Finale for fall semester

Finale

December 4, 2009

Dear Students,

This is my farewell to the fall semester blog. I have written over 33,000 words about Russian language and the teaching of Russian, and expect to have more to say when this blog continues in January. Thanks for your loyal readership and for your comments.

Please feel free to comment whenever something rouses your interest. Let me know what you want me to write about: history of Russian language, the structure of the contemporary language, or strategies of teaching. Or something else.

Всем желаю приятного и плодотворного отдыха и празника, с рождеством, с новым годом поздравляю. Увидимся в январе.

GMC

Novgorod Monuments from the Eleventh to Sixteenth Century and the Final Exam in Russian 101

Novgorod Monuments from Eleventh to Sixteenth Centuries and the Final Exam in 101

December 1, 2009

This won’t be as boring, I hope, as you think it’s going to be.
I’ve noticed in my many years of teaching Slavic, and especially Russian, that student errors in flexional endings show a pattern of learning that in some cases mimicks the early stages of the language, like ontogeny recapituating phylogeny. I marvel over this.

Novogorod monuments — written documents, including private letters, clerical texts copied in monasteries, business documents, deeds, bequests, names carved on amphorae, and more — happen to be the richest and most variegated in Old Russian history, and therefore they reflect the dialectal divergences and probing possibilities of the entire area better than any other. (Note: I refer to Old Russian, not Old Rusian (sic!), which means Old East Slavic, including what would be Ukrainian and what would be Belorussian.)

Take the declension of feminine nouns, like вода, рука, земля, неделя, дверь. By the end of 101 you are supposed to be able to decline these, and, mostly, you can. Everyone knows я читаю книгу, right? (I hope.) Also you know that а/я. у/ю, ы/и are hard/soft varieties of the same thing, so that Gen воды = Gen земли, hard v. soft. In Old Russian these patterns hadn’t gotten so hard-set as they did later, and Old Russian forms were based on older theme vowels and older alternations. So the Gen of the softs was землэ, the last letter standing for the old phoneme jat’ (see my blog on Tsar of All the Russias). Now, jat’ was getting undistinguishable in pronunciation from e. So when things started to change, the people weren’t sure what the Gen of either вода or земля was any more. We read things like у жене, у Ване, just like student mistakes. Now, the old Dat of вода was водэ, and the old Dat of земля was земли. So when this started to get mixed up, you find all kinds of weird Dat and Prep forms: о води, на землэ, and so on, because no one was sure any more what the ‘correct’ old form was, and no one said it that way any more. (Developing vowel reduction muddied the waters even more.) And there weren’t any dictionaries or normative rules. Just like students writing quizzes. Which the heck ending is it? Well, I’ll try...

In some Northwest and Southwest dialects, the odd forms жене, воде became the basis for a united Gen-Dat-Prep singular, as in the oblique cases of 'door' and 'land', where the ending was и. But in these dialects we got из воде, к воде, в воде 'out of the water (Gen), to the water (Dat), in the water (Prep). In still other dialects, we get из воды, к воды, в воды with the old hard Gen generalized for these three cases. And in sill others, we have a kind of Gen I and Gen II developing: мало воды 'little water' (quantifier), из воде 'out of the water' (separational). Phonological changes, as you see, produce both morphological complication and morphological simplification.

Then there is the uncomfortable declension of мать, дочь, дверь, Пермь. You remember the Prep is in –и, в Перми. Also, the Acc is the same as the Nom in these words, which some of you might not remember. And then there is one more case we haven’t had in 101, the instrumental, which has a very very odd ending: дверью, which is -ju, that is, the soft r is followed by jot, then by u. This oddball ending, naturally, gets assimilated to the instrumental of the other feminines (which you haven’t learned yet) and we get all kinds of wild “student” forms; alongside костей, like Instr soft землёй, we get костьей, костьюй (sic), еach with jers after vowels, hence jots.
But the point is the system hadn’t stabilized yet for the average writer. We at least have the advantage of a very lucid and explainable system in Contemporary Russian, we think.

But a language is always changing, and there are all sorts of odds and ends that are finding new uses, or the opposite, getting so archaic they are sticking out like sore thumbs. Examples: the weird plurals братья, сыновья, стулья (Nom) that we supposedly ‘learned’ in 101 but try to ignore. These were actually collectives in Old Russian and meant ‘a group of brothers, a broup of sons, a pile of chairs,’ and so forth, and just about anything could have this suffix and ending, meaning ‘collective’. Now the collective has died and the plurals are weird, but we have to learn them. An exact English parallel are children, brethren, also old collectives.

Another thing that comes up in 101 is один год, два года, три года, четыре года, пять лет. What kind of insane trick is Russian playing on us here? Well, Old Russian lost the number category dual, which earlier was applicable to almost any noun, then, only to nouns that often come in pairs, like banks of a river, arms, legs, and other such. The dual died and lost its meaning, but the endings continued to thrive, e.g. in weird Nom plurals like дома, профессора (don’t worry about them for the 101 final), and also in a new category called paucal: after two, three and four there comes what looks like the Gen sg -a for masculine nouns. But it’s not the Gen sg; it’s the old dual. Laura Janda has written elequently about this in her book Back from the Brink, meaning dead categories littering the battlefield, but ‘endings’ returning from the dead to live again in new flesh.

gmc

Men and Women at Russian

Men and Women at Russian

November 28, 2009

Who’s better at Russian, Newcomb women, as they used to be called, or Tulane men, as they used to be called? Male or female minds at work on a "foreign language”? I won’t repeat the egregious and pompous mistakes of a man I respect, Larry Summers as Harvard pres, who said, among other things, that women may possibly be biologically unprepared for thinking like a scientist, that the research isn’t yet completely in on this question. And in the process he managed to offend not only women in general but the whole faculty he was supposed to lead.

There was always an old cliché that women were better than men at French. And then there was the truism — a false truisim — that men in French studies were gay. I studied French in high school and I knew lots of Frenchmen with mathematical minds, and French students with ordinary minds, who were not gay, both males and females. I met a lot of very cute girls in high school French classes, I must admit, but that’s not the reason I took those classes. I wanted to learn French literature and read Proust in French. I didn’t care about gender approaches. I don’t know how these defunct old legends survive.

Well, I honestly think both genders can learn Russian equally well, and the more creative minds take a more creative approach to the task. It’s true that statistically more of my women students through the years did all my homework conscientiously, came to class with more fervent regularity, and learned details of grammar more systematically. Most certainly, women students are better Slavic calligraphers than men, and, as I tell all my students, better than I am at longhand Cyrillic. There is a clarity and a finitude, a tidiness to their constructions of Russian that maybe fewer men like to cultivate. But you know, in the end, after forty years’ time, it evens out, and the men manage to learn as much and to progress as far as the women. Men more often actually went to Russia, treating the subject not like a calculus so much as a socioculural reality that you can feel and taste and live in. Some men told me that they did homework mainly “out of guilt,” and that they didn’t feel it was as useful as conversation in class or my grammatical discussions. In my classes this fall I think 101 has a number of really strong female students, and maybe a weaker number of men who have really tried as hard as they had planned. But actually it’s pretty close.

In 203 this year I have a group of sixteen more advanced, more mature students who have seen how difficult Russian is in three full and eventful semesters of study; just about every student is good, and I do not see much of a difference in approach between the genders. There is one telltale characteristic about this class: having gone this far down the difficult and narrow path to Russian shows mettle and intelligence. Not everyone who begins 101 can do this. And this mettle and intelligence has emphatically nothing to do with gender. Male and female are equal in this, I think.

You knew this would be my conclusions, didn’t you? Well, I didn’t. I almost came to a completely different ending, but then I lost my nerve, струсил. But, in point of fact, it has nothing to do with gender, it does indeed have to do with mettle.

gmc

Some Nasty Words

Nasty Words We Don’t Appreciate

November 25, 2009

Professor Fish has a recent New York Times commentary on phrases such as “Use Other Door” (when you have just walked around a block-long building only to find what you know to be the usual main entrance closed, “The Role of Arabella Will be Sung Tonight by Her Understudy,” (when you’ve been looking forward to Renée Fleming and bought the tickets three months ago), “Closed for Private Party,” (when all day long you’ve been dreaming about dinner with your young lady at Clancy’s tonight), “To Be Continued,” (when you’ve invested an hour and a half of your time and emotional purchase in this TV show and now you may not for a week, a month, or ever, see the end). Some of his, his readers’, and my own are more than mildly amusing: “this may hurt a little” (dentist), “user name denied,” (a deep insult), “may I help you?” (ironic; from a security guard who’s spotted you wandering off from the group and has no intention of “helping” you); “I’m sorry, but I don’t recognize your response” (from a machine; no wonder, because you probably have just cursed it); “the doctor will be with you in a minute” (the hell he will, sports fans), “we sure don’t” (in answer, by a Southerner, to the query: “Have you got ___?), “speak clearly as our menu choices have changed” (another insult presupposing my stupidity, my inarticulateness, my neanderthal ways; note the smug conjunction ‘as’ — the bastards), “pardon our progress” (you preen yourself on the sawdust and trash and mess you make and congratulate yourself for endangering me). From meterologists I dislike “as well,” when drawn out to cover fifteen seconds of air time, as in “and the sub-normal temperatures will be in evidence tomorrow across the region, and the next day a--a--a z--z we-e-l-l (end on a cheerily rising intonation, suggesting a mad-Hatter hysteria).

Fish’s readers go on and on and so might we. You’ve gone through the menu choices twice, into three sub-sub-menus, vainly seeking the exit to a human voice. Finally you get the eternal spin-back: “To return to the previous menu, press 1; to return to the main sub-menu, press 5; to return to the main menu, press star or hold the line” (the depth of human insult lying in this calculatingly smug presumption: “you fool, you couldn’t find what you needed here; well, we don’t need your tiresome presence, and if you are simply stupid, you may try again and again.” As the gatekeeper said to Kafka’s protagonist in Vor dem Gesetz: “This gate was built especially for you.”

The big winner among Fish’s readers was “No problem,” the fashionable, bullet-brained way to say “you’re welcome” by not saying that at all and implying, again, your own inappropriate thank-you or your own stupid assumption. Garrison Keiller spoofed this: “I told my bartender when he finished my martini, ‘thanks, and don’t say: 'no problem.’ He thought this over and said: ‘Whatever.’”

