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

Russian Native Speakers — Again

Henry James’ “The Real Thing” presents an English couple that, all in all, seem to be. in all visible details, the very perfect, cultured English couple. They are the real thing — more than the real thing itself, which inevitably comes with unwanted blemishes — and they are looking for an artist who might hire them for the illustrations to a novel, or, say, a Henry James short story. Problem is, they are impoverished, and in “real fact” the only thing they are good at is sitting still for long, long periods of time, with great patience. Well, they do find an artist who might need a model. There is, however, a kind of emptiness underneath the surface that the artist tires of, and, by the end of the story, when the English couple is begging the artist to hire them as cook and cleaning lady, the facade has crumbled, and the artist is wracking his brains for a polite way to tell them to get out of his studio.
Well, now, there are tens and tens of millions of Russians who ‘speak’ Russian, more or less, and would love to ‘teach’ Russian to people who will pay them for the honor of learning at their feet; problem is, they haven’t anything but their idiolect. Russian to them is a tissue of memorized lines from Pushkin whose history they never learned, banter from bad movies, a welter of off-color stories, and the emptiness of never really having learned their own history. I speak, mind you, of Russians born around 1980, with no noble ties to relatives across the pond, no advanced education, Russians who never endured the blockade of Leningrad, who never wrote Brezhnev an angry letter, who never were transported by the Nazis from Kiev to Heidelberg as slave labor.
But even the many Russians I know and respect for their experiences, their learning, their humility before a terrific past they knew — or, by their youth, never came to know — talented Russians, hard-working, self-sacrificing, literate beyong the lights of Americans their age and experience — even these enviable individuals, with all their credentials, are not fit to teach Russian. You have to be trained for that, and many’s the golden heart who hates teaching language (although she won’t admit it even to herself) and so botches it.
The term ‘native speaker’ was very much in vogue when I was in graduate school, and my school had the enlightened notion that we students would have contact with native speakers whose role was to get us talking, not, themselves, to tell us about the language we were learning. We met an hour or two a week with various Russians, and they were a lot of fun. We worked hard at figuring out how to learn the sorts of things they did when speaking: techniques of telling a story, intonational patterns of ‘contemporary standard Russian,’ and the like. When I studied Czech, my instructor was, to be sure, a native speaker herself, but she was also a scholar and had been the Czech wife of Jakobson, so she was an exception to the rule. When in our second term of Czech we had an ‘informant’ whose speech differed a lot from hers, she waved her hand and told us, dismissively, that he was a “Moravian.” She was great, and well known in Soviet Czechoslovakia, but perhaps a bit too emotionally tied to her subject. In 1968, when the Warsaw Pact army invaded the country and the liberalization of the Prague Spring had been quashed, she was never the same again. I do admit she was an exception, and a fairly decent teacher of her own language.
But when I took Serbo-Croatian the next year I met some real professionals. Professor Lord, a specialist in the oral epic, had written the grammar book himself, and it was a model of precision. His associate was a passionate oral-epic man, and he, too, was perfect in the classroom. The class was exposed to a Serbian speaker one semester, and a Croatian the next. When we met the Croatian with our newly-formed Serbian accents, telling him we wanted to speak “српски,” we were not shocked, but interested, to learn that he spoken only Croatian, “a totally different and much more cultivated tongue,” written in Roman letters and Roman Catholic in religion. Today in these nationalistic times there are actually three languages carved out of the one we learned in the days of Tito.
Yes, you need a native speaker or your language learning is for naught. You need her for testing whether she accepts as good Russian the phrases you make up. You need her to read paragraphs out loud for your to record. You need her to tell you her background so that you can learn where she grew up and where she studied.
And at Tulane it is our great good fortune to have lots of Russians about here and there, some of whom will be eager to help. If they say they can ‘teach’ you ‘some Russian,” take it cum grano salis, but if they will talk some Russian with you, that’s better still.
gmc

Why Russian Native Speakers Can't Teach Russian

Dear Students,

The native speaker is revered as the genuine article, the real thing, the ne plus ultra. Well, I hate to say it, but, as my gruff-speaking neighbor would say in his bad French, I’d like to give that false truism the coup de gras.

