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