Russian Language Courses 09-10

Corruption

2011-06-09T09:34:00.000-07:00

June 8, 2011

Czechs love to complain, and this year the topic on everyone’s lips is corruption in the parliament. “They are robbing us of millions, hundreds of millions,” an abstract artist told me. “The political system has us voting for parties instead of individuals. The parties make coaltions that no one likes and that’s how they wield power in the government. The crooks are the sons and daughters of the old communisis, and they are just the same thieves as their parents, only worse. The communists had Moscow watching over them to make sure they ran the place the way they were supposed to. These thieves answer to no one.” There is a pervasive cynicism in the electorate and a pessimism about the direction of the country. A cab driver put it very colorfully, as the Czechs do: “There are too many roosters running the dump heap.”

Many of the younger generation have gone to the US to work and to gain English skills, and I found their willingness to converse with me — often interspersing phrases in English into their Czech — something new. A waiter at the Pod Slavínem restaurant, a Volkswagen supplier who sat next to me on the plane, the abstract painter who ran one of my Pensions with brilliance and enlightenment, the waiter at U Libušky in Brno, and his boss Michal, who had me driven gratis to the bus station (“because the taxidrivers are as crooked at the politicians”) — they were all more voluble, it seemed to me, than before.

The Volkwagen supplier told me a joke (fór in Czech, a narrative style borne under the last regime). What’s the difference between a retired middle-class American and a retired middle-class Czech? Answer: they both can afford a trip to Prague twice a year.

Here is my favorite church, the Diensenhofer late-Baroque St. Nicholas on the Old Town Square.
gmc

Mahler book blog

2011-04-09T07:19:00.000-07:00

April 9, 2010

Dear Readers,

learn more about Mahler Re-Composed at my blog mahler-recomposed.blogspot.com (sic). Sorry about the hyphen, in different places in the title and the blog. Just go for mahler-rec and you will find it. There will be some of my photographs from his places.

gmc

Mahler book

2011-04-03T14:16:00.000-07:00

April 3, 2011

Dear Readers,
Here’s a description of Mahler Re-Composed.

It is an interconnected series of six extended essays, a detailed introduction, and a conclusion, on the work and personality of the Bohemian-Austrian-Jewish composer Gustav Mahler. It is for the lay reader — the reader lying down, interested in enjoying something (s)he already knows a little about. Le lecteur accouchant, as Freud would say. 520 pp, with 13 illustrations.

Topics include: Mahler the Czech (35-p. introduction), Mahler sick and lovesick (Ch I, with Freud in a co-starring role), Tell Me the Story (early years II), Too Jewish (III), Strauss (IV), Tell Me the Story (late years, V), and Curriculum Vitae (VI).
In order of quality, I rank them: Introduction, Mahler Sick, Tell the Story (early), Tell the Story (late), Strauss, CV, Jewish. I think Too Jewish is too overrun with detail and tends to ramble. Strauss also rambles, but it is so unique and rings so true to my inner ear that I can’t be dissatisfied. In general I am pleased with the book, and I think most of it is good to very good. In any case, it tells the absolute and complicated truth, as I have discovered it. The introduction, CV, and Ch I turned out to be easier to read than the rest of it.

I do not sugarcoat Mahler. He must have been a difficult person, but with many redeeming qualities. He was like an extremely demanding professor with a soft heart who rewards you for tremendous effort even when you don’t do that well. He was a strong personality, but he had problems dealing with his friends and the people closest to him. Neurotic? No more than any hard-working genius. (To Freud, everyone in the world was neurotic except fresh corpses.)

2011 is the centennial of his death (May 18), as 2010 was the sesquicentennial (July 7), so you can see I had to hurry to get it done in the magic year.
I also had to hurry for another reason: my vision is deteriorating.

If you want an e-version, it is $9.99. If you want paper and print, I have ordered some copies for those who might be interested (IUniverse).

gmc

New Book on Mahler

2011-04-01T09:16:00.000-07:00

April 1, 2011

Dear Students and Colleagues,

It has been nearly a year since my retirement. I have sorely missed the classroom and my work with Slavic students. I hope to make a cameo appearance to lead my Slavic Contributions to Linguistics, Spring, 2012. Open to all linguistics students, the course is a theoretical study of Roman Jakobson and his followers' ideas on language and literature. You do not need Russian or Czech to sign up. Topics include the phenomenology of semiotics in natural language and the central place of function in language structure and change. Unfortunately most of my old students will have graduated or lost interest in this stuff by then — but if you Newcomb big sisters or Tulane big brothers (do they still have that?) would counsel your little siblings to consider this class — if, and only if (iff) they are fascinated by the beauty and the play of language — I will be pleased.Большое вам спасибо, moc a moc děkuju.

You may be interested in my new book, Mahler Re-Composed, IUniverse 2011,available in hard-, soft- and e-format. More on this later.
Regards,

gmc

New Orleans Drivers

2010-08-19T14:03:00.000-07:00

August 19, 2010

New Orleans Drivers

1. When New Orleanians drive — quite intentionally — the wrong way down a one-way street, they go as fast as they can to minimize the time they are committing a traffic violation, thereby quadrupling the danger for the unwary. In parking lot lanes they love to drive as fast as possible, as on a freeway. They like to pop out into a street and then look about to see if anyone is there. I remember once walking on State Street toward Magazine when a motorcyclist popped out of nowhere toward me, driving on the sidewalk. He smiled embarrassedly and went on his way.

2. If a New Orleanian lives in the middle of the block on a one-way street, he’ll drive the street as if it were two-way, going in and out the wrong direction to enter his driveway, always faster than would be safe (get there fast is the rule) so no one will notice.

3. A New Orleanian will never signal a left or right turn. Only outsiders signal. If a New Orleanian has her blinker on, it has no meaning. When making a left turn on a multi-lane road, the New Orleanian in the far left lane may choose to swoop across to the far right line, directly in the path of other drivers turning left. Watch it! When turning left into a side street from a single lane of traffic, the New Orleanian makes a wide sweep to the right and then turns left, believing that a straight-on angle is always the best approach, as though his sedan were an eighteen-wheeler. If you seeing him veering right, watch for the left turn.

4. New Orleanians never slow down on yellow, nor do they stop at a red light they themselves have witnessed turn red (unless, of course, someone is stopped in front of them; New Orleanians try to avoid collisions, if time permits them to think about it). Most New Orleanians actually speed up at a yellow light — move on fast, they reason, before the light decides to turn red.

5. Two-way streets in New Orleans are often narrow, and may be one block off a one-way street running parallel. When New Orleanians drive down a narrow two-way street,with no one coming from the other direction, they hog the road. If another driver advances, or tries to turn into the street, he is lost and forced off the road. The New Orleanian takes the whole road. After all, it’s narrow, and there wasn’t anyone there before, was there? (See 14 below.)

6. New Orleanians are curious by nature. They like to look into the interiors of cars they are following. They want to see up close exactly what you have in your car. They tailgate right behind you, even to the point of forcing you off the road, so they can see what’s in your car. Tailgating, on the other hand, may signal that the driver is impatient and he can’t pass you on the left or on the right, but watch him weave around behind you trying. The only way to get rid of him is to pull off the road— and that doesn’t always work, as he might pull off and try to engage you in conversation. (See 9 below.) Sometimes a curious tailgater will pull alongside you to stop you and talk, right in the street. If you anxiously watch a tailgater in your rear-view mirror you may stir the road rage impulse in him. Better turn off the road.

