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
Saturday, November 28, 2009
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
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
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
Monday, November 23, 2009
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
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
Friday, November 20, 2009
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
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
Thursday, November 19, 2009
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
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
Sunday, November 15, 2009
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.
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.
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Our Father Who Art in Heaven
Our Father Which Art in Heaven
November 12, 2009
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
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
Monday, November 9, 2009
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,
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
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?
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
Thursday, November 5, 2009
Learning Languages at Their Feet, or Meeting my Expectations
November 5, 2009
Learning Languages at Their Feet, or Meeting My Expectations
gmc
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.
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.
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 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.
gmc
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Registration for Spring, 2010
November 4, 2009
Registration for Spring, 2010
Dear Students,
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.
In any case I look forward to this semester with you. Приятного, плодотворного чтения желаю!
gmc
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.
In any case I look forward to this semester with you. Приятного, плодотворного чтения желаю!
gmc
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