We still say “you’re welcome,” but people in ‘the service business’ and people who often deal with the public don’t. They say “no problem.” In Italian, they still say “prego,” which I think is пожалуйста in Russian, both ‘please’ and ‘thank you’, as well as ‘here you are’, ‘here you go,’, ‘come right in’, etc. (you were wondering how I’d get Russian in this thing, were you not?). You can say ничего a-a-z-z w-e-e-l-l, but it’s not quite the same absolutely correct and appropriate thing to say.

There's another infuriating Russian phrase that old guys like me learned when they just started out with Russian: как вы поживаете?, which was inaccurately and falsely given as the equivalent to "How are you?" It is not. It means "how are you living, i. e. how are you getting on, how is it going? and it begs, I mean begs, for an answer. In our Начало textbook there's a funny moment when Саша comes to visit Света and Таня in their room and he says the above phrase, and Света answers very quickly and with an ironic smile, Хорошо поживаем, а ты как поживаешь? She ain't interested in going over personal affairs right now, Сашка. Of course there is no exact way to say "How are you?" unless, perhaps, Good Day, Добрый день, which, American style, needs no response. Как дела? can be flippantly answered "Как сажа бела," 'just like soot is white', another excellent brush-off (note that бела rhymes with дела).

In French you can elegantly toss “pas de quoi”, “de rien”, or elegantly indeed, “mon plaisir, c’était mon propre plaisir, monsieur.” In Czech you may say, moving from the inelegant, near-to-no-problem to the sublimely ironic: za nic ‘for nothing’, za málo ‘for little’. You may say prosím literally the same as prego, I ask, I beg, and it is a humble and ordinary phrase,used, by the way, by all Czechs who deal with the public. "No problem" would be recongized as an insult. In Russian you could say прошу, просим but that is out of use in this sense now. Answering the telephone a Czech will say his or her last name, and follow that with ‘prosím’, ‘ I am listening, go ahead please’. My son hastens to remind me of the irritating Czech phrase 'ale prosím tě', 'but I beg you, please; come on, now', often spoken in a wheedling tone. At the high end of set phrases is the superb Czech translation from German ‘gern geschehen’, literally ‘it happened gladly’, ‘I was glad to do it’: rádo se stalo. This phrase is very well suited to chanting by a huge crowd, as happened in November, 1989, almost exactly twenty years ago, when the Velvet Revolution toppled the Czechoslovak communist state. The crowd rattled their keys and tinkled little bells — they ‘cinkali’, as the phrase has it.

An exhilarating way to end this catalog with overarching irony. A small revenge over the brainless idiots of bureaucracy. Rádo se stalo!

Rádo se stalo! Rádo se stalo! Rádo se stalo! Rádo se stalo! Repeat, printer, to the bottom of the page.

gmc

What's it All For?

What’s It All For?

November 23,2009

It’s for this. For Russian. That’s why, at this instant, you are reading this, and why you signed up for this course, not knowing and not even caring whether it would ever prove to be useful. You wanted to try something and see what it was like, to venture down a path, or a fork in the road taken, as Yogi Berra suggested, just because it was a fork in the road. Tulane doesn’t specialize in this area, nor does it necessarily fit Tulane’s mission statement, its geographic, geopolitical environment, New Orleans, or the strategic needs of the USA. (Russian was heavily funded in the sixties as a critical language, and who knows — it might come back again some day.) Nonetheless it is here at Tulane, as this is a research university, and mere curiosity in itself ought to be answered at a research university.

If only because of the aesthetic bliss of the finding out, as Henry James might say. The neurologist Oliver Sachs wrote of two deeply autistic twins who communicated best only with each other, and on deep alpha- or delta-levels, so it seemed. They were mathematical geniuses, as idiot savants often may be, and their greatest pleasure in life was sitting together and thinking up new prime numbers that had never been discovered. These are numbers divisible by no other natural whole number but themselves — a metaphor for the twins, I guess. They didn’t need a calulator, pencil and paper, or other aids, they just sat until one twin thought up, say, a seven-digit number, which he would announce to his brother, who would forrow his brow in concentration and, sooner or later, usually sooner, discover another imposing number. They were each wide-eyed with pleasure at the beauty of the discovery. I think they also could tell you the day of the week on which fell any date, by Julian or Gregorian calendar, for centuries past. Sachs theorized they could sift through huge blocks of correlations, the nature of which no one knows, somewhat like leafing through a book in search of a picture of a familiar face. Then they would tell you, “February 19, 2010, is a Friday.” One bright summer day they gradually began to lose both of these magical abilities, discovering prime numbers and finding days of the week. They lived in a kind of stultification or stupefaction for a few years, finally dying, of loneliness or despair. They had lost the beauty of their lives, the only thrill, the only happiness.

This just goes to show you don’t have to be a brilliant scholar, or a “normal” genius to have the pleasure of research; you don’t, of course, have to be an autistic savant with a weird talent, either. It is the natural property of all humans, I believe, to thirst for this and to experience it.

I was lucky; I wanted to read Dostoevsky in the original and really, deeply, understand him. I did it, and they paid me for it. Even though I never became wealthy, I met many fascinating scholars, most of them much smarter than I am, in Russian and Czech, and have many friends among them and among my former students. All of us share this one love — not Dostoevsky, of course, and not some blanket conception of “Slavic culture,” which doesn’t exist, but some sense of creativity that comes from working there. I suppose I could have been creative as an insurance salesman or even a high school teacher (that would have worn me out long ago), but this permitted me to be challenged to the utmost by colleagues and students who inspired me to “think again,” as Stanley Fish says.

I believe it important to have the very best possible teachers, and that’s why I went to Harvard,not for its reputation, but for the teachers in Slavic. My English professor in college, who was informed in these matters, said to me: “So you choose Jakobson over Victor Erlich (the great Yale slavist).” It wasn’t the personality of Jakobson, but linguistics in an empirical perspective, the perspective of Slavic languages, that I wanted. I was richly rewarded. The scholarly arc has shot away from Slavists, Slavic linguistics, Slavics, so that we seem to be dinosaurs, but as Charles Townsend wrote, “dinosaurs may some day come back to fashion, and they seem to be much loved among the young.” One beautiful thing about the degree awarded by the Slavic department was its grandiose generality: “Slavic languages and literatures,” “linguas literasque slavicas,” which in lordly fashion confers a cloak of presumed knowledge so vast that no one, really, but Jakobson could know so much. Not even him, and not him. Nonetheless is was a goal to shoot for.

One can do the same at Tulane as in those days at Harvard, and one doesn’t need a Jakobson for a teacher, only a very, very good teacher who really knows what’s happening in the field you are looking into and can lead you to the best sources, who can show you how creative work in the field is done and give you examples of how you may do it yourself. There are such very, very good teachers in of out-of-the-way fields at Tulane. One of the beauties of the American undergraduate system is that you needn’t declare yourself as a major, you needn’t sign yourself away. You can seek it out, try it out. To boot, you can go there, if "there" is a place, in your Study Abroad. An amazing opportunity.

This is what it's all for.

gmc

Bad Day in Black Rock

November 20, 2009
Teacher/Course Evaluations

It’s time again for the online evaluation by students of their courses. Dean Jeremy of SLA (School of Liberal Arts) says recently only 45% of SLA courses were rated. Maybe that’s because the evaluation, designed for generic, quantificational use, isn’t any good; maybe it’s because the students don’t think it makes any difference.

But it does. It figures in promotion and tenure decisions. I actually remember a case when a man up for promotion to professor got turned down because he wouldn’t administer the test, I mean the evaluation forms, excuse me (I believe it was the same one we use now). However when I was chair of Germanic and Slavic and was shepherding my first third-year review for the committee to examine, I was appalled to learn that the written comments on the back of the form don’t get any consideration by the P and T Committee. I was told not to include them, but to include only the statistical results. In very small classes, the statistical results will show exaggerated numbers -- 80% (of five people) thought the professor was average, so she gets a really damning number for that. (What did that other person think?) Or 100% loved him. That would mean something if there were one hundred students in the class; it would mean that she was so easy the course was a joke. Or that he was a great entertainer, or the best thing since Franco-American spaghetti. Now, the written commentaries would make that very precise indeed. More precise than numbers.

There is an independent student evaluation of professors which is available and is noted. All the best such evaluations are student-driven and student-made. I am of the opinion that our current questionnaire is jejune and inane. (I’m not sure how to pronounce “jejune” but that’s what it is.)

However, I say grimly, it is necessary that we have some form, any form. What if I were up for promotion and you didn’t fill this out? Huh? What then, eh? Pretty sad, huh? So I ask y’all to rate my class in good faith and without malice aforethought, and не поминайте лихом ‘don’t remember evil of me’. Honni soit qui mal y pense.

I joke. It is your decision. I will try to remember to set up some shell Blackboard course for 101 and 203 so that you can do this. On the other hand, I have a very low opinion of Blackboard; it is a blank-brained out-sourced piece of clunkware that can’t even be used for site-licensed courseware. It’s like our Friendly Help Desk, Only at Tulane, which is out-sourced to India. I kid you not.

You wouldn’t believe I volunteered to do the SACS materials for our department, would you? What’s SACS? Never mind, you don’t want to know.

No, no, I take all this back. Please do the forms. I will even set aside class time for it very soon. I’ll announce a day for you to bring you laptops, notebooks, Blackberries and other devices to class.

Really and sincerely,

gmc

Matters of Life, Death and Sex

Matters of Life, Death and Sex
November 19

муж, мужчина. < Old Russian mąžь, < *mangio-, an extension from something like Gothic manna, English man. It is possibly related to *men- ‘think, mind’, as in память ‘memory.’ Thinking man, homo putans, a putative man.

любовь, Czech líbý, líbit se ‘please’, любить, Czech líbat ‘to kiss’. Also любой ‘any at all, any you please’. This is 15th cent. English lief, as in ‘I had as lief go’, Latin libet. Old Indo-european -*eu- monophthongized in Slavic to -ju-, hence *leub- may be posited as an etymon. What Russian word comes, then, from *leud-? Люди. German Leute.
жена. (женщина < жен– ск–ин–). Gothic qino, Old English cwene, English queen. Greek gune. The postulation is *g(u)ena. This is a good example of how Slavic changes initial primary consonants to alveolar palatals very early on. Cf. also gynecology.

карандаш. This is an example of a word from Turkotatar, unrelated to the word ‘pencil’ in other Western languages. In Turkic it meant ‘black stone, graphite’.