7. At an intersection when the light turns green, New Orleanians will boldly take a fast and sudden right turn at the expense of frightened pedestrians trying to cross the street at the marked crosswalk. There is no pedestrian walk light outside the CBD (vs. Seattle, Boston, New York, Washington, and cities throughout the world). Standard procedure in our town is to threaten pedestrians, who de facto do not have the right of way. At a stop sign, a New Orleanian will occasionally, in a fit of guilt, stop to permit a pedestrian to cross. Most ot the time the walker has to wait for a long line of cars to pass, all following the leader past the stop sign. As a pedestrian you are expected to wave and bow in gratitude.

8. There’s one case where the driver becomes the offending pedestrian. The New Orleanian driver, when not in his car but walking with a group of four, five or more people, forms a phalanx and marches down the middle of the street as in a parade. All traffic stops. All cars wait patiently. This is New Orleans. New Orleanians don’t walk on the sidewalk, they walk on the street.

9. New Orleanians like to drive as fast as conditions permit — not as they warrant, I say, but as they permit. In quiet residential neighborhoods New Orleanians will speed; it is fun, they believe, to drive fast. If a local road goes on a while without an intersection, beware! The New Orleanian will accelerate up to fifty, sixty, sixty-five. Leake Ave/River Road early in the morning looks like I-10. Try crossing Magazine Street at Audubon Park on foot when the traffic is light. When traffic is heavy, there’s no problem. Try it when a single New Orleanian is barreling down the street. If you are doing twenty-five on Magazine street with no traffic in front of you, a New Orleanian will hug your tail in irritation, just as she does when standing in line at Rite Aid. There’s nobody there — let’s do fifty.

10. New Orleanians, who in the good old days used to drive without insurance or up-to-date vehicle registration, have learned from bitter experience that speeding can’t be proven without witnesses, while failure to yield can be demonstrated. They themselves blithely fail to yield, but are quick to honk at any other offenders — even if it’s someone turning left at a remote stop sign a hundred meters ahead with no other traffic in sight. Honk! Honk! (What? Where?)

11. In major cities of the world, the horn is a signal: Alert! In the old communist states honking your horn was a serious traffic violation; it was forbidden. New Orleanians honk when waiting in lines of cars at a standstill, for whatever cause that is blocked from view. The honk means: I’m irritable, I want to go home. Long honk (lean on the horn): I’m really fed up, y’all. And no one can do anything about it.

12. Parking lots are dangerous, and New Orleanians love to speed in parking lots. Give them an open lane and they will go just as fast as they can accelerate. Never mind who might emerge from behind a car, or what driver or pedestrian or child might fail to see their careening vehicle.

13. When it rains, New Orleanians love to splash down the street in their cars, like little children at play. Pedestrians beware: New Orleanians don’t care if you are splashed along with the car. The harder it rains, the faster they drive. One has to press against the sides of houses to escape the waves they make.

14. Driving in any city is perilous, and New Orleans is no exception. One has to be from here to know where the dangerous intersections lie. New Orleanians like to get as quickly as possible from Broadway to Carrollton, and several cross streets are conveniently without stop signs the whole nine blocks — Oak, for example, is one-way from Broadway to Carrollton without a stop sign. But not so Hampson; there are stop signs at Hampson and Short, one block from Carrollton, but New Orleanians disregard those stop signs and charge right ahead. Drivers on Short Street (a two-way through street paralleling Carrollton) are expected to stop for the Hampson drivers who routinely run the stop sign. After all, it’s only one block from busy Carrollton Avenue — why should we have to stop again one block away? Go for the fender bender instead.

15. Other cities and other countries may have it worse. In Boston or Prague, one has to be from there to have any hope of survival behind the wheel. Nothing in New Orleans compares to the agony of Central European autobahns, where innocents die every day, slaughtered by impatient men and women in fast cars. The point in the Czech Republic, for example, is not to get from point A to point B. Rather, it is to punish the drivers of trucks and other fast cars simply because they exist. We are not like that in New Orleans.

16. However, do not let a New Orleanian loose on a European highway. Women, children, and old men ride bicycles on twisting lanes in the Dolomite mountains of Salzkammergut, and they survive to tell of it. (See 7 above.) Drivers are alert and courteous, above all better trained and, so it seems, somehow more intelligent. Can this be so? Teenagers have to take a difficult course in driving with a large compulsory fee before they get their licenses. Such places do not know our New Orleanian humanity and flexibility. I taught my son how to drive in a remote parking lot in a tiny town in Bohemia, and the locals warned me: this is illegal. Like me, New Orleanians teach their children to drive, God help them.

17. Years ago one would see slow-moving station wagons filled with nuns, driven by a mother superior venturing into the world with an air of unworldly uncertainty. You’d have to watch for these station wagons, say your prayers, count your mardi gras beads. I don’t see them much these days. (By S.Wilson)

18. There are a lot of old cars in New Orleans — my 1979 Toyota hatchback was for a time among their number — which seem patched together with glue and old engine oil. What keeps them going? (By S. Wilson)

19. All in all, for all their faults, New Orleanians are creative drivers. Any road, if wide enough, can become a two-lane road for a New Orleanian (cf. however 5 above). Suddenly one will see a car cruising immediately to one’s right in the parking lane on St. Charles, skimming past parked cars; in a moment, of course, she’s passing you, like people in line at Rite Aid. When New Orleanians want to turn right, they don’t wait in a long single lane of cars at a stoplight. If the opportunity presents itself, the New Orleanian will make a special right-turn lane with himself at the head. These lanes form spontaneously, so watch it when waiting at a light to turn right — someone is already turning in front of you.

20. New Orleans is bad, but it is quaint and old. I am a New Orleanian, quaint and old myself, and I am a New Orleanian driver to the core. Go for it! Geaux for it, as we cheerfully spell it. Never apologize.

gmc

Professor Retires (3)

2010-07-20T12:30:00.000-07:00

Professor Retires (3)

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Still without coverage, I go to my bank to open an investigation of the lost first check. One of the associates at my branch of Capital One ventures that the check has been posted to “Unpostable,” a catchall posting for something that doesn’t fit anywhere else. They are going to “research” this for me and try to find my money. Felicia at Crosby has told me that the outcome of their research is that they never saw nor touched this check, as is evident by its opaque destination at an unknown or unrecognizable account, and, to boot, they do not use Bank of America. So they are clean. Do you follow this reasoning? I send a check to Tulane University, c/o Crosby Benefit Systems, addressed to Crosby’s premium-receiving P.O.Box, and the check goes into a black hole. They are clean? Not in my world, buster.

Donna is now helping me at Crosby. Like Jocelyn, she is very sympathetic and helpful. I tell Donna on 0712 of my next-day express mailing of a second check to Crosby at the premium address, marked ATTN JOCELYN BRADY. Donna promises to set up my coverage as soon as the check arrives and is processed. (Ha, ha.)

Wednesday, 14 July. The check has been on July 13 cashed, apparently by Crosby, or so I believe by scrutinizing the reverse of the check, a week after receipt by next-day express mail. The coverage has not yet been initiated; I buy a prescription (usually costing $30 with insurance) for $217.00, but United Health will perhaps reimburse me. Mrs. Hawkins at Rite-Aid tells me that if my coverage is initiated within two weeks of the purchase of this medicine, Rite-Aid can void the extra charge. I am counting the days.

