Breakdown of Пятый билет — мой, а чей восьмой?
а
and (contrastive)
мой
my (мой, моя, моё) / mine
чей
whose (m, sister forms: чья, чьё)
билет
ticket
Questions & Answers about Пятый билет — мой, а чей восьмой?
Why do the words for fifth (пятый) and eighth (восьмой) have different endings here?
Even though both are masculine ordinal numbers, their endings depend on where the word's stress falls. When the stress is on the stem, the masculine ending is -ый (like in пятый). When the stress falls on the ending itself, it becomes -ой (like in восьмой).
Why do these ordinal numbers act like adjectives?
In Russian, ordinal numbers behave exactly like adjectives. They must match the gender, case, and number of the noun they describe. Since билет (ticket) is a masculine noun in the Nominative case, both пятый and восьмой take masculine Nominative endings.
Why is there a dash in the first half of the sentence?
The dash replaces the present tense verb is (or am / are), which is almost always dropped in Russian. It visually separates the subject (пятый билет) from the word that identifies whose it is (мой).
Why use а for but instead of но?
The conjunction а is used to contrast two different things (the fifth ticket vs. the eighth ticket) without them contradicting each other. You use но when there is a direct contradiction or a surprise (for example: The ticket is mine, but I lost it).
In the second part, why is the word ticket missing after ?