Let us recall from childhood the familiar lines from "The Tale of the Dead Princess and the Seven Heroes" by A. S. Pushkin: And the princess came down to them, I saluted my hosts, She bowed low from the waist down; Blushing, she apologized... In this passage, attention is drawn to an unusual," incorrect " form of the dative plural for hosts from the point of view of modern Russian literary language. We say: to the owners. Meanwhile, it is this unusual form that is natural for the noun master. This word, as well as other na-in formations that omit this suffix in the plural and end in the nominative plural on-e (- s): peasant -peasants, Tatar - Tatars, would have to represent the form khozyate in the nominative plural; in indirect cases, the forms khozyam would be expected accordingly, hosts, hosts. page 102 However, in the modern Russian literary language, the noun host represents a non-standard ratio of the singular and plural bases, appearing in the plural with the extension-ev: host, - a, - u..., but hosts, - evam, - evami, etc. In this regard, the word host can be rightly attributed to the number of grammatical riddles. However, the forms themselves with the extension-ev are not unique at all. In the history of the Russian language up to the XVIII century, forms of the nominative plural type sons, zyatev, sons, zyatevya, synova, zyateva, etc. were widely used, which were very characteristic of nouns with the meaning of a person. Similar forms were taken by personal nouns with the suffix-in: boyarov (- ya, - a), Tatarov (- ya,- a), etc., and the secondary element-ev could extend from the nominative plural to indirect ones, and forms such as tatarovey - tatarovyam and pod appeared. (About this in more detail: Shakhmatov A. A. Historical morphology of the Russian language, Moscow, 1957; Gorshkova K. V., Khaburgaev G. A. Historical grammar of the Russian language, Moscow, 1981). However, while the rest of the formations in-in obeyed the general laws, losing the forms ... Read more