Thursday, 15 July. Donna calls me from Crosby to say that she has good news. She has initiated coverage, notification of which will be sent to United Health on Friday by Crosby with their regular Friday insurance updates. I may expect it up and running Monday or Wednesday. That would mean reimbursement from Rite-Aid for the prescription. I can do the MOHS surgery on the 28th as scheduled! Good news. Good news, that is, if it all works out.

Monday, July 18. I call United Health Cobra to see what has happened. The call is discouraging. United Health has no record of my Cobra coverage; what’s more, they don’t have a Cobra account with Tulane. I am told to call my HR representative and ask her who has the Federal United Health care Cobra coverage.

I wonder: my son was on UH care Cobra. What does this mean?

Geraline Wesley at Tulane tells me the person in UH Cobra was confused. She will call and tell them to start my coverage.

Superstitiously, I promise not to call back. Maybe something good will happen.
Look back at the review by Simon JF. It’s going to take weeks longer, if that.

I’m trying not to think about it,

gmc

Professor Retires (2)

2010-07-19T11:43:00.000-07:00

July 19, 2010

Professor Retires (2)

Dear Students,

I find myself without insurance, although I sent the outscourcer a check well in advance. I cannot have my cancer surgery without paying $3000, or least a big fat advance. What am I to do?
Joselyn Brady at Crosby was very comforting. I spoke with her several times on July 6, the day I missed my procedure. She was understanding and helpful. My check, cashed on June 8, would be immediately researched and credited. My coverage should be reinstated very soon. She sounded like a freshman at Tulane, a Newcomb freshman, as we used to say. Her compassion and thoughtfulness made me feel a lot better. When I ran on Wednesday, I took my cell phone — a clumsy complication for a runner with a water bottle and an umbrella. (I run/walk a long track, from Cooter Brown’s to the Huey P. Long Bridge and back.) She called me and reassured me.

I think I must have sounded panicked.

I knew there was something wrong with my first payment. After a sleepless night, I got up and drove to the Carrollton Avenue 70118 post office, a difficult destination for the massive construction centering on Carrollton and Earhart, where the very heart of the earth is being exhumed, or so it seems, with traffic jams a mile long every day, from morning to night since February, 2010.

I mailed a next-day delivery Express Mail to Jocelyn at Tulane University, c/o Crosby Benefit Systems, etc., with a second check to initiate coverage. Jocelyn had told me to go to my bank and get copies of the front and reverse of my first check and fax them to her at Crosby. This I did at once. I was certain the mistake could soon be corrected.
Here is what I read on the reverse of the check:

E - 4516 36
4426241863
101 BOS-003020
Then there is a solid line, followed by:
>011000138<
CR PAYEE ACCT
LACK END GTD
BANK OF AMERICA

As a learned reader of literature and linguistics and a very naive reader of the reverse of bank checks, I saw CRosby in CR (probably means CREDIT). I saw BOSton in BOS. (Not sure yet what that meant.) What is Lack End GTD? Sounds like something from a movie.
Still, I felt better. I was sure everything would be fixed up soon. I rescheduled my MOHS basal cell cancer surgery at the Tulane Cancer Center for July 28. Surely, by that date I’ll be in coverage. I have now mailed about $750 in payments.
I talked to Felicia on 0708, as Jocelyn doesn’t work on Thursday. She told me they are “researching” my check. It will take “several days” for this research to find a conclusion. They will then notify Jocelyn the result and she will call me.

It was then that I looked for reviews of Crosby Benefit Systems online.

Here’s what I found.

Crosby Benefits Kafkaesque nightmare

simonjf's Full Review: Crosby Benefits Systems COBRA Administration July 13, 2009
“So, you want to continue your benefits after leaving your employer and you have to do it through Crosby? Well I pity you. Crosby clearly runs their organization for the benefit of the their clients: your former employer, not for the benefit of you.
Crosby's website pretty much spells this out:

‘How long will it take for my health insurance coverage to be reinstated with the insurance carrier(s) once I have mailed in my initial COBRA payment?
‘Generally speaking, the wait time is 2 to 3 weeks. We understand this may seem like a long time to wait, particularly if you have doctor's appointments or prescriptions to fill. We aim to make this process as smooth and fast as possible considering the logistics involved.’

The process is as follows: COBRA payments are mailed to a bank lockbox. [the reviewer continues] The bank deposits all checks and sends enrollment and payment information daily to Crosby. Once received, enrollment and payment information is loaded/entered into Crosby's system.

Based upon Crosby's system, health insurance enrollment information is generated and sent to the appropriate insurance carrier(s). This process is performed weekly. Once the carrier receives the health insurance enrollment information, our experience is that carriers update their systems anywhere from within 1 to 10 business days. [Note from gmc: This did not happen with my check. It was apparently not entered into Crosby’s system. It must have been lost.]

Therefore, it is best to expect that your coverage will be reinstated approximately 2 to 3 weeks from the date you mail in your payment.

For those clients for whom Crosby does not notify the insurance carrier(s) directly, the process is similar. However, rather than sending information to the insurance carrier(s), the information is sent to the client. The client then forwards the information as appropriate.

Only, this in my experience was wildly optimistic. Yes, it takes over a month for them to reinstate coverage. The 'retroactive' nature of the coverage when implemented may mean that this is less of a problem. UNLESS your providers treat retroactive coverage in the same way they treat out-of plan coverage: covering a percentage of the cost with an initial deductible.

Recommended:
No”

Reading this, I felt a strange relief. I thought: I am not at fault, I am not derelict, they are.” Of course this is so. I needed someone to tell me so. I felt better. Sit down and wait, I said.
Ah yes. I am not the only one.

More horrible complications follow.
gmc

Professor Retires

2010-07-18T09:29:00.000-07:00

July 18, 2010

Dear Students,

Well, being now retired I have no students to address, and no practical advice to transmit. So why am I still writing this Russian course blog and what and I writing about? I will have to figure that out, feeling my way. Can’t seem to stop.

What happens to a Tulane professor when he retires? He has to get medical insurance, that’s what happens. All those years being covered by Tulane’s group plan in United Health Care Plan B, my plan of choice, and all those years before United Health Care, all that is over now.

Tulane offers a soft landing parachute with 18 months of extended coverage called Cobra. Fees are high because the insured are coming off of other programs or haven’t found coverage elsewhere. Still, I thought 18 months of the same plan would be a good idea, even at $375 per month.

This sounds pretty boring so far, but wait. We will enter a Kafkaesque nightmare.

I was familiar with Cobra because my son was in that category when he was no longer eligible for my Tulane plan. We made payments to something called ADP Benefit Services in Philadelphia. At first we made online payments, until an announcement came warning that online payments would be subject to a $10 fee. We hastily resumed monthly checks.

For a long time, for months and months, it did not dawn on me what ADP Benefit Services was. With the naivete of an unretired person, I assumed ADP was an insurance company that offered Cobra. I did not even stop to ponder the cognitive associations of Cobra. “A highly venomous snake native to Africa that spreads the skin of its neck into a hood when disturbed.” Am I in good hands with Cobra? Cobras don’t have hands. On the other hand, Jung teaches that the uroboros, or snake swallowing its tail, is a symbol of wholeness.