дети. This is an old IE root with metonymic transference of meaning; originally the root meant ‘to suck’, as Greek thele ‘breast’, Latin felare, Gothic daddjan. Slavic has доить дою ‘to suck’. The original form was a collective деть ‘one’s offspring’, with a jat’ in the stem (see my blog on Tsar of all the Russias). The word in the singular became дитё, дитя in dialects and is replaced by ребёнок in the literary language, itself from рабя < раб, ‘child of a slave, a serf’. The plural ребята is not the plural of this word but rather means ‘lads, guys, fellows’ as a group designation. The lengthened stem in this word is that to be found in the singular and plural of the words for the young of animals, as котёнок, котята ‘kitten’, жеребёнок, жеребята ‘foal’, with the singular originally masculine and the plural neuter in gender. It is still a productive formation today.

жить, живу ‘live’ is found in Old Slavic; Czech and other West Slavic languages have a stem in -j-, as in žíti, žiji, žiješ. Lithuanian gýti ‘be whole, healthy; live’ shows the original Balto-Slavic g-. Cf. Latin vivus, vivo ‘alive, live’, and Greek Bios, all related and all very ancient words. Note the Russian word for life, жизнь, with its unusual suffix. Czech has život, which in Russian has the synecdochal meaning ‘belly’, the seat of life. The Czech derivative živůtek means ‘corset’, an extension of the belly. And, for further evidence that identical roots in neighboring Slavic languages can bear strikingly different meanings, note Czech žízeň ‘thirst’, in Old Czech, it meant ‘abundant harvest, grain’; cf. Russian жито ‘grain, cereal’. Russian жизнь is ‘life’. ‘Thirst’ in Russian is жажда, used in a figurative sense; “I’m thirsty’ is пить хочется.

смерть ‘death’, смерш < смерть шпионам ‘death to spies’ (dative). This is an old, old word, more evocative in Russian than in Czech, which has the rapidly pronounced monosyllabic smrt, while Polish has the juicier śmierć, with palatal fricatives, Czech smrt seems to come from losing the jers in Common Slavic sъmьrtь, although of course it was more complicated than that. This is Latin mors, gen. mortis, The Slavic su- is possibly from the prefixal su- ‘good’, hence ‘a good natural death’. Cf. счастье ‘happiness, good fortune’, with the same prefix. Slavic death is feminine, so that she is not depicted as a grim reaper but as a witch-like figure. So the Russian for Emily’s poem would be: Because I could not stop for death, She kindly stopped for me. Can anyone translate this for me?

gmc

Minorities in Russian

Minority Students of Russian

Why don’t more black students take Russian, or German? Dean Greenberg, Newcomb Dean at the turn of the millenium, told me that they don’t have any reason to study such languages. But I didn’t have any reason to study Slavic; I have no Slavic background, I don’t have any political interest in Slavic — I wasn’t a communist, as some of my stupider older relations may have suggested, the blockheads. I was interested, I didn’t care where it would lead me, and that was that.

In the 1970’s we had more black students in our Russian classes for the reasons I studied Slavic — curiosity and lack of career motivation. It was de rigeur in those days to disavow career goals with a carefree wave of the hand, and if you really believed the pose, so much the better. The compass pointed 180 degrees the other direction by the mid-eighties, but in the glorious, pot-fumigated late 60’s and early 70’s, in the days of Good Morning, Viet Nam, and conscientious objectors fleeing to Canada, or talking of fleeing, and in the salad days of Woody Allen and the Joy of Sex, (otherwise known as the Job of Sex), in those wonderful days we had students for all the right reasons. One black student won the legendary Russian Book Prize, which gave him great pride. There was no special history behind the Russian Book Prize; it was simply the prize awarded for the greatest achievement in learning Russian as an undergraduate. His name was Barry; I remember him for his excellence and for the warmth of his personality. He was a leader without political or personal portfolio. His quiet excellence reminded me of Ed Brook — the latter’s, seen as a distance. Ed Brook was a black senator from Massachusetts in the 60’s and early 70’s when I was a graduate student there. I knew little about him but his impressive intelligence and his apparent aloofness from civil rights politics. Indeed, for all I knew, maybe he had been active in ways I didn’t realize, and maybe Barry had, too. Barry told stories about how he attracted crowds in Moscow in the 70’s. They had never seen a black man before.

A black woman distinguished herself as our Book Prizewinner in the middle eighties; she was flashy, verbally talented, not the very best student in Russian, but cynical and outspoken. She shone on stage as a comic actress. She could make fun of the old stereotyped wide-eyed-wonder-or-fear expression blacks were portrayed with on TV in the 50’s (Amos and Andy) and 60’s. You could see her eyes widen, and see the whites of her eyes, fifty feet away in the audience. That was the most amazing thing she could do. She won a prestigious Newcomb post-graduate travel award, but did not go to the Soviet Union in its last days, but rather to Yugoslavia in its. 

In the nineties we had twin sisters from Slidell, T. and T. They were delightful personalities and serious students. In 101 I remember vividly how they would both come to my office after class and pepper me with grammatical questions. They loved Russian early on and conceived a desire to use Russian in their careers right then and there — a big difference already from the 70’s. They worked and worked, but Russian did not come easily to them. They refused to give up. It was a cause they espoused with their hearts and souls. After two years, one with me and one with my colleague, they spent the summer in Petersburg to improve their fluency. Ter, the serious, quiet, more intellectual of the two, told me the story, with impulsive interruptions by Tra, the giggly, humorous twin: When we got to the home we were assigned to live in for the summer, we met our host father. He sat up down and told us very solemnly: “Я не говорю по–английски. Поймите. Мы говорим по–русски.” So the girls were a little awed by the challenge but undaunted. They certainly improved their spoken Russian that summer.
Their senior year they completed their Russian major with a course in advanced grammar and composition. Here their free-topic essays, in excellent and fluent Russian, ranged on all questions of interest to a college student, but with one characteristic theme that emerged again and again: racial prejudice that they had experienced in their lives. I was amazed that this still existed so late in the century, and in Slidell and I told them that. They were gravely surprised at my naivete. Their essays became more and more personal and detailed. I was horrified at what I was seeing. How is it, I asked them, that you have survived all of this with your personalities intact, your family, your parents, your goals and achievements? They quoted something like that misquoted Nietzsche line Pres. Cowen used about the Katrina experience: whatever you endure that doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

The girls were inseparable and always lived and worked together, though they often spoke about having separate and discrete, independent lives. They earned a master’s in Russian from Maryland, both of them, together, at the same time, Ter probably encouraging Tra every step of the way and Tra’s bubbling good spirits buoying up Ter at the same time. I don’t know what they have done since, but I’m sure they are somewhere with Russian in the government. It was really an experience and an honor to teach them.

I’ve had several American black students in this century, but even more brown students from Asia — India and Pakistan. One did a whole semester of Russian as an IS with me, and a year later was at Tulane medical school. Anu was her name.

I think Arabic and other areally critical languages will replace Russian for minorities. The days of innocence and glory are over forever, I’m afraid. Except for the occasional Barry, Ter and Tra, let us hope.

gmc

Our Father Who Art in Heaven

Our Father Which Art in Heaven

November 12, 2009

This famous New Testament prayer is also known in Russian as Молитва господня ‘the Lord’s Prayer’. The last word is a possessive adjective from the word for ‘lord’: госпОдь, гOспода, vocative гОсподи, from which we get the words for ‘sir’, ‘ma’am’, and ‘gentlemen’. The word is a compound of an old root meaning ‘guest’ and one meaning ‘potent, powerful’. The powerful guest is the lord. (The meanings ‘guest’ and ‘master’ get mixed up.) This is a hint, too, of the pre-Christian bases of religious terminology in Russian.

Here is the text of the Pater noster from the Old Russian Ostromirovo evangelie, 1056.
Отче наш иже еси на небесех,
да святится имя Твое,
да придеть Царствие Твое,
да будеть воля Твоя,
яко на небеси и на земли,
хлеб нашь насущный даждь нам днесь,
и остави нам долгы нашя,
яко и мы оставляем должником нашим,
и не введи нас в напасть,
но избави ны от неприязни.

Our Father who art in heaven
Hallowed by thy name.
Thy kingdom come
Thy will be done
On earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread
and forgive us our debts
as we forgive our debtors.
Lead us not into temptation
but deliver us from evil.

The language is already clearly Old Russian and not Old Church Slavonic. You will see some of the features of the Old Russian dialect here, mixed in with the evident Church Slavonicisms.

The verb ‘be’ is, in OCS and is OR, conjugated: есмъ, еси, естъ ‘I am, you are, he/she/is.’ Да with the 3rd person means “let X happen, may X occur.”

Святится ‘be sanctified’ is from the adjective святой ‘holy’, also to be seen in the personal names Святогор, Святополк; the former is the name of a famous Russian folk hero and shows the pre-Christian meaning of this word: ‘powerful, mighty’. The church changed the meaning to coincide with Latin sanctus.

Даждь ‘’give’ is an old imperative from this ancient athematic verb; днесь ‘today’ is the genitive of ‘day’ with the demonstrative pronoun, дьне–сь, ‘of this day’, just like contemporary Russian сего–дня ‘to-day, of the day’. Isn’t it satisfying to see the analysis of this word you learned in 101?

Долгы нашя ‘our debts’ is interesting as it shows that the velar still retained hard vs. soft distinctions before the high vowel; in contemporary Russian we have to say долги and the hard variety долгы cannot occur. The demonstrative pronoun is the accusative plural of a soft stem, with the Slavonic я instead of jat’ (see my previous blog on Tsar of All the Russias.)

Temptation is напасть, ‘trap’. The last line has the ancient acc. ны ‘us’, and also the interesting translation of ‘evil’: неприязнь ‘the umpleasant, the enemy, the evil nature’. Greek has tou ponerou, ‘the evil one’, the devil (genitive).

The following version from the Russian Slavonic Bible has a lot of modern Russian in it, as you can se.

Отче наш, сущий на небесах!
да святится имя Твое;
да приидет Царствие Твое;
да будет воля Твоя и на земле, как на небе;
хлеб наш насущный дай нам на сей день;
и прости нам долги наши, как и мы прощаем должникам нашим;
и не введи нас в искушение, но избавь нас от лукавого.

Ибо Твое есть Царство и сила и слава во веки. Аминь.

Note прости нам долги наши ‘forgive us our debts’, which is fully modern. The last lines have искушение ‘temptation’ and избавь нас от лукавого ‘deliver us from the clever/insidious/evil one’, very close to the Greek.