There is no one more helpless in the classroom than a Russian teaching Russian who is ignorant of language. I had the old mid-century battle-axes in college, who’d say: “Why you not know dis word? You learn it, you hear?” And I had a charming nymph, a госпожа Данилева, whose name I will never forget, who moved with soundless grace, spoke Russian in a murmurous fluted lilt, was so afraid of the old bastard who ran the program and so unsure of herself that she never taught anything and we learned nothing, except that young Russian women can be unspeakably beautiful.

But then I had доктор Арутунова at Harvard and she broke the mold. Brilliant, linguistically erudite, endlessly mindful of her role as trainer of the young Russian language professors of the coming age in America, superb and frightening, she was the very best there was. Our class met only once a week (for two hours), and it was so nerve-wracking that one lived in terror until the day of class, enjoyed a day or two of relaxation and then lived five days of terror until the next class. She knew everything Jakobson and Halle and Chomsky were working on and she got us to talk about it in Russian. У Гоголя мы видим реализацию метафоры. Вот различительные признаки русской фонологи... It got even harder when we got deeper into other Slavic languages. My colleague was stopped by Arutunova on the street — she made some remark or some question — and he responded: Прочь? which in Czech means ‘why’, but in Russian, ‘get away’. Oh my lord.

But how we learned Russian syntax: какие бы книги вы ни читали, вы... окажись я на месте преступления... and many many more beauties of Russian irrealia.

The fact is that everybody of every ethnic group speaks some language and has strong opinions about that language, even if he has never been trained in languages. This often leads to wrong-headed conceptions and to real misinformation if a classroom teacher is an ignorant native speaker; and, let me tell you, there is no more arrogant a native speaker than an ignorant Russian, one who cannot for the life of him assume the proper humility of respect and awe needed to teach a language. Especially a language of world literature, especially a language of world wisdom and suffering and poetry. Especially the language of Putin and Prokof’ev, of Khrushchev and Shchedrin, of Kharms and Khachaturian.
Why? Why? The answer is coming in the next installment, but, for a clue, read Henry James” “The Real Thing” to learn why the real thing is not it, after all.

gmc

Tarantino Again

Dear Students,

Tarantino Again
Sept 23

Dear Students,

As I say, I’m no film critic, but it really seemed to me that Inglourious Basterds was, in part, at least, about language. The very first scene, a masterpiece of directing (so says the non-critic! — sorry), made me certain this flick would have a linguistic base. The Frenchman spoke real ‘country French' and his tense, three-word communications with his daughters as the Nazi motorcycle brigade approached set the tone. An Austrian colleague tells me that the Austrian background of the character played by Christopher Waltz is apparent at once from his references to “Hitler taking me out of the Alps” and, indeed, in his Austrian courtesies and charm. Speaking accented but fluent French, the colonel declines wine for a glass of his host’s milk and praises “vos fillettes et vos vauches,” ‘your daughters and your cows’. Then comes the ominous switch to English, as I mentioned last time, but I had missed the clear reference to Austria. My colleague wondered whether the reception of the film in Austria might have been reserved (was it?) because of this character and Austria’s blemished reputation of being the first to accede to Nazis in the Anschluss in 1939. Have you seen The Sound of Music? Here the heroic Austrian van Trapp, played by Christopher Plummer, I believe, stands up to the Nazis and the family flees across the Alps, never to return. That was a legend of another kind, I suppose.

I can tell you that the Salzkammergut, the Salzburg mountains, are as beautiful as you see them in that old film, and it’s no legend that Austrian sportsmen run up the mountains while we (or I, at least), huff and puff at a walker’s pace. Gustav Mahler, by birth a Czech, used to compose in Austria, first along the shore of the Attersee, then in the Wörtersee, and finally in the dolomite mountains of the Tyrol.