I learned from Geraline Wesley in Human Resources at Tulane (Personnel to older retired professors than I am) that Tulane was now using Crosby Benefit Systems for Cobra. She didn’t say precisely that Crosby was the outsourcing company for Tulane. If she had, I would have thought of the outsourcer for the Tulane Help Desk, a company based in India, I believe. You could call the Tulane Help Desk and get a lady in Calcutta. You would have to answer a long questionnaire so that the outsourcer could document your call. Then, of course, you wouldn’t get any help. You would be referred to someone else. But I didn’t know about Crosby yet, so it did not occur to me to think of the Tulane Help Desk.
Crosby has nice stationery with lettering light baby blue: CROSBY. In typographer’s cursive: Benefits People. Again in baby blue: Crosby Benefit Systems [sic], Inc. In black non-serif: P.O. Box 929125 Needham, MA 02492-9125.

I got announcements with other addresses in and around Boston: CROSBY, Benefits People, Crosby Benefit Systems, Inc. 27 Christina Street Newton, MA 02461-1953.

Newton had a nice resonance; this is one of the exclusive suburbs of Boston, one with an outstanding public school system, no crime, and mansions everywhere, like Winnetka, Illinois, where I grew up. Newton must be a good place. I was unconsciously building a positive image in my brain for Cobra (Jung’s influence, no doubt).

In late May, I sent Crosby my enrollment form for Cobra. I didn’t send my first check; it wasn’t due until much later, for some reason. My United Health coverage, Geraline cautioned, would run out on June 30, my official retirement, or separation, date. So I sent my check to Crosby on June 2, well in advance.

For premiums, Crosby has yet another address, P.O Box 84320, Boston MA 0284-3020 PLEASE DO NOT SEND CASH. My checks were to be made out to Tulane University, c/o Crosby Benefit Systems. I actually addressed my envelope to “Tulane University, c/o Crosby Benefit Systems.” When I mailed it I had an uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach. There is no Tulane in Boston. Not at least since hundreds of our freshmen where at B.U. in the fall of 2005. Why hadn’t I written simply Crosby Benefit Systems? I had another funny feeling, that I had written “Crosby Benefits Systems.” But surely the check would arrive at its intended destination. The zip even had nine digits.

The check was received and cashed very quickly, 6-8-2010. It showed up in my online Capital One banking immediately. Excellent, I thought.

I never gave Crosby another thought until July 6, six days into my coverage, when I was checking in for an outpatient procedure at the Tulane Cancer Center. I was told that I had no coverage. My United Health had expired. I explained what I knew about Cobra. The secretary knew a lot more than I did. “Your United Health number will still apply with Cobra, but it’s not showing up. You don’t have Cobra.” I suggested that my Medicare Plan B, which pays outpatient precedures, might be applicable, but my Medicare B is only to supplement basic Major Medical. The secretary looked this up and informed form me of this. I didn’t even know that my Medicare number is my SS plus A. I was getting a fast retirement tutorial from the Tulane Cancer Center secretary. I called Crosby right from the clinic and was told that no check was received and no check was cashed. The secretary at the cancer clinic told me the procedure costs three thousand dollars and that they couldn’t do it without a big down payment.

So I had to go home without insurance.

More later, it gets better

gmc

Help for Final Exams

2010-04-28T10:26:00.000-07:00

Dear Students,

I'll be in my office today, April 28, Weds, from 1-3. If you're taking the 102 final tomorrow, come see me.
For Sunday's test I will be in around noon, so you can see me then. But take the test tomorrow and you can go to Jazz fest on the last day — it's well worth it.

204 students may telephone me in the office at 862-3094, or at home at 862-4918. (Reads like I live at the office. No way, it's just a fluke.)

I've enjoyed my blog. About 73,000 words, a small book. Does anyone know how to extract the text from a Google blog? I suppose I can select the text of each post and copy it to a file. Right?

Счастливого пути! Счастливо!

"Продленный призрак бытия / синеет за чертой страницы, / как завтрашние облака. / и не кончается строка."

Счастливо!

Crime and Punishment

2010-04-27T09:29:00.000-07:00

Crime and Punishment

Dear Students,

I am being urged to submit my Преступление и наказание textbook, which some of you have learned to love and to hate — odi et amo, said Horace — to Slavica. I think that it is a unique vehicle for learning. (Unique indeed, you may say, sarcastically.)

Well, should I undertake this enterprise I would need to have the text treated with minute corrigenda et addenda, and to have the whole thing typed into Word in exactly the same format I have it now, in a rather small font, pages of somewhat varying length, and glosses on the page in double columns, with brief grammatical notes at the very bottom across the page. Also appendices and general vocabulary.

I’d have to have a Russian-reading typist with sensitivity and intelligence, and pay accordingly. What better wellspring than 204? What would be a fair pay per page? Five dollars a page and mininum $1000 for the whole job? Or double that, or something in between? Is this realistic?

If someone in the class wants to do it, I’d have the advantage in my typist of real familiarity with the work. It would really save my proofreading.

I don’t have any deadline in mind. I think the work should be spaced out over several months, so that the typist’s brain doesn’t become dulled by too much at once. You could start very soon, leave the city for the summer, and finish later (how later? your academic work might distract you from the job).

Do y’all have any thoughts about this?

Thanks,
gmc

Pushkin's за

2010-04-25T14:51:00.000-07:00

Аpril 25, 2010

Он за тобой

Pushkin, like all classical poets, was best at expressing deep emotion with grace and restraint, or with irony, with an epigram; with fewer words rather than more. He often took recourse to grammar to do this. In one famous lyric, addressed to a former girl friend whom he loved and lost, his vocabulary, at the beginning very stylized, veils the strength of his feelings.

Для берегов отчизны дальной
Ты покидала край чужой;
В час незабвенный, в час печальный
Я долго плакал пред тобой.

For the shores of a remote fatherland / You were leaving an alien place;
In an unforgettable hour, in that sad hour / I wept long before you.

Sounds silly in English. Note the sudden extrametric stress on час in the third line, first syllable. This prolongs the third line and makes it depart from the regular three-ict stresses of the iambic tetrameter in lines 1 and 2: для берегов отчизны дальной is - - / - ´/ - ´/ - ´/ - but the third line is ´- / - ´/ - [] ´/ - ´/ - .

The speaker tries to hold on to her and not let her go, to prolong their farewell kiss. O moment, stay!

Но ты от горького лобзанья
Свои уста оторвала;
Из края мрачного изгнанья
Ты в край иной меня звала.

But you pulled away your lips / from this bitter kiss;
From the gloomy land of exile / you called me to another land.

She is calling him to visit her in her own land, leaving the exile where he, Pushkin, finds himself, exiled from Petersburg and now also from her love.

Ты говорила: "В день свиданья
Под небом вечно голубым,
В тени олив, любви лобзанья
Мы вновь, мой друг, соединим

You said: “When we meet again / Under a sky eternally blue
In the shade of olive trees, we will again, my friend, unite our kisses of love.”

Но там, увы, где неба своды
Сияют в блеске голубом,
Где тень олив легла на воды,
Заснула ты последним сном.

But there, alas, where the arches of heaven / shine in a light-blue glimmer,
Where the shade of the olives lay upon the waters, / You slept your final sleep.

So she has died. An old story, told over again and again in the annals of love. But here comes the burst of feeling which makes this story unique and personal, with the stamp of Pushkin alone.

Твоя краса, твои страданья
Исчезли в урне гробовой -
А с ними поцелуй свиданья...
Но жду его; он за тобой...

Your beauty, your sufferings / Vanished in the sepulchral urn,
And with them, the kiss of greeting;
But I wait for it; you owe it me.

First note that the Slavonic лобзание ‘kiss’, has been replaced by an ordinary everyday Russian поцелуй, which is of course the normal word today. “I am waiting for it (поцелуй);” it is on your account, you promised it to me and you must give it.

