Breakdown of На столе чей-то телефон.
стол
table / desk
телефон
phone
на
on, at / by (transport) / to (a place) / to (in answer to)
чей-то
someone's
Questions & Answers about На столе чей-то телефон.
How do we form чей-то and what exactly does it mean?
It means "someone's." You form it by taking the question word чей (whose) and adding the suffix -то. The -то suffix is used when you know that a specific thing exists or happened, but you don't know exactly who or what is involved. Here, you clearly see a specific phone, but you simply don't know whose it is.
Why do we use the form чей-то instead of чья-то or чьё-то?
Because чей-то acts like an adjective and must match the noun it describes in gender, number, and case. The noun here is телефон, which is masculine and in the nominative case (it is the subject of the sentence). Therefore, we use the masculine nominative form чей-то. If it were a bag (сумка, which is feminine), it would be чья-то сумка.
The translation says "There is someone's telephone..." but why isn't the word есть used in the Russian sentence?
In Russian, the present tense of the verb "to be" is usually dropped. While you could say На столе есть чей-то телефон to strongly emphasize the mere existence of the phone, leaving есть out is much more natural here. Without есть, the focus shifts away from existence and focuses on the descriptive fact that the phone on the table belongs to someone.
Why does стол change to столе in this sentence?
The preposition на (on) requires the prepositional case when you are talking about the location of an object. The nominative (dictionary) form is стол (table), and adding the -е ending gives us the prepositional form столе.
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