Another very ‘linguistic’ scene in Basterds is that set in the basement bar, where Brad Pitt’s Nazi hunters, or two or three of them who can speak some German, are meeting with the double agent Diane Kruger. Here one of Brad’s men, who is fluent in German, gives away his British origins — not by an overtly bad accent, but, that same colleague tells me, by “misspeaking one or two words enough to give himself away as non-German.” The Germans pointedly ask him about this: “Where are you from? Why do you speak like that?” and Diane Kruger makes up some story to document his German heritage. In the end, the Brit gives himself away by ordering three Scotches as we might, with forefinger, middle finger, and ring finger held up to the waiter. The Germans will show thumb, forefinger, middle finger. He’s doomed. So the poor fellow, with a Walter pointed at his privates, makes a show of enjoying the thirty-year-old Scotch, saying, “well, if I am never to leave this place alive, I might as well try this.” Very sophisticated, noir touch. I would have done the same thing in his place. Why grovel? Live in the moment, as Joseph Campbell said.

Having seen the movie only once, I still maintain that Waltz is a non-speaker of Italian — just a hunch. If anyone in my classes can find out for me, I’d appreciate it.

In many European language communities the living presence of dialects is a badge of provenience, for good or for ill. You can tell a North Russian by his okanie, non-fricative g, and v, v’ devoicing to f; you can tell someone from the south by the fricative g. In Czech, Prague speech is unmistakable for its melody (especially in the speech of women), and Brno-Moravian speech by both phonetic features and Germanic slang. Some people claim they can peg an individual so precisely to his geographic origin that it seems just too unlikely. My colleague tells about the Austrian dialect specialist who could tell you what village you came from in Austria, and not only the village, but what part of the village: “up to the church, but not beyond; or, up to and behind the church.” He’s joking, of course. Thanks to Dietmar Felber.

gmc

The Greatcoat

Dear Students,

I complain about the too-conspicuous category of gender in Slavic. It's everywhere, and we have to force students to pay attention to it. Witness the little Czech boy who said "Ja to nechtela, ja to nechtela" 'I didn't want that!!' -- and his mother whopped him over the behind because he used the feminine agreement he heard so often from her. Take that and learn gender, blockhead! How cruel is Mother Language, mother tongue.

In German, students complain that there's no apparent ''rule" for finding the gender; to be sure, there are some easy clues to certain groups of words, like diminutives in -chen, which perversely are neuter from the suffix instead of masculine or feminine from the referent. French, too, offers challenges to the gender-challenged, including me. How many times did I look up the gender of terre, 'earth'! I had a block against remembering French gender.

Russian's rules are a lot simpler. Only in third declension nouns in soft sign does one have to hesitate between masculine and feminine -- and those ending in hushers are fem., as are all nouns that refer to women. Male hypocoristics in a/я are masculine, even though they are members of the feminine class. And then there are my favorite -- the epicene words, which take the gender of their real world referent. They are usually expressive, often pejorative: соня 'sleepyhead', пьяница 'drunkard', убийца 'murderer'. So: он горький пьяница, и она тоже горькая пьяница.

All of this is good enough. Students like to seek deeper meaning in nominal gender, deep symbolic meaning. 'Love' is fem. in Russian, Czech, and German; death is also feminine in Slavic but masculine in German. The figure of the grim reaper is feminine in Slavic, but not so in English. We have смертушка 'Godmother death' -- somehow a nightmarishly gruesome figure. Life is feminine in Russian and French, but neuter in German (via the -en of Leben). Earth is feminine in Russian and French. These things do not have symbolic meaning for Russian speakers -- or do they? There are two words for moon, one feminine, luna, and one, meaning 'month' is masculine. I can go on, but I can't make any conclusions.

Readers of Gogol have made much of the fact that the overcoat, or greatcoat, in his famous short story, is feminine. Even the garrulous narrator notes this and highlights it. When Akakij Akakievich (his name, by the way, is derived from the nursery term ka-ka, to go number two), has a new greatcoat made for him by the tailor Petrovich, going to ridiculous lengths to scrimp and save money to pay for it from his exiduous salary -- he steps very lightly on the floor so as not to wear out his shoes, and he refrains from taking documents home to copy, his favorite pastime, to save on candles -- it is a banner day in his life. It is "as though he had gotten married, as though a new life companion had joined him." This, to a miserable little man who had never experienced joys or sadnesses, is a new undreamt-of dimension of life, оpened up to him by the шинель, the new overcoat. He had never been so proud as he was the day Petrovich himself delivered the new overcoat, and Petrovich examined and adjusted it from the front, from the back, from the sides, -- and it was good, it was wonderful!