The last line, where all the feeling rushes to the surface, is the most ordinary in its vocabulary. Note за with the instrumental here (see previous blog); it stands behind you, you are responsible for it, you answer for it, you ‘have’ it in your control.

gmc

Pasteurization

2010-04-23T07:44:00.000-07:00

April 23, 2010

Homogenizing and Pasteurizing of Good Things

Dear Students

...ruins them. MLB (“Major League Baseball, the corporation) has taken over the websites of all the minor league teams, not to speak of the majors. They are all the same, with corporation-appointed scribes and a corporation-appointed ticket vendor, the infamous Ticket Masters.

I may no longer telepone the Zephyrs box office. The number has been suppressed. There is a rambling and remonstrative description of the office hours, rules and regulations, but no number. If you called the Zephyrs they might actually know you. That’s prohibited.

I used to telephone and order my seat on the phone. I could pick the precise location, within limits of availability. I knew the section, the row, the seat I wanted. I knew the ladies who work there, by name, and they me.

No more. Ticket Master won’t let you choose the section number; they do that. You get to vaguely choose “left field,” “third base”. Ordering through Ticket Master is like ordering anything through a big corporation online. Only worse.

It is predictable. The bigger the corporation, the worse the site. Did you ever try ATT? Try clicking the button “Automatic monthly bill payment”. You know what it will do? Destroy your ability to ever pay your bill except by snail mail. Sites of swank elite products are just as bad, only worse. They are so insensitively and 'elegantly' designed that old eyes like mine cannot read their mauve and washed font colors. Try Montblanc. You’ll see.

With Ticket Master you have to create a special “Secure code”, not to confuse with “security code,” the infamous three-digit number on the back of your credit card. The notion of the secure code is a good one; it protects the consumer, or at least provides another putative, thin layer of protection. The problem is it is stupidly named and stupidly designed. Stupid and stupefying.

And another thing: it asks your for your card’s PIN, (or rather, in crass ignorance, ‘PIN number’).

Is this impudent gall or stupidity, or both?

I lucked out this time. The woman who processed my order, a real woman with blood in her veins and a brain in her head, recognized me by my pasteurized order, somehow, and gave me what she knew I would like. She also handed me my ticket at Will Call. “Here you are, Mr. George.”

This doesn’t happen in MLB.
gmc

What Is a University?

2010-04-21T08:24:00.000-07:00

What is a university?

A university is a free association of scholars. Freedom is their attribute, freedom to choose their objects of scrutiny, freedom to imagine, freedom to write, freedom to teach, to travel, to think, to speak and to be silent.

Nowadays a university needs a manager, a development office, and a press. It needs a corporation in all the good and evil ways. So Tulane has Scott Cowen, who, judging by his Friday talks, loves Tulane with all his heart and with all his soul and with all his mind. And there is nothing bad in Tulane. Scott is the bearer of the gospel, the good news, good news only.

This is the prototype of university presidents today. It wasn’t that way in the recent past. University presidents were members of the association of scholars, like President Eliot of Harvard (way back), or President Pusey. When the students mutinied and staged sit-ins in the sixties, president Pusey asked himself, what would Thucydides do? When Senator Joseph McCarthy threatened civil liberties in the fifties, President Pusey knew what to do; he condemned him.

Those were the days of heroes in academia. Today, the scholars are trapped in the tight nets of institutional and bureaucratic controls. It is the parents and the students whose suasion counts for most these days, and so we have degrees in hotel and casino management in the School of Continuing Studies. Scholars rue the loss of the disciplines of logic, geometry, rhetoric, language, history. We have to put up with all this to get anything at all worth while done.

Now it’s the case that the bureaucracy can force nothing on the university that the faculty does not want to shape, control and govern, the faculty itself. If the bureaucracy gets too intolerable, the faculty will leave. If the bureaucracy tries to run something itself, the university suffers.

A small case in point which I will not discuss at great length is SACS, the association of Southern schools and colleges which accredits our university. To achieve and maintain accreditation we have to assess our programs and our faculties, and we must do it ourselves. All well and good. Is there anything wrong in this? Not at all.

But the mechanisms of assessment are given from above, or from without, far without, to the faculty, effectively vitiating their creative will to do this assessment. As a result SACS has a terrible reputation and the work of self-assessment is regarded, far and wide, with ridicule and repugnance. Naturally no scholar wants to ‘do’ this, or ‘be responsible for’ the work in her program or department. So the work goes to new contingent, non-research faculty, such as professors of the practice, or others who agree to ‘do’ it in return release from other duties. I was given the job for German and Russian, as I am retiring this year. All scholars want to focus on their research, and I’ll have plenty of time for that in short order. Do you think this bodes well for SACS?

Well, I do this of my own free will. I enjoy writing, and this is a remarkable challenge. My ‘boss’ is an intelligent person with a very sharp eye and nose. It’s not too bad; I’ve done worse. I won’t describe all this to you except to say it could be worse. My boss could be a fool. Or worse. It could be, well, a contemporary university president.

There aren’t any Puseys left, or many of them. (Actually I like the present prexy, Drew Faust.)

Now, a certain big bureaucrat at Tulane has been criticizing departments for “cobbling together” data instead of really and truly assessing and really and truly planning necessary changes in curriculum. Doesn’t this sound like corporation-speak? That’s what you get when faculty don’t want to do something and are told how to do it. Well, we are going to have to put up with a lot of things to have the privilege of a great, or at least a good, university.

Dear students, don’t let anyone know about this blog. Especially not your parents. Я имею право иметь свои секреты.
gmc

По

2010-04-18T08:12:00.000-07:00

April 18, 2010

По

Тhis preposition/prefix shows a very wide and diffuse range of meanings, so much so that it’s difficult to generalize. This sort of phenomenon is common in prepositions, classifiers, case markers, and the like in all natural languages. English for causes all sorts of problems for L2 learners, and for us when we try to ‘translate’ it into Russian. ‘For you’ can be для вас or вам. Деньги на поезду is ‘money for the trip’; elsewhere ‘for’ may be за.

По with the dative seems to mean ‘about the surface of a plane, covering a set of points on a plane’. E.g. ходить по магазинам ‘to go around to stores (one after another)’, муха xoдит по стакану ‘the fly is walking along the glass’ (Nabokov says: мухи не ползают, они ходят и потирают ручки ‘flies don’t crawl, they walk and rub their little hands’ , я ездил по всей России ‘I travelled all over Russia’.

Extended, non-spatial meanings are very interesting. Some point to cause or motive: я женился по любви ‘I married for love’, я это сказал по ошибке ‘I said that by mistake’, по этой причине ‘for this reason’, поэтому ‘therefore’. Others point to a connection between entities: брат по матери ‘half–brother (with the same mother)’, я чистый американец по происхождению, а чех по характеру ‘I am a pure-blooded American by provenance and a Czech by character’. старик по имени Джонс ‘аn old man named Jones’, что вы скажете по этому вопросу? ‘what can you say on this matter?’ See Townsend, Continuing, Lesson V.

По with accusative has the meaning ‘up to (in a series) and including’, e.g. задания с 12–ого апреля по 20–ое апреля ‘assignments from the 12th to the 20th of April’.

The preposition can also be used distributively, meaning that each member of a class of entities is treated in a certain way: дети получают по книге ‘the children receive a book each’. With numerals the accusative may appear: рабочим заплатили по тысячу долларов ‘they paid the workers 1 000 dollars each’.