You can also find a number of faky Slavonic-style versions, with the Church Slavonic-style alphabet and totally unreal spellings. The Slavonic serves the eccesliastical mood, just as we old Anglo-Saxon conservatives hearken back to the days of the King James Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, and, for Catholics, the Latin mass. In the Russian church the old language is still there to ease the spirit — somewhat dressed up, painted and perfumed, but still there for us.

gmc

Tsar of all the Russias

November 11, 2009

Tsar of All the Russias

November 11, 2009

The tsar of all the Russias: the official title of the tsar, beginning with САМОДЕРЖЕЦЪ ВСЕРОССІЙСКІЙ ‘autocrat all-Russian’ — ‘of all the Russias’, etc., etc. Another phrase pops into my head: Царь всея Руси ‘the tsar of all Rus’ ‘. This is a Russian Slavonicism, this odd-looking feminine genitive of the quantifier весь, вся всё ‘all, entire; everything’ (neuter), ‘everybody’. The genitive, if you have learned it yet in 203, is всего (masc and neuter), всей (feminine). In Old Church Slavonic the form was vьs’eję, the last letter representing a nasal vowel as in French, or a front vowel followed by a nasal, somewhat like French en enfance, or the last syllable in enfin. This sound was written by a special letter called the юс малый, which has a counterpart, the юс большой, for a back nasal, like French dont. Methodius’s school invented unique graphemes for these sounds, which I don’t have on my font. The nasal vowels which they symbolized very quickly disappeared in Slavic, except in Lechitic.

At any rate, Russian never had a nasal vowel in the old declension of this word; it had another obsolete sound-and-letter, the jat’, ять. This vowel, in some Slavic languages a diphthong like -ije- or -ai-, also appeared in the old genitive singular and nom.-acc. plural of words like земля. Using э to represent jat’, and я to represent the old юс малый, here are some of the forms of the word земля:

Old Russian-OCS-Modern Russ
N Sg земля земля земля
G Sg землэ земля земли
D-P Sg земли земли земле
N-A Pl землэ земля земли


Confusing, isn’t it? But what happened was that the Gen sg and the N-A pl, in Old Church Slavonic Style, could look the same: наша земля, отъ земля, те земля. And the gen. sg. and nom.-acc. pl. of these ‘soft’ stems had a special Old Russian ending, the jat’, which by-and-by was replaced by the generalized plural ending ы for hard stems, и for soft stems.

So the Modern Russian style, based on hard vs. soft as well as on gender, did away with those special jat’s and jusy.

Words like весь were of the soft pronominal declension, so that they had a gen like моей, твоей, and lost all trace of the jat’. The plurals of pronouns can be eccentric: эти, одни, мои, наши but те, все.

Nom Sg карта земля вся
Gen Sg карты земли всей
Nom-Acc pl карты земли все


So what is Царь всея земли, tsar of all the land, or tsar of all of Rus'? It is a Russian Slavonicism, with a deliberately archaic flavor of Church Slavonic, not native Russian. It can be found in several set phrases in Russian.

gmc

Truth

November 9, 2009

I am translating the following gem into Russian. Can anyone help me? Give me some time.

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant –
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind –
— E.D. (#1129)

gmc

Irrealis

Irrealis

November 9, 2009

Dear Students,

Every speaker has a proprietary interest in his native language. He plays with it, talks about it, analyzes it, and, as he ages, grumbles about “poor grammar” of the younger generation, about the neologisms that seem to him to pollute his language’s purity. This is the nature of things, for language is the one human socio-biological function for which every man and woman has a metalanguage. We all theorize and talk about our speech.

I try to control my own innate conservatism and not grumble. After all, I should understand that language changes and times change and things are passing me by. But I still sometimes get riled up by “between you and I” (horror!), “I’m fine, how about yourself?” (yuck), “the boss gave Hal and I a raise” (oh hypercorrection horror), and so on. But what really tears me up is the loss, the distortion, the ambiguification (is that a word? no) of the hypothetical conditional and the contrary-to-fact conditional.

This happened quite a while ago in the language of sports commentators. The contrary-to-fact in present tense if~then clauses: “If he goes all out, he scores,” “if he sees Morris in the open, he hits him.” I kind of liked that. But then appeared such mongrels as: “If he would have returned the book in time, he wouldn’t have a fine to pay.” What happened to “If he had,” “had he”? The if-clause, or protasis, shouldn’t have ‘would’ in it. Russian says Если бы он вернул книгу во–время, никакого штрафа бы не платил.” The little word бы, which can appear only with the past tense or the tenseless infinitive, signals irrealis. The contextual tense, that is, condition in the hypothetical future, attentuated, vs. hypothetical condition in the past, no longer realizable — the contextual tense isn’t expressed in Russian. 

The blurring of “may” and “might”, two modals of the sort Russian lacks, disturbs me. “If you are nice to him, he may help you out” (pretty good chance), “if you are nice to him, he might help you out” (somewhat lesser chance). Future hypothetical, possible, but attentuated — less likely. Если ты к нему мил, он может тебе помочь; может быть, он тебе поможет. No бы here in Russian. Russian can have бы in other sorts of attenuation: я хотел бы поехать “I’d like to go” (French influence here).

Very attenuated conditions in English, such as “if you were to come early, we might be able to finish the job.” This is prissily correct speech; normal now is “if you come early, we might...” The subjunctive, everywhere in Elizabethan English is gone today.

Now the true contrary-to-fact: “if you had been nice to him, he might have helped you out.” I hate “if you would’ve been nice...” and I hate “he may have helped you out.” They are both barbarisms. See my curmudgeonly self coming out there? But don’t you agree? See?

From the "editor’s notes on English" page of the NYTimes:
LOS ANGELES — AT&T, one of the biggest corporate sponsors of “American Idol,’’ might have influenced the outcome of this year’s competition by providing phones for free text-messaging services and lessons in casting blocks of votes at parties organized by fans of Kris Allen, the Arkansas singer who was the winner of the show last week.

I ask: did they provide phones or did they not? If they didn’t, I say "might have". If they did, then "may", since it is the influence and not the providing of phones that is in question. To me this distinction is quite clear.

“May” and “might” ought to at least have an attestation clause that is not in doubt. Else: had they provided phones, they might have... That’s clear. But nobody says that, mostly, any more.

PHILADELPHIA -- A healthy Donovan McNabb may not have mattered against Drew Brees and the New Orleans Saints. Brees tossed three more touchdown passes, helping the Saints beat the Philadelphia Eagles 48-22 on Sunday.

Hypothetical, contrary to fact. Say ‘might’, not may; if there were a healthy McNabb, he might not have mattered. Not ‘may’. (This is from last year before, sadly, McNabb was murdered in a tangled romantic triangle with his wife and another woman.)

If he runs all out, he may score on that. Ok.
If he had run all out, he may have scored. Oh, no. Contrary to fact in the past, hypothetical unrealizable, irrealis. No, no. Say “might.”

These are the saddest of possible words: It might have been.
(Not: it may have been. It wasn’t, damn it.) Grumble.

gmc

Learning Languages at Their Feet, or Meeting my Expectations

November 5, 2009

Learning Languages at Their Feet, or Meeting My Expectations

Harvard’s alumni mag this quarter has an article on Harvard students doing service learning in Africa. I read it and gave it to Allie Conlay, who has traveled in Kenya and knows Swahili. There was an inset blurb about the Professor of the Practice of African Languages.

The professor of the practice is a relatively new rank in American universities. The duty of this professor, who may be a scholar in any discipline, is primarily to coordinate all the foundational (introductory, or basic) courses in the discipline at the school so that they are all working to achieve the identical or very like goals. It’s a tiring job, since he or she has to teach a lot of classes and review a lot of course plans and testing instruments. Mostly the P of the P is not expected to do a lot of independent research, since she doesn’t have much time for that.

But not Professor Z at Harvard, we read. He is a steely-faced, obviously engaged and brilliant young man who, intrigued by how certain weirdo, or, rather, amazing Harvard undergrads — I guess they are Africans and maybe also African-Americans — exhibited an unnatural precocity for learning more and more different and exotic African tongues. He wanted to observe how they did this: what techniques did they have and how did they learn so fast? No doubt his curiosity was stirred by his own monstrous linguistic talents. He is said to command an unknown (read: huge) number of ALs himself. How does it come about?

How to learn a language? That is the question. Now, first, a distinction. These wildly proficient African speakers were not linguists doing field work. They weren’t trying to make an exhaustive description of the phonology, morphophonemics, and syntactic structures of the languages; not at all, at all. This is principally what linguists used to do in the outback of Australia or in the American deserts and jungles. Sometimes these people, these pathetic ‘linguists’, with all their knowledge, didn’t even speak the languages they described.

So, what did the students do to learn to speak? They took down copious notes of useful words and expressions as they talked to native speakers. They spent much time repeating and practicing the speech that they wanted to learn. They wrote down what they needed, presumably in their own IPA shorthand, or phonetic characters, or whatever. They picked what they wanted to learn, and they repeated and practiced, and, above all talked with the native speakers. For the details on what they did, we’ll have to wait for Professor Z’s book to come out.

I wonder what it will have to say to the theory of second language acquisition. What would Noam Chomsky say about this? How could an adult be capable of using ratiocination and a sharp attention span to the extent that the person can speak? What is this? We can only speculate now.

As I speculate, I note, first of all, one thing that distinguishes this kind of language learning from what we do in universities. There’s very often no elaborate written culture in this speech, even perhaps not an alphabet. So there’s no long tradition of literature and cultural heritage; all this book learning is replaced by the people who speak it, and whatever they choose to tell about where they come from, what life was like for their parents and grandparents, and the like. The learner picks and chooses his "culture", his interests, and literally “gets what he wants out of it,” as students so often say about classes. “I didn’t get anything out of it,” or “I got a lot out of it.” In this case, though, it’s not a professor spoon-feeding you what you get, it’s you the learner prying out of the speaker what you want. Or something like that.

If the learner, in the end, really learns to speak from one or several informants, that’s amazing and beautiful. And although I don’t know yet exactly how it happened for these students, or what their ‘speech’ is really like, I can see the tremendous advantages of the method. No political, cultural, or literary theory. No maps, no lectures, only what you can learn. Very much like what you did as a thirteen-month-old, but with at least two critical differences: you are using your brain to intentionally learn, and you face the enormous handicap of not being immersed in the target speech environment. These two attributes, or rather one positive attribute and one negative, we have also in the university. We are asked to ‘think’ about the process of speech and to organize our thoughts, and we lack a speech community until Study Abroad comes around, if ever.