But no happiness lasts forever in Russian literature. No sooner blessed with love is A.A. than he loses it. A robber steals his overcoat, right on the square, in full view of a policeman who "thought [the robber and party] were his friends." A "significant personage" might be able to help Akakij, but he is a narcissistic bureaucrat who disdains to help and curses Akakij out for not following correct protocol in submitting his petition.

Akakij dies, but his ghost comes back to haunt Petersburg streets, and especially to frighten Petersburg bureaucrats, from whose backs the ghost tears away overcoats.. shaking a fist that was the size of a civil servant's head.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, another Petersburg poet rises from the mist, Андрей Белый, author of the symbolist prose manifesto, Петербург. So perhaps the gender mystics were right after all. There is something there.

gmc

Tarantino and Language

I’m not a great fan of Quentin Tarantino, nor am I a film critic. I was frightened by Inglourious Basterds but enjoyed the acting performances of the German actress Diane Kruger and the Austrian Christopher Waltz, among others, including also Brad Pitt, the American.
Both of these (first-named) accomplished performers are multilingual by their European heritage; Kruger, who has not too long ago entered upon her acting career, has developed almost faultless English (she needs it for her work) and also speaks excellent French and some Russian, which she apparently studied for a film. The diabolic Waltz, an Austrian, naturally speaks German, and has good French and excellent English. Austrian German is markedly different from Hochdeutsch or cultivated standard German, and there wasn’t a trace of it that I could hear from Waltz — this may have irritated the Austrian critics of the movie, which, I must say, makes otherwise an impression of remarkable linguistic verisimilitude. It begins with a scene in the French countryside, with Waltz speaking French, and then English, to a French farmer who is harboring some Jews under his floorboards. The shift from French to English, marking the shift from an initial exchange of pleasantries (and Waltz enjoying a glass of farm-fresh French milk) to the Nazi colonel’s pressuring the poor farmer to admit he is hiding people, dramatizes the role language plays in human interaction. Waltz, or his character, Col. Landa, is a master of multilingual power. It is spine-tingling, almost unbearable for my poor nerves to endure.

Tarantino goes over the top, as they say nowadays, when he presents a grotesque confrontation between Brad Pitt, leader of an American band of “Nazi-hunters” in France, and Col Landa. Landa knows that Pitt is an American posing as an Italian film-maker in a starched-shirt-front tuxedo, and he decides to make fun of him. When Diane Kruger (a double-agent) introduces Pitt to Landa as Italian, Waltz erupts into a torrent of fluent Italian, to Kruger’s frustration and embarrassment — “Germans aren’t very good at Italian,” she had assured Pitt, hence they picked Italian as their language front.

I suspect Waltz doesn’t really speak fluent Italian, but he memorized this speech beautifully. The hilarious attempts by Pitt and his group to “speak Italian” are Tarantino’s parody of the ignorant American in Europe, an old joke, an old jibe going back as far as Henry James, but one that still stands. Why aren’t we fluent, like the Germans, the Dutch, the French, the Swiss?
Well — you can speak some Russian. That’s one small step for America, I suppose. Keep it up!

Hamlet живет здесь

Hamlet: I think it be thine [thy grave] indeed, for thou liest in it.

Gravedigger: You lie out on't sir, and therefore 'tis not yours. For my part, I do not lie in  't, yet it is mine.

Hamlet: Thou dost lie in 't, to be in 't and say 'tis thine. 'Tis for the dead, not for the quick; therefore thou liest.

Gravedigger: 'Tis a quick lie, sir; 'twill away again from me to you.

Hamlet: What man dost thou dig it for?

Graved: For no man, sir.

Hamlet: For what woman, then?

Grave: For none, neither.

Hamlet: Who is to be buried in it?

Graved: One that was a woman, sir, but rest her soul, she's dead.

Hamlet: How absolute the knave is! We must speak by the card, or equivocation will undo us.