As a prefix with determinate motion verbs (идти, ехать) по denotes the beginning of a trip or, by extension, the completed trip itself (perfective): он пошел домой ‘he set off for home’ or ‘he went home’, куда вы поедете ‘where will you go? With non-determinate verbs (ходить, ездить), and with a range of imperfectives signifying a non-telic activity, however, the prefix denotes an activity that is extended in time, usually for a short period, but possibly for an immeasurably long period. The greatest literary example is Anna’s exclamation in “The Lady with the Little Dog,” when she confesses to Gurov: “пожить хочу, пожить!” ‘I want to live (for a while), I want to live!’ Mundane examples: давайте почитаем ‘let’s read for a while’, я хочу поспать поcле обеда ‘I want to nap a bit after dinner’, папа походил взад и вперед по комнате ‘father walked up and down the room for a while’, давайте поговорим ‘let’s have a chat’.

This prefix also perfectivizes a number of verbs without adding any extra semantic information: познакомиться ‘get acquainted’, and many others.

For this reason a student of mine who knew Russian, when learning the Czech verb dělat ‘to make, do’, guessed that the perfective (in Russian, сделать), might be with po-. After all, in Russian one may say ничего не поделаешь ‘there is nothing to be done about it’. So my student began conjugating, in Czech class: “podělám, poděláš, podělá...” No, no, no, no, said the teacher. This means, believe it or not ‘I will foul my pants by releasing my bowels’. I swear to you this is the truth. An ironic rejoinder in Czech is the sarcastic “mám se podělat?” , ‘well, do I have to shit in my pants?’

Just goes to show you how you can never predict what a prefixation will mean. You can never ‘make up’ a new verb until you’ve actually heard it.

Only in Slavic. Only at Tulane.

gmc

За

2010-04-14T08:08:00.000-07:00

April 14, 2010

За

Оne of my favorite prepositions and verbal prefixes is за. The following remarks owe much to Laura Janda’s book on the subject.

Janda talks of landmarks and groundings with this complex preposition. If you say ‘the park is behind the bank’, парк за банком, you mean that either from your viewing perspective or, perhaps from the anatomical structure of the street, the bank stands in the foreground and the park, possibly not visible, is in the background, more or less in the line of sight of the viewer.

Like под ‘under’, над ‘above’, перед ‘in front of’, за shares these complex points-of-view and multiple landmarks. It is not without reason that they all are grouped with the instrumental when location is meant. To varying degrees all of these can also occur with the accusative if motion is denoted: ‘I am walking behind the bank’, иду за банк.

The derived or figurative notions of these prepositions project their spatial bases into the dimensions of time, purpose, strategy, willed action, and so on.

One of my favorite words is the adverb зачем, ‘for what purpose, with what goal in mind?’ ~ почему ‘for what reason, by what cause?’ The latter is commoner, but the former is very cool. Зачем ты пришел сюда? For what purpose have you come here?

За takes the instrumental when the notion of ‘fetching, going to get’ is meant. Идите за хлебом, за водкой. Молодой студент пошел за дворником ‘Go for bread, for vodka. The young student went for the porter’. The word may mean ‘is on the account of, is the obligation or responsibility of’. Слово за вами ‘you have the floor (may speak)’. За Достоевским было записано творческое банкротство ‘Dostoevsky was said to have reached creative bankrupcy’. (!)

Remember the great line in Pushkin to his dead mistress who had promised him a last kiss: “Жду его, он за тобой,” ‘I am waiting for it; you owe it to me (it’s still on your account)’. This moves me to tears. It is gloriously beautiful grammar.

За takes the accusative in the sense ‘for’, as in спасибо за деньги ‘thanks for the money’, спасибо за ничего ‘thanks for nothing’, сколько вы хотите за этот стол ‘how much do you want for this desk’, за это расстреливают ‘they shoot people for this’.

As a prefix this morpheme signals place where and goal, often with the sense of going too far, of diverting oneself from one’s path or track, as in getting lost or overdoing something. Here are some of my favorites: я уже забегал вперед ‘I have jumped ahead of my theme’, я заблудился в темном лесу ‘I got lost in a deep forest, я зачитал эту книгу ‘I read this book to tatters’.

From C & P: Раскольников бы задавлен бедностью ‘Raskol’nikov was crushed by poverty’, до того Лизавета была запугана и забита, что даже не подняла руку ‘So frightened and cowed was Lizaveta that she didn’t even raise a hand (to defend herself)’.

Зачитать книгу also means ‘to borrow a book and never return it’. (!!) Note also зачитаться ‘o read oneself into a silly stupor’.

Only in Russian.

gmc

Моre Reflexives

2010-04-12T08:31:00.000-07:00

Моre Reflexives

April 12, 2010

I have gone back to Townsend for some examples of reflexives with ‘certain’ prefixes. Among my favorites: я хорошо выспалась/-ся ‘I have gotten a good night’s sleep (slept myself out)’, я вам звонил, звонил, но не дозвонился ‘I called and called you, but couldn’t get you’, договорились ‘we’ve agreed (it’s settled, it’s a date)’! Катя заучилась ‘Katya has studied herself into a stupor’, Байрон исписался ‘Byron has written himself into exhaustion’, Саша и Маша затанцевались ‘Sasha and Masha have danced to utter exhaustion’, мои родители разошлись ‘my parents have separated’.

Here’s a funny sentence from that same Lesson X, Continuing with Russian: Oсторожно, князь! Обопритесь на мою руку ‘Careful, prince! Lean on my arm’. This reflexive verb is опереться, опираться ‘lean (self) on (someone or something)’.

The prefix o- becomes обо– before a root that contains a cluster, but has a mobile vowel or other full vowel in the following syllable in other forms, so it goes: обопрусь, обопрёшься, обопрётся, past tense опёрся, оперлАсь. I call this the ‘paranoic oбo-‘ because it may be seen in обо мне, они говорят обо мне ‘they are talking about me’, where the old soft jer has dropped out of the root in the dative case of the pronoun.

Another verb with this is обобрать, обобрал, обобрали, оберу оберёшь ‘to fleece, rob someone’. Here the longer prefix is seen in the infinitive stem, where there used to be a jer in the root; in the present perfective, the shorter form occurs since there is a full vowel in the root.

gmc

See Raskol'nikov Hear

2010-04-12T08:02:00.000-07:00

More on Hearing

The impersonal in Russian, as you know, is very effectively used to show that the source of the action/state lies outside the subject. Ему послышалось, что руки слабеют ‘he felt his arms numbing’ shows Raskol’nikov’s helplessness; он слышал, как руки слабеют ‘he felt his arms numbing’ has his much more of a participant, as it were, in the source of the action, with a nominative subject. Cf. the classic example он хочет поехать в Россию ‘he wants to go to Russia’ , and ему хочется в Россию ‘he feels like going to Russia/has the yen to go (no pun intended)’. The impersonal is very often negative: мне сегодня не работается ‘I just can’t work today’, мне здесь не спится ‘I (just) can’t sleep here’.

Raskol’nikov in his auditory adventures in I.7 often is the logical, dative subject of a reflexive verb, which is therefore not strictly speaking impersonal, but nonetheless R. is a sort of flabbergasted recipient of the sounds. Ему вдруг послышались тяжелые шаги ‘he suddenly heard heavy steps’, послышалась его одышка ‘he could hear (the man’s) asthmatic breathing’, послышался сильный шум ниже ‘he heard a loud noise below’. One exception to this sort of ‘middle voice’ in Russian (reflexive, but dative subject of the perceiver and a true nom. subject) is the truly impersonal phrase (147) послышалось, что ходят translated by Grace, Sasha and Katya, I believe, as something like ‘there was a sound that someone was walking’, which is quite correct; this awkward sentence probably wouldn’t go into a translation. The perceiver, Raskol’nikov, would be in the dative, but he is omitted. What does Connie Garnett say? I will check it later.