The big difference is that in the uni, we structure the whole ‘learning process’ for the student, and woe betide her if she fail to meet our expectations. President Cowen told this story when he came to Tulane in, I think, 1999, to introduce himself as the new prez. Yogi Berra was asked, told Cowen, about the up-and-coming young player Don Mattingly. “Did he have a good year, Yogi?” “Yeah, a great year.” “Did he meet your expectations?” Yogi thought a while about this one. “Well, he didn’t meet my expectations, but he was better than I thought he’d be.” That’s what these learners of African languages do. They don’t meet our enormous preconceived cultural expectations, but, croyez-le ou non, they are better than we thought they’d be, much, much better.

The analogue in Slavic language teaching in American universities is the heritage student. We have three of them in 203, Alan, Elliott, and Regina. These three people came from Russian-speaking environments and have a subtle, highly developed speaking facility, but less literacy. Regina is an extreme example, for, while Alan and Elliott can write more or less pretty well, Regina needs lots of practice in writing, as I tell her a lot in class, while, on the other hand, she can analyze the literary situations we’ve been studying with great expression, individuality, wisdom of understanding and marvelously relaxed Russian fluency. In fact, when Regina was talking about her own “take” on Dmitry Dmitrich Gurov, the lady-killer in Дама с собачкой, I had the sense that many of our American 203-ers couldn’t follow her; they didn’t have enough oral Russian. Their writing and spelling skills outstrip Regina, but our American method hasn’t, yet, taught them how to communicate on the “Superior” level, as in the professors’ association description: “They [Superior level speakers] discuss their interests and special fields of competence, explain complex matters in detail, and provide lengthy and coherent narrations, all with ease, fluency, and accuracy.” Well, this is still academic-speak, but it comes close to what Regina can do. 

So I feel terrible that I am waving my professorial finger at R. and asking her to “learn to write better.” Would I could transfer her wonderful gift into the academy so that it would be available to all of us.

In the meantime, maybe she isn’t meeting my expectations, but she is much much better at Russian than you or I thought. Oh, well.
gmc

Registration for Spring, 2010

November 4, 2009

Registration for Spring, 2010

Dear Students,

Here’s the brief line-up of my courses for Spring, 2010. First, some other Russian courses: Sasha Raskina is teaching Russian short stories in English — I’ll have to check the number for you — and Professor Brumfield is offering Russian Art and Architecture 353, I think it is.

Correction! I apologize for not noticing that Sasha Raskina's class is Russian 303, third-year Russian in the language. She will focus on short stories, but you have to have roughly two years of Russian to enroll. 

I have Russian 102, the continuation of introductory, first-year Russian, with all skills taught, especially speaking. Prerequisite is Russian 101 or equivalent. Many students who have had a good smattering of Russian in the past might find 102 to their liking and to their level of proficiency; you need only interview with me and then revise your placement with the Language Learning Center, if this is necessary, with a note from me. You’ll find your Russian will come back to you in time, especially if you had some decent teaching and worked hard. Vanya in our class, who is now two or three years, I believe, into the future from his high school Russian, is benefiting from the review of 101, and has renewed confidence that his choice of 101 was a good one. I look forward to another variegated and interesting group. The class will meet the same hours as 101: MWF at 12:00-12:50 and T 12:30-1:20.

I am also teaching Russian 204, fourth-semester Russian, which is conceived as a portal into the study of literature in the language. We will read from my annotated textbook of Crime and Punishment, supplemented with selections from other works or other authors, by request. This will be a small class with, I hope, many of the brilliant 203 students continuing with Russian. It is to meet MWF at 2:00, despite what you may read in the preregistration schedule, which, Byron tells me, may be following its own scheduling whims that I’m not aware of. I will repair it as soon as I can.

Students in 204 will have access to my MP3 file of an actor reading the entire novel, which takes him about 24 hours, not including breaks. If you don’t like his voice you may give up early and read it aloud to yourself. As a pleasant alternative, I’ll give you my recording of the 3-hour radio program Crime and Punishment from the ‘90’s, which is very good indeed, with excellent actors, and which keeps scrupulously to the original text, as is the Russian (and Soviet) custom in adapting works of literature to stage or screen — no liberty permitted with the sacred words of the writer. In our case this is convenient.


In any case I look forward to this semester with you. Приятного, плодотворного чтения желаю!

gmc

Slow Reading

October 31, 2009

Slow Reading

When I was a graduate student in Slavic at Harvard, I had a friend I’d known through college who practiced the art of slow reading, as Professor Lunt called it, to the ultimate frenzy of delight. He announced that he was going to write his Ph.D. thesis on one poem, and only one, poem, of the Zhivago cycle in Pasternak’s acclaimed (and slandered by critics, and disavowed by its Nobel-prize-winning author) novel, Dr. Zhivago. Pasternak was a poet at heart, and a poet of the hard blue flame. His verses sparkled with interconnected resonances, echoes and re-echoes, trumpet blasts and Brahmsians rhapsodies. The music-and-color metaphors are apt for Pasternak, who loved music, studied philosophy at Marburg, and became a master of singing lines in a tradition of Russian poetry that has many masters, from Derzhavin to Brodsky.

Well, so what does this lead to, this Ph.D. dissertation on one and only one fifteen-line poem? My friend wrote a 180-page analysis of every perceptible and every imaginable level of understanding and interpretation a brief poetic utterance can have. Phonology and morphophonology, word-root play and design. Backwards, enantiomorphic structures, skewed semantic xeugmas. Mirror-play. As I remember the thesis, which I actually read in the Harvard achives some years after the fact, curious to know if it took shape the way he said it did — as I remember the thesis, there was little or no reference to the other poems in the cycle or to the body of Pasternak’s work. It was a self-contained exercise in finding the whole through living out all of the parts. It was an ultimate tour de force.

Was it interesting? Deeply so, it was strangely gripping, for a fellow linguist who loves literature as I do and as I did, to read. The idea came from Jakobson’s own penchant for slow reading of Old Russian and Old Church Slavonic texts not as though they were monuments of a lost Slavic dialect, but unique creations of literature. I think his passion for the weird (sic!) also infected my friend a little bit too. Jakobson’s favorite poet was Velemir Xlebnikov, a real off-the-wall crazy who invented заумь, a language “beyond mind,” and for his fascination with the disputed classic of twelve-century Russian literature, The Lay of Igor’s Campaign. Professor Lunt disapproved of this text and refused even to discuss its possible (in)authenticity and its place in the canon of Old Russian literature. This did not discourage my friend when he was a student at Harvard. When you have a supremely original genius for a professor — I mean Jakobson, not Lunt — you are unafraid to explore the trails he has blazed.

So while he was writing this opus I would ask how it was going. “Still reading it,” he would say, pythically. Two days later: “I found another X.” That meant a chiasma or cross-shaped interrelation of echoing parts. “I hadn’t found anything new for about a week. Then I found it. Very interesting.” I refrained from asking more general questions, like, e.g., “What are your conclusions?” He was too deep in the structure of the thing and too modest to make any great claims for himself. Instead of asking questions I would suggest conclusions to him, jokingly. “It is what it is.” “The meaning is no more or less than the thing itself.” He refused to be deterred, discouraged, or insulted by my jabs. He kept going, for about a year and a half, until it was finished. Then he said: “I could do the same thing for all the poems in this cycle. I have glanced at them. The depth is amazing.”

Is this crazy? Not at all. To memorize a work is to know it, the saying goes, and my friend went several dimensions beyond this, visualizing its patterns so deeply that he was, for a time, lost inside them, like Theseus in the labyrinth, so that he needed Ariadne’s thread to find his way out again. Emerging blinking into the sunlight is like emerging from a life-changing experience; nothing will ever be quite the same again.

What lessons did he learn? I don’t know, I didn’t dare ask. But I think, I surmise, if I had been he, I would have learned that it was worth it, every day and hour and minute of struggle and meditation — but that, somehow, I would never be able to repeat the experience. It would have been for me a unique journey, a once-in-a-lifetime shot.

As I reflect on reading my friend’s dissertation, it occurs to me that it wasn’t 180 pages at all. It was more like 90-100 pages. He pared it down, he cut and trimmed the work to the absolute minimum, like Flaubert touching up Madame Bovary and Goethe at eighty tinkering with Faust. This was maybe the most important part of the thesis itself, making the dross or the inessential disappear without harming the inner core. This always requires infinite care, the care of a loving artist. My friend kept on slicing and trimming, aiming at only the essence of what he had learned and found in those long months of slow reading. It was worth it.

gmc

Is It Not Possible to Understand in Another Tongue?

October 25, 2009

In Act V of Hamlet, Hamlet, Horatio and a sycophantic courtier named Osric are engaged in a lengthy and bombastic verbal joust, which Hamlet, of course, wins handily. It is the kind of logomachy that the Renaissance loved; see Rabelais’ Gargantua (early 16th century). And not only did intellectuals love this sort of thing; ordinary people did, like you and me, and like people who enjoyed Abbott and Costello in their vaudeville act of many years ago about “who’s on first, what’s on second, I-don’t-know’s on third.”

Osric, whom Hamlet calls a “waterfly,” praises Laertes with such sugary hyperbole that Hamlet mocks him while seeming to agree with him:
Hamlet: But in the verity of extolment, I take him [Laertes] to be a soul of great article, and his infusion of such dearth and rareness as, to make true diction of him [this is all gobbledygook], his semblable is his mirror, and who else would trace him, his umbrage, nothing more.
Translation: Blah...blah...blah...only his mirror can match Laertes, and besides that only his shadow would trace him.
Osric: Your lordship speaks most infallibly of him. [Fails to see the joke.]

Hamlet does not know that Laertes and the king plot to kill Hamlet with a poisoned foil. But he knows the king wants him dead, and for his own reasons he wants the king dead.

The play is approaching its apogee, or denouement, wherein everything will be revealed, yet Hamlet, whose time is short, who has lost Ophelia to suicide, engages in a ten-minute repartee with an idiot. Osric’s language is more and more fancifully obscure, and Hamlet still takes the time to overmatch him.