Latin vivus, Greek bios, English quick, Slavic zhiv-, русский жизнь, живёт. Cf. Doctor Zhivago, the doctor of the living.

Note the witty gravedigger and Hamlet cross linguistic swords with their puns on 'lie' and on 'quick'.

Russian Pig

The Russian Pig

Pig is an important word in Russian, with positive and negative vibes. The positives are fewer. In Czech they say, “She is as beautiful as a pig!” meaning very, very beautiful, as a pig is very, very much a pig. Who can mistake a pig? Czechs have a great ceremony for slaughtering and consuming the pig, zabíjačka. Russians especially like sausage from the pig.

The Russian for pig is свинья, with that strange combination of a soft consonant, jot, and a vowel. Ask a Russian to say it for you, slowly. You can hear the same combination in платье ‘dress’, статья ‘article’, семья ‘family’, and others. The old Slavic was something like svinъ, male or general, and feminine, or lady pig, свьнь, both from an older sus, cf. Latin sus, suis ‘sow’ or ‘pig’, like English swine. It doesn’t sound that pretty and, supposedly, comes from the onomatopoeic call of the pig su! su!

Now, in pre-Slavic svin-ьja ‘pig’ the complex suffix, originally a collective, like братья ‘brothers, brethren’, has the old reduced vowel ь, which was pronounced like a short i, then jot, which is like modern й , and then a. So in Old Church Slavonic and old East Slavic, it had three syllables: svi-ni-ja. When the reduced vowels, or ‘jers’, were lost or changed to e, o, the tense jer (ь before a jot) was lost in weak position, and then the word became: svin’-ja, as in modern Russian. The tense jer left its softness in the preceding -n-, but the jer itself disappeared. The cluster of soft n and jot is tricky for us to hear. Note that the soft sign, meaning soft consonant plus jot plus vowel, doesn’t go away in oblique cases: G свиньи D свинье A свинью I свиньёй P свинье; the G pl has a zero, and -e- is inserted between the soft consonant and the jot, spelled свиней.

Russians feel that there was an old ‘i’ in there long ago, because that’s the Slavonic form. So they can and do say свин’–и–я, Соф–и–я for Софья, cf. брат–и–я. So also the Slavonic or very formal ending in учение, воскресение, vs. Russian conversational or native ученье, воскресенье (in this word there is a difference in meaning: ‘resurrection’ and ‘Sunday’).

Back to the Pig. He is a dirty animal who eats у кормушки ‘at the trough’, as many rough and rude people sometimes do, and not only Russians. The great fabulist Krylov, the Russian la Fontaine, has a fable about a pig going to visit some friends. When he went home, says Krylov, “из гостей домой / пошла свинья свиньёй”, ‘the pig went home from visiting / the [same] pig’. Very damning.

In most of Slavic the ‘pig’ is messy, morally indiscreet, uncouth, fat, stupid, and so on. Czechs say ‘curse somebody to the pigs’, call someone a pig. But remember that beautiful women can be beautiful as pigs, and that’s a high compliment indeed. Read Bohuslav Hrabal’s Cutting it Short for a deeply moving portrait of the pig slaughter, with a beautiful woman the butcher’s priestess. A little pig is a beloved animal, like Piglet in Winnie the Pooh. In Russian, however, свиное рыло ‘pig snout’ is not a complement.

gmc

Slavic Heritage Students

Dear Students,

A heritage student is one who comes from a family where a language other than English (or Spanish) was spoken. They come from all sorts of linguistic backgrounds — some left Russia with their parents at the age of three or four and hence have only fleeting memories of mother Russia, others remained in Russia until the age of reason and full linguistic development. Still others had Russian grandparents and never attained even a child's speaking competence, but wish to fulfill бабушка's dream that little Ванечка might speak and write the language of Pushkin. In 203 we have Лёша, who reads, writes and speaks, but needs work on the literary language as on vocabulary development and syntax. He really is perfect for our class and should learn a great deal,  while, with his experience with the language, he will help our non-heritage students learn. This is the ideal for us.