I, were I writing a translation of this, my favorite all-time book, might write ‘he heard the sound of footsteps in the next room’. It’s got to make your spine crawl along with Raskol’nikov. The verb is by default impersonal because the subordinate clause, containing the source of the action, is an indefinite personal in the third person, like здесь говорят по–русски ‘here Russian is spoken’. Even though there is an animate, indefinite, subject, послышалось has to be impersonal neuter.

O.K., I give up, I’ve got to find what Connie says. Why, here’s a handy Connie translation (one of many I must own): “Suddenly he heard steps in the room where the old woman lay.” I remember reading that at the age of eleven. (A la recherche du temps perdu.)

Remember the words of the sentimental Russian song, подмосковные вечера ‘Moscow Suburban Nights’: песня слышится...и не слышится... ‘you can hear a melody waft...and then it’s gone’.
This verb is like the Raskol’nikov’s auditory verbs: reflexive and dative, grammatical subject is the sound itself, песня.

Isn’t this pretty interesting?

gmc

See Raskol'nikov

2010-04-09T08:15:00.000-07:00

April 9, 2010

Dear Students,

The ordinary-seeming verb видеть, вижу, видишь ‘to see’ in Russian is one of the first second-conjugation prototypes we learn, along with (по)смотреть ‘look at’; a verb of psychological visual perception and of conscious attention, cf. слушать, слушаю ‘listen to’, слышать, слышу ‘hear’. For some reason ‘hear’ is learned later — it’s trickier to conjugate and its easily confused with its counterpart. But видеть has always struck me as peculiar, as its infinitive theme in -e- (the old jat’ here) is never stressed, so that we don’t have any proof that the theme vowel isn’ t и. Я вас видил на улице would be the same as я вас видел. And yet I never encounter this spelling mistake. Strange.

This verb in Old Russian has the athematic present passive partiple невидомъ ‘being seen; having sight’, which should be невидим, as it is in modern Russian. Czech also has nevidomý ‘unsighted, blind’, hinting that this verb goes back to earlier Slavic. The imperative in Old Russian is вижь, ОCS виждь, ‘see!’ This is also irregularly athematic. As in “see the ball, see Jane run!” We don’t ordinarily speak that way. I think of Pushkin’s Slavonic poem “The Prophet”, with its line восстань, пророк, и виждь, и внемли....глаголом жги сердца людей! ‘Rise up, prophet, and see, and hear....sear the hearts of people with the Word’. I think of Pasternak’s translation of Hamlet’s ghost, ‘List, list, o list!’ as, literally Слышь, слышь, о слышь! (For some reason this sounds funny in Russian to me.) The imperative вижь is another signal that this is an old athematic verb.

And, indeed, it turns out to be related to the old verb ‘to know’ in Slavic, вэдэти, вэмь, in Roman letters věděti, věm. Indeed, the OCS form vědě ‘I know’ is the perfect tense of an older form of the word ‘to see’, so that ‘knowing’ is ‘having seen’. Veni, vidi, vici, I came, I saw, therefore I know; I conquered. Though we have lost the old verb вэдэти in Russian, we have a lot of cognates in the language: весть ‘news’, пропал без вести ‘disappeared without a trace’, известия ‘news’, известный ‘known, familiar’, неизвестный ‘unknown’.

It is interesting that the psychological perception verb слышать is used in Russian, and in many Slavic languages, in the sense ‘to feel, have the sensation’. When Raskol’nikov is about to murder the old woman, ему самому слышалось, как они с каждым мгновением (руки) немели и деревенели ‘he could feel how with each moment his arms were getting numb and wooden-feeling’ (page 140 in my edition). In this fashion auditory and generally psychological perception are intertwined in the mind of the murderer. who is on the verge of hallucination at the very moment when, his theory predicts, he should be totally clear-minded and emotionless.

gmc

Regressive Palatalization of Velars

2010-04-07T08:28:00.000-07:00

April 7, 2010

So the Cubs lost their opener in humiliating fashion. What else is new?

I am thinking about the second regressive palatalization of velars in Slavic languages, the one responsible for all kinds of rough edges in the morphology of nouns and verbs that Russian outright got rid of. It is fascinating.

For example, remember the irregular plural of друг, друзья? Two things are irregular about it: it’s an old feminine collective formation in –й–а, and it has the velar shift of g to z (dz), not to zh. This sort of change used to be seen in all the Old Russian nominative plurals of masculines, e.g. чиновникъ ‘civil servant’ had the regular OR plural чиновници. Now, in West Slavic this became a big thing: the development of a new category of ‘virile’ nouns (!) marking masculine people. Macho thing. But the egalitarian Russians made the nominative plural the same as the old accusative plural, so столи ‘tables’ (nom.) became столы (nom. and acc.). Other Slavic languages followed suit. But Russian had its complications: the acc pl of all animates would merge not with the nominative but with the genitive, as we are about to learn now in 102. So while in Czech you have a special nom. pl and the acc. pl. merging with the instrumental pl, in Russian you have nom pl = acc pl if inanimate, and gen pl = acc pl if animate (women included).

Russ столы столы столов столами столах столам
nom acc gen instr loc dat
Czech stoly stoly stolů stoly stolech stolům

Russ братья братьев братьев братьями братьях братьям
nom acc gen instr loc dat
Czech chlapi chlapy chlapů chlapy chlapech chlapům

You can see how the Russian plural has gotten much more unified. The old ам, ами, ах, ям, ями ях fit almost all the nouns. Not so for Czech.

I also miss the good old second regressive in the imperatives of the verbs мочь, печь, речь — мози, мозэте, пьци, пьцэте, рьци, рьцэте (I use the э letter to represent the old jat’).

Here is a sentence from the 11th century Ostromirovo gospel:

молю же вьсэхь почитающихъ не мозэте кляти, нъ исправлшье, почитаите. ‘I beg all who are reading this not to curse me, but, having corrected me, to read on’. Istn’t that something? I repeat the same for my readers.

gmc

Why Time Begins on Opening Day

2010-04-02T14:46:00.000-07:00

April 2, 2010

Dear Students,

Monday is opening day, which doesn't mean much to most of us any more, but to me, it is, as always, hope springing eternal in the human breast, or my aging version of my former youth. In 1945, when I was two, the Cubs won their last pennant, and I remember going to the Series in Wrigley Field and scoring the game in my crude toddler's scrawl. I kept the scorecard; Cubs lost. I cried all the way home (that part, I believe, is true).

But it's a new season, a new chance at life and victory. I get out my old glove and try to make my son play catch with me, but he doesn't like baseball. I am alone in my tragedy and my exaltation. So I throw the ball up into the air and catch it myself. That's the way it is.

gmc

Finale: Passives and Reflexives

2010-04-02T08:01:00.000-07:00

April 2, 2010

More on Passives and Reflexives

Dear Students,
this is a particularly fun blog. Read it carefully.