Hamlet: The concernancy, sir? Why do we wrap the gentleman in our more rawer breath?
Osric: Sir? [Doesn’t understand.]
Horatio: (aside to Hamlet) Is ‘t not possible to understand in another tongue? You will to’t, sir, really.
Translation: Might Osric not understand a simpler variety of language, one less fanciful? Put another way: switch to a direct code, cut the nonce words, the metaphors and the circumlocutions, and perhaps he will understand you.
Hamlet takes his time and lets Osric continue in his description of the bet. The king wagers six Barbary horses and Laertes, six French rapiers and daggers, with sword-belts and scabbards. But Osric can’t resist a flowery turn of speech, a type called synecdoche. He calls the belt-and-scabbards “carriages,” or decorated carts for cannons, because of their artistic (Frenchified) imagination of design, or “conceit.”
Osric: Three of the carriages, in faith, are very dear to fancy, very responsive to the hilts, most delicate carriages, and of very liberal conceit.
Hamlet: What do you call the “carriages”?
Horatio: I knew you must be edified by the margent ere you had done. [I knew you’d have to have a marginal gloss for that one]
Osric: The carriages, sir, are the hangers (sword belt and straps).
Hamlet: The phrase would be more germane to the matter if we could carry a cannon by our sides. I would it might be “hangers” till then. But on. Six Barbary horses aainst six French swords, their assigns, and three liberal-conceited carriages — that’s the French bet against the Danish.

Hamlet is especially irked at Osric’s inept and clumsy use of hyperbole in place of precision in language. He remarks to Horatio “He did comply, sir, with his dug before he sucked it,” or, he made a deep bow and a fruity compliment before taking his mother’s breast. Here, at the brink of doom, Hamlet allows himself to vent healthy anger at windbags who use language to impress stupid people rather than for its rightful purpose: as a tool of thought.

If you think this example is a little far out, think again: Hamlet is perhaps the most performed play of all time, and the Elizabethans relished this comic relief before the duel, though, for us, the language is just a touch too old to move us so quickly. But it is perfectly timed just in front of the violent action which will end the play, resulting in four more royal deaths.

This brings me back to the ACTFL's idealistic description of the Superior foreign-language learner, Superiorspeak, or Abstractspeak:

Speakers at the Superior level are able to communicate in the language with accuracy and fluency in order to participate fully and effectively in conversations on a variety of topics in formal and informal settings from both concrete and abstract perspectives. They discuss their interests and special fields of competence, explain complex matters in detail, and provide lengthy and coherent narrations, all with ease, fluency, and accuracy.

Abstractspeak can move from narration in the “concrete” to hypothesizing in the “abstract” in the twinkling of an eye. He can talk big and he can talk small.  He can explain complex things with ease. Native speakers unused to Learnerspeak are not unnerved by him. They listen to him with ease, forgetting he’s not one of them.  

I contend, however, that Abstractspeak is not what the native speaker, or the very-very-very proficient learner does. The real speaker, be she two years or twenty, plays with language, makes language games, and appreciates a pun put just right, unforced and without exaggeration, likes a well-made narrative much more than an academic “argument,” and treats verbal imagination as the highest pinnacle of language, not verbal suasion. Many's the very-very "near-native" speaker who, by the way, cannot explain abstract concepts with ease. Where the ACTFL puts narration down on the intermediate-high level, readers of great writers like Rabelais, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Gogol and Flannery O’Connor prize not their abstraction, not their not concretism (whatever that is) but their aptness, their precision, the revelation of their language. Any native speaker will love his language so much that he will defend it to the end, or to the brink of his own demise, as Hamlet does. Any native speaker considers himself an expert on his language, because he has in it, by birthright, a lifelong proprietary interest.

gmc

Monday October 26 is the last day to drop

Dear Students of 101,

If you haven't been enjoying, to the fullest, your relationship with Russian this fall; if you find yourself not organizing your weekly assignments by printing out my Work for the Week files; if you neglect even a half-hearted attempt at the written assignments; if, indeed, beyond all this, you find yourself, again and again, unaccountably leaving all your Russian at home, mentally and physically, including your textbook, notebook and workbook, accepting in class the use of my own materials as we focus on a grammatical question — you might consider a last-minute drop. Unfortunately it will be "with record", which is a disaffecting prospect.

Or you might consider not only coming to class — your attendance has been generally very good indeed, and when you are ill, you usually let me know, for which I extend my thanks. I appreciate your good humor in class discussions and exercises and your genuine interest in things Slavic and Russian. Many of you are quite talented and deserve to treat yourselves better than you are doing. Treat yourself with the respect you deserve! Remember that this class is not merely a wonderful aesthetic experience. It is also a portal into the learning of a language, requiring conscientious work and devotion and steady development of skills. If you do this you will not only learn Russian, you'll get a decent grade as well.

It is not too late to rescue yourself from a familiar academic nightmare. Come to class with your files, your books and materials, not merely with your delightful personalities and ready curiosity. We have about five weeks plus a final exam remaining, and I put heavy emphasis in grading on the rising arc of achievement in the last weeks of class, from the pass around the far turn into the home stretch. 

If you are having trouble, the ERC has tutoring and I have an office hour four times a week, MWF 1:00-2:00 and T 1:20-2:00.

Вперед в светлое будущее! Да здравствует великий русский язык! 

More soon,

gmc

Teacher-Course Evaluations

Dear Students,

at Tulane we now do these evaluations on Blackboard and do not spend class time on them. Nevertheless they are crucial to our understanding of how effective our courses are. I am not satisfied with the format of the Tulane evaluations, nor have I ever been. I especially dislike the heavy emphasis on quantified scores and the lack of prominence of written student comments, from which I can learn so much more than a sample 'grade' I got for this or that category. I always read the comments and take them to heart. When professors come up for promotion and tenure at Tulane, the written comments of students are disregarded. I couldn't believe that when I was first informed of this. Everything has to be a quantified measure. How can you quantify a professor's books and articles? We have to get letters of evaluation from other scholars in the field, and believe me, the letters are written comments, not grades or raw scores.

Drew Faust, the lady prez at Harvard, was asked how their evaluations might change. She replied that we need to find out whether a class has effectively prepared the students for the next level in the field -- very pertinent to language classes. Further, she wants to know how the professor guides the students to analyze and evaluate raw information and to integrate information in an approach to a problem. Using information wisely, with healthy scepticism and a high regard for the integrity of facts is what we should somehow be able to teach. Another thing she said that appeals to me is: "We should ask whether the students will remember the class in a year's time, in five years' time, in ten years. (Thirty years?)

I suppose I flatter myself to think many students remember my Russian classes, even if they don't venture beyond 101. One student told me "Russian and I just didn't get along," but she and I became friends. I think that counts, doesn't it, as "remembering" the course? This girl was a talented artist and used to frighten us in the department with her self-designed Halloween costumes. I would gasp and my first impulse would be to stand in between her, her vampire fangs and bloody eyes shining, and Professor Naughton, who commented "Feral! Feral!" As though I could protect Professor Naughton from an evil vampire!

I think students will remember the Russian for hello, how are you, and I speak Russian. That in itself is a legacy of sorts.

Homo loquens

October 15, 2009

Homo loquens

Here below is the ACTFL definition of the “superior” speaker, whom we professors, in our job-search descriptions, used to describe smugly as “near-native.” The speaking creature we have here, however, is a fictive homo loquens, a super-rational man of Superior-speak.

Para. 1: He is abstract; he is concrete. He is narrative and he is coherent, “all with ease.” He is all things, but not metaphorical, not allusive, not playful. He is, above all, formally and informally, a great communicator.

Para. 2: He argues, and supports his arguments, on all issues of importance. He hypothesizes (knows irrealia). Unhesitatingly he moves forward in his discourse. In certain unexplored, perhaps unknowable ways, he reveals his own private home language. But this is insignificant.

Para. 3: He is a commander of discourse strategies: he knows how to take turns, to separate main ideas and supporting info. He uses intonational signals — and, one might suppose, extralinguistic signs, such as body language, eye contact, averted or riveted gazes, and so on and so on. He is practically error-free.

One has only a muted hint that he did not grow up with English.

However, he is not human. People do not talk like this; certain academics, yes, they do, and many automata. Language is serpentine, helical, playful, evasive, illusive, metaphoric and synecdochic — even when it is communicative, which it isn’t much of the time. Only academics classify their arguments into main and supporting theses. People do not. And, notably, orators do not. (Check out Antony's speech in Julius Caesar.)

This speaker, one presumes, has lived for years in the environment of the target language.

SUPERIOR


1. Speakers at the Superior level are able to communicate in the language with accuracy and fluency in order to participate fully and effectively in conversations on a variety of topics in formal and informal settings from both concrete and abstract perspectives. They discuss their interests and special fields of competence, explain complex matters in detail, and provide lengthy and coherent narrations, all with ease, fluency, and accuracy.

2. They explain their opinions on a number of topics of importance to them, such as social and political issues, and provide structured argument to support their opinions. They are able to construct and develop hypotheses to explore alternative possibilities. When appropriate, they use extended discourse without unnaturally lengthy hesitation to make their point, even
when engaged in abstract elaborations. Such discourse, while coherent, may still be influenced by the Superior speakers own language patterns, rather than those of the target language.

3. Superior speakers command a variety of interactive and discourse strategies, such as turn-taking and separating main ideas from supporting information through the use of syntactic and lexical devices, as well as intonational features such as pitch, stress and tone. They demonstrate virtually no pattern of error in the use of basic structures. However, they may make sporadic errors, particularly in low-frequency structures and in some complex high-frequency structures more common to formal speech and writing. Such errors, if they do occur, do not distract the native interlocutor or interfere with communication.


Now look at advanced high.

Para. 1. This speaker seems equally good at first as SuperiorSpeaker, but note that he breaks down. He can’t “sustain” it. Patterns of error grow like tumors.

Para. 2. He is uncomfortable in the abstract zone (whatever that is).

Para. 3. He is clever at hiding his disability and compensating for his lack of abstraction. He is often very good, but sometimes not.

Para. 4. Confronted with the ‘complex tasks’ of SuperiorSpeak, he collapses and resorts to “simplification, description or narration” in place of argument or hypothesis.

He has studied the language for years and might have been a major in college. He lived in the target language, but never reached the dizzy peaks of AbstractMan.


ADVANCED HIGH


1. Speakers at the Advanced-High level perform all Advanced-level tasks with linguistic ease, confidence and competence. They are able to consistently explain in detail and narrate fully and accurately in all time frames. In addition, Advanced-High speakers handle the tasks pertaining to the Superior level but cannot sustain performance at that level across a variety of topics. They can provide a structured argument to support their opinions, and they may construct hypotheses, but patterns of error appear.

2. They can discuss some topics abstractly, especially those relating to their particular interests and special fields of expertise, but in general, they are more comfortable discussing a variety of topics concretely.

3. High speakers may demonstrate a well-developed ability to compensate for an imperfect grasp of some forms or for limitations in vocabulary by the confident use of communicative strategies, such as paraphrasing, circumlocution, and illustration. They use precise vocabulary and intonation to express meaning and often show great fluency and ease of speech.

