Word
Пятого мая приехал мой старший брат.
Meaning
On May fifth, my older brother arrived.
Part of speech
sentence
Pronunciation
Course
Lesson
Breakdown of Пятого мая приехал мой старший брат.
брат
brother
мой
my (мой, моя, моё) / mine
старший
older, elder
май
May
Questions & Answers about Пятого мая приехал мой старший брат.
Why use приехал here instead of пришёл?
The prefix при- means "arrival". But because Russian splits verbs of motion into "by foot" and "by transport", we have to choose between пришёл (arrived on foot) and приехал (arrived by transport). Since a brother visiting usually implies traveling from another town or country, приехал is the natural choice.
Why is it пятого мая and not пятое мая?
When you want to say that something happened on a specific date, Russian puts both the ordinal number (пятое) and the month (май) into the Genitive case: пятого мая. If you used the standard Nominative case (пятое мая), it would mean "May fifth is..." rather than "On May fifth...".
Why is the verb приехал placed before the subject мой старший брат?
Russian word order is flexible, and the most important or "newest" information is usually placed at the very end of the sentence. By putting мой старший брат at the end, the speaker is strongly emphasizing who it was that arrived.
Why use the perfective verb приехал instead of the imperfective приезжал?