Since the collapse of the CCCP Russians have been coming to our universities as graduate students and professors, mostly from mathematics and the sciences. Our adjunct professor Sasha Raskina is the spouse of a brilliant mathematician. She was educated in Moscow in post-Stalinist Soviet times and has a unique perspective of the past that our heritage students, unfortunately, lack. Another of our teachers, Lidia Zhigunova, comes to us from Нальчик in the Caucasus; her spouse is a brilliant physicist at Tulane. And there are many others. This means that the opportunity to learn and study Russian has widened enormously since 1991. One of our students, Berenice, has worked as a counselor in Perm' — по–русски Пермь, в Перми (a third-declension feminine with stress on the locative). She has had a summer experience which is routine in non-Slavic language groups, but until recent times has been unheard of in Russia. Kudos! 

For me as a Slavic linguist (dear Dean Haber: you can say: "So that's what he is!") the heritage student is a phenomenon of twelve different languages and their interweavings. The tissue of generational linguistic ties is a crazy quilt. I've had lots of students take Czech with me, for example, who had Slovak grandparents, or even parents; Slovak is a different language, but it is close enough to Czech that the old folks urge their grandchildren to study it. These are really minority languages, but all the rarer and more beautiful for their absence from American university curricula. I've had lots of students of Ukrainian background, including a superb French and Russian major who is now a graduate student of Ukrainian studies at Harvard. What a piece of good fortune for her, and for me to have had the privilege of teaching her. I love to read Belorusian, though I don't speak it, and to study its relationship with Russian; to Russians it may seem like a 'dialect', which is a prejudice of hegemony. Tulane German professor Brancaforte has a good friend who is from Belarus'; he has studied Russian because it is the scientific language of that country, even though Belarusian is spoken at his friend's home as well as Russian.

More perhaps on this topic later. Coming soon: Quentin Tarantino's new movie and Americans Abroad.

Who is Taking Russian 101?

Dear Students,

Most of the 25 or 26 students signed up for 101 are seeing and speaking Russian for the very first time (call them group 1); all of my students, indeed, want to learn Russian. Some have "had a smattering" of Russian in the past (group 2), recent or not so recent, and others have had a good year or two, and are not having a difficult time in this class so far (group 3). You are all welcome, unless, indeed, you are a covert member of (group 4), a near-native heritage speaker, who is feigning ignorance for the sake of an easy class. Group 4's are indeed insincere, and I will have to have a good talking with you, if you are here.  Group 2's and 3's will, in short order, find that you really do have to work to further your knowledge, and pretty soon you will not know so much more than do novices. You are of course welcome and I have no prejudice against you. But if you were born in Penza and left Russia for the first time six months ago at age 19, you are in the wrong class; see me.

It is group 1's that I have to care about early on. Some of you are working very hard — e.g. Женя, Лёва, Вера, Толя, Коля, Дима, Гога, and many others — and I beg you not to resent the group 2's or 3's. You will be graded on your merits, on your individual accomplishments. I plan the arc of my class to your intellects and your knowledge. 

[Note: Гога is the nickname of the protagonist in a late-Soviet tear-jerker movie, Москва слезам не верит, 'Moscow does not Believe Tears', (sic) or, as the Soviet themselves pithily translated it, bless them, 'Moscow Distrusts Tears'. ]

You could note how much Russian you've have previously, perhaps on a homework (not required). If you are a heritage speaker, I think I'd have recognized you by now.

Years ago, before the breakup of the CCCP, I had a student who feigned ignorance in 101 and had me completely in the dark; she imitated my speech, spoke slowly and accurately, and was perfect on all her quizzes. She was a premed, she said, determined to get into medical school. She missed the final examination in 101 by misreading the exam schedule, and came to my office in tears begging the chance to take it late; the truth spilled out of her then, as copious, as cold, as unsentimental and as fleeting as her tears — "I am fluent in Russian; I speak as well as you." I accepted her confession and warned her she had to have perfect quizzes and perfect attendance or she wouldn't get her A; she promised, and, as it happened, she marched through four years of a Russian major with perfect A's. Her fellow students early on knew what was up with her, but did not object. She got into medical school, and no longer had the slightest interest in Russian after Tulane.