4, However, when called on to perform the complex tasks associated with the Superior level over a variety of topics, their language will at times break down or prove inadequate, or
they may avoid the task altogether, for example, by resorting to simplification through the use of description or narration in place of argument or hypothesis.

Next time: Psychoanalysis of the ACTFL standards-writers. All mysteries revealed.

gmc

College Standards for Russian 102 and 203

October 13, 2009


College Standards for Russian 203

Dear Students,

We are in the midst of preparing our departments to pass the Southern Association of Schools and Colleges accreditation (yawn). It can be very painful, as we have to deal with a rigid bureaucratic jargon and its assumptions, paramount among them that everything we teach may somehow — must willy nilly somehow — be (objectively!) quantified.

I won’t bore you (yawn) with the gruesome details, and please don’t tell anyone about this. But I thought you might be interested in the American Council of Teachers of Foreign Language’s standards definitions for Intermediate High, Mid and Low. These correspond roughly to, I’d say, our 204, 203, and 102 at Tulane. We’ve been told that Intermediate Mid is indeed roughly 203 and that the official Tulane proficiency requirement, 102, is Intermediate Low.

Take a gander. I’d love to hear your comments.

Note definitio a negatione: achievements are defined by how far they miss the mark. (the Advanced Level defines true success, which I’ll share with you soon). Note “features of breakdown,” “failure to maintain narration,” etc. The dominant language is present like an evil ghost.

Check out the last sentence for Intermediate mid: “Intermediate-Mid speakers are generally understood by sympathetic interlocutors accustomed to dealing with non-natives.” I hope y’all find some sympatheic interlocutors.

The Intermediate Low is the outcome of 102.
I guess I shouldn’t let you read these things; let me assure me that I don’t believe them as stated. Fear not! Вперёд в светлое коммунистическое будущее! Совестский Союз навсегда!


INTERMEDIATE HIGH

Intermediate-High speakers are able to converse with ease and confidence when dealing with most routine tasks and social situations of the Intermediate level. They are able to handle successfully many uncomplicated tasks and social situations requiring an exchange of basic information related to work, school, recreation, particular interests and areas of competence, though hesitation and errors may be evident.

Intermediate-High speakers handle the tasks pertaining to the Advanced level, but they are unable to sustain performance at that level over a varietyof topics. With some consistency, speakers at the Intermediate High level narrate and describe in major time frames using connected discourse of paragraph length. However, their performance of these Advanced-level tasks will exhibit one or more features of breakdown, such as the failure to maintain the narration or description semantically or syntactically in the appropriate major time frame, the disintegration of connected discourse, the misuse of cohesive devises, a reduction in breadth and appropriateness of vocabulary, the failure to successfully circumlocute, or a significant amount of hesitation.
Intermediate-High speakers can generally be understood by native speakers unaccustomed to dealing with non-natives, although the dominant language is still evident (e.g. use of code-switching, false cognates, literal translations, etc.), and gaps in communication may occur.

INTERMEDIATE MID
Speakers at the Intermediate-Mid level are able to handle successfully a variety of uncomplicated communicative tasks in straightforward social situations. Conversation is generally limited to those predictable and concrete exchanges necessary for survival in the target culture; these include personal information covering self, family, home, daily activities, interests and personal preferences, as well as physical and social needs, such as food, shopping, travel and lodging.
Intermediate-Mid speakers tend to function reactively, for example, by responding to direct questions or requests for information. However, they are capable of asking a variety of questions when necessary to obtain simple information to satisfy basic needs, such as directions, prices and services. When called on to perform functions or handle topics at the Advanced level, they provide some information but have difficulty linking ideas, manipulating time and aspect, and using communicative strategies, such as circumlocution. Intermediate-Mid speakers are able to express personal meaning by creating with the language, in part by combining and recombining known elements and conversational input to make utterances of sentence length and some strings of sentences. Their speech may contain pauses, reformulations and self-corrections as they search for adequate vocabulary and appropriate language forms to express themselves. Because of inaccuracies in their vocabulary and/or pronunciation and/or grammar and/or syntax, misunderstandings can occur, but Intermediate-Mid speakers are generally understood by sympathetic interlocutors accustomed to dealing with non-natives.

INTERMEDIATE LOW

Speakers at the Intermediate-Low level are able to handle successfully a limited number of uncomplicated communicative tasks by creating with the language in straightforward social situations. Conversation is restricted to some of the concrete exchanges and predictable topics necessary for survival in the target language culture. These topics relate to basic personal information covering, for example, self and family, some daily activities and personal preferences, as well as to some immediate needs, such as ordering food and
making simple purchases.

At the Intermediate-Low level, speakers are primarily reactive and struggle to answer direct questions or requests for information, but they are also able to ask a few appropriate questions.
Intermediate-Low speakers express personal meaning by combining and recombining into short statements what they know and what they hear from their interlocutors. Their utterances are often filled with hesitancy and inaccuracies as they search for appropriate linguistic forms and vocabulary while attempting to give form to the message. Their speech is characterized by frequent pauses, ineffective reformulations and self-corrections. Their pronunciation, vocabulary and syntax are strongly influenced by their first language but, in spite of frequent misunderstandings that require repetition or rephrasing, Intermediate-Low speakers can generally be understood by sympathetic interlocutors, particularly by those accustomed to dealing with non-natives.

What Makes Russian Russian

October 11
What Makes Russian Russian

It was fate that made Moscow, and the Muscovite duchy, the center of the Great Russian lands, and the seat of the tsar “of all Russias,” царь всея Руси.” Here the Moscow colloquial speech of the seventeenth century became the standard for the written language of all of the land, and the characteristics of that very dialect, a variety of the central Rostovo-Suzdal’ dialect zone, became the standard for the future.

In phonology, that meant a very strong phonemic stress and concomitant loss of phonemic pitch and quantity. This trait is shared by nearly all dialects, from the Northeast and Moscow, to the Southwest and the Novgorod-Pskov dialects, to the Zavolzh’e variety. This latter, located in an intermediate zone between Great Russian and Belorussian, has a seven-vowel system with long tense vowels, a v like a w, and, most important, no reduction of unstressed vowels.

In Moscow, however, аканье was adopted from some neighboring speech communities, and that most natural of developments in the presence of a strong phonemic pitch led to a drastic reduction of the unstressed vocalism: three vowels only, in the first pretonic syllable. High unrounded vowels are represented by i, and mid flat vowels, by a. Moscow thus had [v’id’i], ведИ ‘lead!’, [vad’i], водИ ‘lead’ (indet.), [vadi] водЫ ‘water’ (gen. sg.). The spelling gives the etymologies rather better than the phonetics; listen to your teacher pronounce ведИ, водИ, водЫ. Although the vowels sound rather different, especially the mid-back jery in водЫ, they are completely driven and predicted by the consonants. This remains the greatest justification of considering и and ы to be varieties of the same phoneme, even though Russians, psychologically, feel the great phonetic disparity between the two. But they are one, functionally.

Moscow speech has that strong phonemic stress, plus a highly developed system of soft vs. hard consonants, perhaps the most remarkably pervasive such system in all the dialects of all the Slavic languages. Ukrainian and Belorussian have soft ~ hard, but not with such rigor and not in so many tiers and ranks, as does Russian; Polish soft consonants are not so much ‘palatalized’ in the Russian manner (e.g. dentals да–да, дядя, –ся, –си, –сю –сё vs. –са, –сы, –су, –со) as transformed into lisping-like palatal sounds.

Devoicing at word-final and in clusters is most insistent and thorough in the Moscow dialect, and is varyingly realized in languages with more sparsely realized palatalization oppositions. Ukrainian, for example, has voiced final consonants and tenseness, rather than voicing, as the basic obstruent feature.

It is a romantic notion that I am about to broach, but nonetheless I like it and want to keep it. The stress-system, the consonantal hegemony, and the simplicity of the vocalism of Moscow was perfectly tuned for the great poetry of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, based, as it was for the most part, on very regular alternation of stresses in disyllabic and trisyllabic meters (vs. the relative freedom in English iambs, for example), and, later, in the dol’niki and free verse of contemporary poets, the continuing dominence of the stressed vowel.

There is nothing and no language like Russian for stress. Compare a Russian saying Guten Tag ‘good day!’ in German with the pronunciation of a German-speaking native. All stress, all voicing vowels and devoicing consonants— vs. the tense German consonants. Try it out.

gmc

Ways and Means to Study a Language

October 8

Dear Students,
How does one study a language? One has to decide what one wants to do with the language. Converse with the natives? Learn phrases for tourists? Really get some fluency (that’s Byron’s plan for Russian)? Get the basics, then be able to use the language for research, or for business purposes? Learn enough to really please one’s grandmother from Omsk? Be able to have control of the sounds of the language, like Christopher Wertz with Italian, in Inglorious Basterds? Have really good active control of the phonetics, like an opera singer must have German and Italian, but not necessarily a fluent speaking knowledge?

These are all very respectable goals and all, and with varying degrees of commitment of time, zeal, labor, and struggle, all are attainable. The easiest is the opera singer’s goal, but even that can be difficult if you don’t have the knack of imitation. Jessica Norman, a wonderful singer, never could sing German to my satisfaction, and her Southern accent in Mahler’s lieder is to my taste distracting. Remember when you are speaking Russian, to the end of our days, you are ‘imitating’ a native speaker; you have to consciously control your speech apparatus. Just as non-natives speaking English, who can pronounce the interdental fricative ‘th’ quite nicely — when they are concentrating, that is. A couple of drinks in their belly, and the fricative assimilates to their own native language, and so we hear ‘de house,’ ‘you bote [=both] are coming,’ and so on. You have to get an American really drunk before he loses that fricative, but that’s possible, too, because it is so functionally complex. In both cases we see a sort of aphasia, due to lack of concentration or a lowering of inhibition and neurological control

If you want to ‘get the basics’ and a touch of fluency first, you have to practice all the skills in your language classroom; they will stay with you in the future when you are using Russian in business correspondence or when chatting with clients. You may not have to do much writing, but you have to know conversational phrases and you have to remember how to read, which means basic vocabulary.

The technical vocabulary of your specialty is in the long run easy to get, since it’s usually a limited stock of words pertaining to what you study or what you do, and it doesn’t take very long to get a very good passive control of these words by reading books and articles. It is much harder to get a good ‘general’ vocabulary, that needed for reading novels or newspapers without a dictionary. It will come, with effort, and in time the dictionary will only be needed in critical cases when you’re not getting the point because you don’t get some term or other.

