When I first saw those pair of words in order to memorize their meaning, I thought, thanks to language gods, it would be very easy to learn them because of their phonetical similarity to Quality/Quantity couple. Didn’t know how wrong I was.
To this day I still had to spend some moments, trying to sort out in my mind which is which before using them.
They sound so similar, that I assume one of those languages had to copy it from the other. But why in opposite way? A historical misunderstanding maybe? Translation error from old times?
Please enlighten me, so maybe next time I hear them in a Russian Learning podcast, I won’t need to hit pause and look blankly for 5 seconds before I can continue.
What makes you think distinctly Slavic sounding basic vocabulary in Russian was somehow borrowed from Latin of all languages?
Both words are of Old Church Slavonic (Old Bulgarian for simplification) origin, derived from како (how) and колико (how much/many). Both како and колико are still present in Serbian, for instance.
If anything, the most literate morphological translation of качество and количество would be “how-ity” and “how-much-ity” / “how-many-ity.”
I am pretty ignorant about the etymology of both languages sorry. English-Russian learning content is much more accessible for me compared to my native language however this sometimes makes me tackle myself with such problems.
The English words are borrowings from Latin via French, and Latin qualitas and quantitas are, in their turn, calques of Greek poiotēs and posotēs. The Russian ones were calqued from Greek directly (technically, via Church Slavonic, though this happenned at a time when CSl and Old Russian were still essentially dialects of Common Slavic). The base words are pronouns: Greek poios / Latin qualis / Slavic какъ (meaning “what sort of”), and Greek posos / Latin quantus / Slavic коликъ (meaning “how big”, “how much”). These are augmented by a suffix to form an abstract noun, Greek -otēs / Latin -itas / Slavic -ьство. To put it in simple terms, quality = “how-good-ness”, quantity = “how-much-ness”.
You can remember Russian words by juxtaposing them with modern forms of the base pronouns: колич+ество ~ с+кольк+о and кач+ество ~ как. The к/ч alternation is very common for Russian roots.
КАКой -- чередование к/ч -- КАЧество.
сКОЛЬко -- КОЛичество.
Кач-ество = как, какой
Коли-чество = с(коль)ко
Shorter word translates to shorter word, longer word translates to longer word. If you need a memo.
Deliberately looking for false similarities will make you more trouble than it's worth. What about words like Magazine?
Магазин haunted me for a year but now i learned to live with it
That one will be handy if you're in France or learn French tho.
"Quality" comes from Latin qualis 'what kind of?', "quantity" comes from Latin quantus 'how much/how many?'. The two Russian words were built according to the very same model. I assume (because they are abstract nouns), they were probably coined in Old Church Slavonic, the old Slavic literary language, based off of the Latin words.
качество comes from Old Church Slavonic како 'how?', and количество comes from Old Church Slavonic колико 'how much/how many?' (compare modern Russian сколько).
So basically both pairs of words are literally "how-ness" and "howmuch-ness"
Perhaps it would be easier to memorise which is which by counting syllables? Качество - 3, количество - 4. While in English it’s 3-3, Quality sounds shorter than quantity because of an extra consonant (n) in the latter.
Ngl, strong "if English was good enough for our lord Jesus" vibes. English borrowed the words from Latin which had calqued them from Greek. Russian
went the calquing route againborrowed them from Church Slavonic which had also calqued them from the Greek.As a mnemonic, количество is the longer word so it has, you know, more quantity.
If anything, you'll hear the adjective качественный "(high) quality" much more often than количественный "quantitative". Maybe this will help you remember the former root. And yeah, количество and сколько have the same origin.