One day her father arrived, a grim-faced, sour and silent Russian, with a rear-trunkload of a couple hundred Russian books for us, including some excellent gift editions of literature and a complete set of the rare 1950's edition of Dostoevsky. They belonged to his daughter, Newcomb College, 198-.  I have many in my library today.

Coming soon: "heritage students" in the new century.

gmc

The Importance of Written Assignments

Dear Students,

As we near the end of Week Two I want to conjure you to do more of the written assignments. Good attendance is the first necessary condition, but it is not sufficient -- the study must be as active as possible, active in the classroom and and active at home with pen and paper, or computer, Cyrillic font, and printer. 

Try to do as much as you can. If you do nothing, but attend faithfully every class, you will learn some Russian, but your grade won't be very good, most probably — there are exceptions. By doing homework I am seeing you study and think about the work four days a week. I recognize your mind, your hand, your sense of humor, your moods, in your work. It only takes a moment for me to 'correct' your exercises, a mere blink of time's eyelid, but a moment that tells, a moment wherein I read with total attention, as though in deep meditation, aided by an ipodded stream of music. This really lets me know what needs to be explained in class and who needs more help. 

A year ago there was a Polish student who never wrote anything. He was very good, tried to answer in class, asked good questions, wrote reasonable tests. I was impeccably polite to him; in turn, he was a touch remote, sarcastic, within himself. I did not pry. B. B-.  The students pleaded with him: Grzegorz, why don't you just do some assignments? He was a man of principle and listened to his inner voice. He did learn something. I just never knew what, exactly.

I have students who write reams of exercises and still don't get solid A's, but they are really learning something and I struggle along with them as I plow through their stuff. The toughest reading comes from the students who write in very faint pencil. I can hardly make out what they are saying. Some have execrable handwriting, but good thoughts. Still I like the rare calligraphic miracles, where all is so noble and perfect, and a coarse grammatical mistake stands out like a hideous deformity. I read without prejudice! Bring it on, I have several long Russian, Czech and German operas (Richard Strauss, not Wagner) to keep me on point. 

Пишите, пишите! Книги не читаются, их надо писать!

gmc

gmc

Milk and the Second Pleophony

Dear Students,

Milk is a sacred commodity to the Russians, ranking with bread and eggs. The Soviets used to boast that the price of milk reflected only the cost of production (no one believed them, but who knows). 

The Russian молоко, with its beautiful Rostovo-Suzdal'/Moscovite akanie, three vowels of different quality, one following the other, alternates with молочный 'dairy', where the stress is on the second syllable. This is so beautiful that a lady I knew from the area used to blush with pleasure when she discussed it with me.

The second pleophony is a late East Slavic liquid metathesis, later than c. 800 karl/korl > король, gard/gord > город. Here there is a svarabhakti vowel, an indistinct doubling of the first vowel, that develops in metathesis. So while Church Slavonic has крал, град, Russian has король, город. 

The second pleophony came somewhat later and involved the sequence CьлC, CьрС. Classic examples are молоня 'lightning', полон 'full', шелом 'helmet'. They were edged out of the literary language by молния, полн, шлем, largely with Slavonic influence. Notice they are groups of jer plus liquid (r or l) between consonants, specifically, two examples with labials m, p  before and n after, the other example, x before (> ш) and m after.

Vasmer posits melk- as the root for pre-Slavic 'milk', but I'd like to think it was a reduced vowel, mьlk-.  It sounded just like 'milk, Milch' in Old Slavic. In the Russian second pleophony, the -l- labiovelarized and the jer changed to a back jer, which became a full vowel as in волк 'wolf'. This word did not undergo second pleophony; it was originally vьлk- > volk.  This involved a labial v before an original front jer which labialized, and the change of a strong jer to a full vowel. But волк was not subject to pleophony. Mьlk-, instead of  becoming molk-, developed a svarabhakti vowel and we got молоко.  If second pleophony had not applied, we would have молко. Instead, we have the beautiful молоко.

Not everyone agrees with this etymology. If the pre-Slavic were мелк–, we have just have the usual labialization, e > o, and metathesis with svarabhakti vowel. But I prefer to think it was with молоня, полон, шлем. Молоко!  Молоко!