Of course, before you read geological articles in Russian every week, you want to get the fundamental morphology and vocabulary. That you will have after three good semesters of university Russian. At that point you can take a fork in the road and follow the yellow brick road of your own desires. If more fluency is your goal, a summer in Russia would be stupendous; the great advantage of traveling to the site of the target language, as Berenice will testify, is getting to know the people on their own sod, so to speak, and one can do it very nicely with three semesters preparation.

To pass a graduate language exam in Russian, you’ll need to spend a period of time reading in the field you will be tested in; if it is political science, you should read articles in Russian journals, and perhaps work with a Russian speaker or a professor who can help you be sure you are getting it right. If you are in mathematics, you’ll find the vocabulary and style of writing leans heavily on English. We once had an undergraduate, a math and Russian major, who decided to do a self-designed Junior Study Abroad Year, and he travelled to a remote northern city where they had a good math department — and where, as a bonus, there were very few people who spoke English. Our concern for him was not academic, but meterological: could he survive the bitter, cruel Russian winter? He did, and all went well.

I came to the decision last summer that I would turn the arc of second-year-Russian to careen toward Dostoevsky, where it will abut in a crescendo of Russian-only speaking, reading, and writing. There is no reason for us to patter on in the same vein an entire year; it’s time to get to the beef.

I hope there will be some of you left in 203 who have the adventurous spirit to try this (204). It will be very good stuff. (Meets three times a week, not four.)

gmc

Conferences

Dear Students,

Early next week — Oct 12-13-14, just before mid-term and the Autumn Break, this will be specified in my Work for the Week — I will hold individual discussions — conferences, or tête-à-têtes, with all students in my Russian language classes to help you monitor your progress. I do this only in foundational classes (Russ 101-203) just as a means of helping you measure and assess (I hate that bureaucratic term, now a cant term among the college accreditation specialists) your work and to customize it to your needs, intellectually and practically: to get the most Russian “out of it,” as students say, with that bald quantifying metaphor, and to “get the grade,” that is, make sure the class is rewarding your grade-point as well as it is whetting your aesthetic sense and your intellectual satisfaction. It is important for you to try and be in class to meet with me. I want to talk with students who are doing well and feeling good in my classes, as well as those who aren’t doing well and feeling not so good; also those who don’t feel the scale tipped one way or the other. So I’m looking forward to this. No assignment for that day!
See you soon,
gmc

Hitler's Argument and The Name of the Book

Dear Students,

When Fred Starr was provost at Tulane, he put a clipping on the bulletin board across from the French department. It was an excerpt from Hitler’s memoir, Mein Kampf. In a rambling paragraph Hitler deplored the many wasted hours German schoolboys and girls spend diligently and vainly studying other languages, when German is the only language needed anyway. The time would be so much better spent in ideological battle, I think the argument went on to claim. For Fred it was an argument in reverse persuasion, of course: Hitler was talking like so many American businessmen of the past century. Why learn Japanese? Takes forever, I won’t get it right, and they have to learn English anyway, the language of power. Sounds like what Hitler was saying. And you know, the power-broker Americans of the mid-twentieth century had a despicable ignorance of minority languages, especially Asian languages, not to mention Arabic, Indic languages, African languages, native American languages. And they nourished an unhealthy disdain for them and for the cultures they represent, the ugly disdain born of ignorance.
So many of your generation, by happy contrast with my parents’ and mine, now don’t talk like the CEOs of General Motors. You, unlike us in our day, know how essential a fluency in a foreign language is and how incalculably valuable it is. You wouldn’t be continuing with Russian in 203 (by the way, that’s the name of an excellent second-year textbook, “Continuing with Russian) if this weren’t so, and some of you in 203 sincerely want to get fluent in it (makes me want to return to my holy vow of Russian-only, at least out of my mouth). This can only be good.
I remember my first ‘language’ textbook in high school; it was a Latin grammar handbook, entitled “Latin for Americans.” It was a naive title that I was ashamed of. I much preferred the conservative, staid cover of “Third Year Latin,” with its smug certainty of what ‘third year’ should be and its glossy pages, with lists of recondite tropes and syntactic constructions. It’s hard to find a really catchy title for a beginning language book. A group of very bright female Slavists called their Czech textbook “Czech the Game,” Čeština hrou, less catchily translated as “Czech for Fun.” Wanna bet it’s not fun? Some female Czech teachers of the 80’s gave their book the disaffecting title “Czech for Foreigners.” Foreigners? Perhaps because in that day only people who were working in the country had perforce to study it as a ‘foreign language’, hence the title.
My old Russian professor in college, who was a profoundly stupid person in most students’ opinion, gave his book the title “Basic Russian,” which we felt insulting. Are we “basic people”? Do we speak “basic English”? My Harvard prof called his “Fundamentals of Russian.” It had no pictures, no realia, no jokes, no texts. Just sample phrases and all the morphology of the language. In its time I would use it as a textbook at Tulane, because it was such a good reference; I supplemented it with my own texts. One of the most popular texts of the mid-70s and 80s, up to the fall of the CCCP, was “Russian for Everybody.” This seems disingenuous, since Russian is not for everybody, so how should this book present it so?
The communicative textbooks of today, with their glossy cyberwise realia and their page setups, suspiciously more redolent of an internet storefront than an academic manual, have catchy titles that “young people” (Russians call them молодёжь) will ‘relate to’: German “Kontakte,” for example — in fact most serious students are confused by such books, with their fragments of cartoons, movie clips, interviews with famous personalities, and so on. Where’s the beef? Or, as students will diffidently ask: “What (of all this crap) am I supposed to know? (and why?)”
It’s enough to make an “old person” yearn for the good staid old days. Russian professors of the good old days, who wrote textbooks for Russian as well as other languages, wouldn’t think of calling them anything more suggestive than “Учебник русской грамматики для шестого года” ‘Тextbook of Russian Grammar for the Sixth Form.’ (I’m asleep already.)
This brings to mind N. Smirnovsky, author of Учебник русской грамматики, quoted by Nabokov in the epigraph to “The Gift”: Дуб — дерево. Роза — цветок. Олень — животное. Воробей — птица. Россия — наше отечество. Смерть неизбежна.
This laconic paragraph seems to be a study in predicate nominatives, with the copula ‘be’ omitted in Russian; the inner arc of poetry leans into the melancholy fate of the Russian people, as in English: “An oak is a tree. A rose is a flower. A deer is an animal. A sparrow is a bird. Russia is our fatherland. Death is inevitable.” The last, fatal, punch line, shows a noun with a short adjective; in this doom-charged atmosphere one does not require a dash.
gmc

How to Learn Russian in a University

Sept 29

Writing and Listening, or How to Learn Russian in a University

The academic environment is a sterile, ratiocinative one for learning such an intimate, neuromuscular, spiritual skill as a language. No kid ever learned Russian at age 2.7 in the classroom. He has to be eating cereal, crawling into a dangerous corner, going for a walk with grandpa, going to sleep, listening to a favorite song, and other such excellent pursuits. We deprived older people must, however, make up our losses with stratagems to supplant what we lack in naturalness of style. We have to hear the language in the classroom, and in our private audits, and we have to write personally and creatively in the language.

My colleague Henry Sullivan of Spanish was writing Czech plays after only about a year of studying Czech, and we write in Russian 101 — not plays, maybe, but creative essays, as on Quiz No. 2: “Describe your family” or “Describe your apartment or room.” As simple as this sounds, you were able to make a personal linguistic creation. This is much more important than fill-in-the-blank, or, for example, choose-the-correct-answer tests; I give the ‘communicative textbook writers’ their due in that. Also, note that some of the exercises in Nachalo, familiar now to everyone in 101 and 203, are couched in ‘creative’ terminology, even if the task seems rudimentary: “ask your roommate if he knows where Sasha is going,” “tell your host mother you speak Russian in America” (note the obvious subliminal subjectiveness of ‘host mother’ — go to Russia, go to Russia...). You surely have discovered that you really can’t do the exercises without having first gone through the grammar in the textbook, the paginations for which I have conveniently marked for you in my Work of the Week handout. For example, in 101 for Sept. 29, you had to have read the conversation between Наталья Ивановна и Лена before you could answer exercise A, which consists of statements about the content of that dialogue which you are asked to check and correct. Some of the exercises, I will grant you, are foolish, gratuitous, or idiotic, with dumbed-down drawings of Tanya or Jim leering at each other. These you may skip at your discretion.

But (never start a sentence with but), my point really is, some writing and some listening four times a day gets you set for speaking in class. For some reason my opening today in 101, Tuesday, 29 Sept., seemed to click nicely. I asked people to repeat parts of a dialogue, and with the repetition came implicit understanding of the conjugational patterns — as heard, not as written — and the bonus of really good practice on pronunciation. It really worked. The students seemed to enjoy it. By contrast, in 203 today, I was distracted by the difficult material of the lesson, the genitive plural (or plurred genitals, as we called it at Harvard; I think it was from Joyce’s Finnegans Wake) and did not maintain my noble intention of speaking nearly all, or 99 % all, Russian only. It wasn’t as good as it could have been. And, indeed, the one day last week when I did speak only Russian the whole hour in 203, and, by the way, the subject was the complicated and abstract idea of the mobile vowel, one student said it was good, even if they (she) didn’t understand everything. I think she is right. I must hold myself on course better, and in 203 in particular that means holding myself right on Russian.

I tell students again and again: write at least some of the assignment and turn it in. Listen to at least some of the lesson, be it on cassette, DVD or CD, or whatever. Just 10-15 minutes of real, concentrated immersion in the sounds of Russian -- perhaps with the text of the reading right alongside, if you have a particularly visual memory, as do I and so many of your own generation.

You must do the homework to get a decent grade; you must do it to understand the grammar, and to learn the vocabulary. Please at least learn the vocabulary! I would give an A to any student who learned to write every word accurately, even should he mix up genders and cases and verb types. It’s well worth it. What if you were lost in Moscow and got the attention of a train conductor for a moment or two -- better to know the words где остановка площадь Маяковского than pause to analyze the grammar for ten seconds.

Listen 15 minutes, write exercises 15 minutes, learn words 15 minutes.
In fact you are oriented to respond to sounds (music) and visual stimuli. What’s better for learning Russian? If you do this the process of learning will become truly cumulative, one day building on the previous day, and the habitual reflexes of reading, writing and listening will get stronger and stronger, like the muscles and the breathing patterns used in running and other forms of aerobics. Language is a process of inspiration and expiration. Start with inspiration.

gmc