Russian has a quasi-free syntax, which allows it to highlight new information, or the rheme, in sentence-final. Cf. this exchange: — Кто говорит? — Говорит Сидиров. ‘Who is speaking? Sidorov is speaking.’ Word order can be used to make a kind of syntactic passive. Старуху процентщицу убил не крестьянин Николай, а студент Родион Романович Раскольников. ‘The old usurer woman was killed not by the peasant Nikolay, but by the student Rodion Romanovich Raskol’nikov. Literally: ‘the old woman (acc) - killed - not Nikolay - but R.’ This is a lot nicer, to my ear, than the use of a ppp, as in Старуха была убита не Николаем, а Раскольниковым, with the auxiliary, past passive participle, and agent in the instrumental. More examples: объявление повесила секретарша, ‘the flyers were posted by the secretary’, меня похвалил сам президент, ‘I was praised by the president himself’, эти сведения нам передали начальники ‘we were informed (dat.) of these matters (acc.) by the bosses themselves (nom.). Cf. the topicalizer ‘это’ in these examples: это Раскольников убивал, это я написал эту длинную статью, это папа вымыл машину, ‘it was R. who was the killer’, ‘it was I who wrote that long article’. ‘it was Father who washed the car’.

A few more important and interesting non-passive -ся constructions: note the word найтись ‘to turn up’, not ‘to be found’. Бумажник нашелся в комоде ‘the wallet turned up in the dresser drawer’.

I like the so-called ‘reflexive of general characteristic’. Remember when Gurov first meets the lady with the little dog, and he uses the dog to get to the lady? When he offers a bone and the dog growls, Gurov shakes his finger warningly at him. The lady tells him: он не кусается ‘he doesn’t bite’. Another good one in this class is ругать кого, ругаться, ругать себя. The transitive means ‘curse someone out’, the reflexive particle, ‘to swear (as a characteristic)’, and the reflexive pronoun себя, ‘to curse oneself out’.

Note дверь открылась, дверь быта открыта, дверь открыли, meaning, respectively, ‘the door opened’, ‘the door was open’, ‘the door was opened’. The first is not a passive, but a kind of middle voice, or unergative, construction; some force or agent or instrument caused the door to open — this is not a passive. The second is a ppp, typical of a passive sentence, but also very often simply adjectival: дверь открыта ‘the door has been opened/the door is open’. The third is the useful personal indefinite construction, with no overt subject, the object fronted, and the verb a transitive without a nominative subject ‘the door has been opened’. Cf. ‘the stew is cooking slowly on the stove’.

The verbs ‘open’ and ‘close’ are important. от– (за–)крЫть, закрЫла, закрЫли; закрОю, закрОешь, закрОют. Similarly: мыть мОю мОешь мОют, мыл, мЫла, мЫли. These are the perfectives; imperfectives are закрывать, открывать.

Дверь открыли is a kind of indefinite passive with an implied human agent. If you don’t want to imply a human agent, but some kind of indefinite instrument, you can use the default neuter subject, as in the stock example отца убило молнией ‘father was killed by lightning’. But I prefer the great example from the Brothers Karamazov, when stinking Lizaveta somehow climbs over the wall separating the garden from the bathhouse. The narrator tells us ее перенесло, или перенесли, ‘someone carried her over, or something did’. This is effected by the change of just one letter.

I told you literature does it so much better than stock examples. ‘Father was killed by lightning’, indeed — that’s in the category of ‘the boy was playing in the garden with his aunt and his governess’. Give me a break. Remember how Nabokov almost flunked his American citizenship reading test. He correctly read the sentence ‘the child is bold’, and then added mischievously, ‘if you change one letter you could get ‘the child is bald’. (This was in the days before chemotherapy for children, he meant no offense.)

gmc

Thoughts on Reflexives and Passives

2010-03-28T12:01:00.000-07:00

March 27, 2010

Thoughts on Reflexives and Passives

There is another reflexive in Russian, of course; it is the pronoun себя (gen.-acc), себе (dat.-prep.) собой (instr.); the nominative is lacking. This is the Slavic cognate of Latin sui (gen.), sibi (dat.) se(se) (acc.). This form is in complementary distribution with -ся — where the one occurs the other may not.

I do not understand all the reasons underlying the choice in Russian. We say я видел себя в зеркале, я люблю себя ‘I saw myself in the mirror, I love myself’; я *любился does not exist, as so linguists star it as impossible, but, я влюбился в Аню ‘I fell in love with Anya’ is a standard locution.

If we said я *виделся it would be unacceptable, but мы часто виделись ‘we often saw each other’ is very common, cf. мы встретились утром на улице ‘we met in the morning on the street’. This is the ‘reciprocal’ reflexive, when both agents combine in a single action, or two or more people join in producing a single action.

Переписываться ‘correspond’, is often sited as a reciprocal of actions going back and forth, action A producing re-action B as in a tennis game. My favorite formation of this sort is перестукиваться ‘communicate by knocking (on metal pipes, for example, in prison). This is quasi-productive and you can try to make up your own examples and see if they exist. Перемигиваться ‘to exchange winks’, перекашливаться ‘to exchange meaningful coughs’.I think this would be a good construction for many semiotic systems, say animal communication.

A very interesting verb is считать кого кем shorthand for ‘consider someone (acc) someone (instr.). This is a ‘small clause’ verb, or a verb with double complement, object accusative and comparative entity, instrumental. It can take an animate (human, personal) subject and passivizes in -ся, so that it is a glaring exception to the rule that passives with the particle have to be inanimate. Not only that: it can take the full reflexive pronoun, with the true reflexive meaning. What a dream come true. Here are examples:

(1а ) Профессор считает Mашу (acc) хорошей студенткой (a good student) ‘the professor considers Masha an excellent student’
(1б) Мы все считаем mашу хорошей студенткой ‘We all consider Masha a good student’
(1в) Mаша (всеми) считается хорошей студенткой ‘Masha is considered a good student by everyone’
(1г) Mаша считает себя очень хорошей студенткой ‘Masha considers herself a very good student’.

Example 1a and 1б are transitive, with instr. complement. Example 1в is passive, with the agent in the instrumental (всеми) and the complement in the instrumental. Note that the two instrumental phrases are separated so that they don’t get mixed up. 1г is the reflexive, with the full reflexive pronoun in the accusative, and ‘good student’ in the instrumental as complement.

Why, I ask you, can’t all the passives/reflexives in Russian be this straightforward? (Again, see Townsend, Chapter X.) But they are not. Townsend mentions some formations with -ся which might be confused by students as reflexives or passives: Иван убился means neither ‘Ivan killed himself’ nor ‘Ivan was killed’. but ‘Ivan got smashed up to death’. But повеситься, утопиться do have the reflexive meaning, ‘to hang oneself’ and ‘to drown oneself’. What can one do?

The lesson is that general rules must be built up slowly, with numerous lexical exceptions. Себя always has some sort of ‘self’ reference, that is, it is always reflexive, while –ся only has one meaning for absolute sure in all cases, the syntactic one that it can’t be transitive, it can’t take an accusative (but can denote various sorts of other things).

More later,
gmc

Reflexives and Passives

2010-03-26T08:18:00.000-07:00

March 25, 2010

Reflexives, Leading into Passives

Marmeladov asks Raskolnikov, in the stinking bar at a sticky little table, “My dear sir, may I inquire, are you in the service (изволили служить) or are you a student (учитесь)?” — Учусь, the latter replies, using a verb well known to 102 students to mean “I am enrolled in a course of study, I study.” You also know that when the ‘reflexive particle’ is removed, the verb is transitive: (вы)учить слова, урок. But what does the particle -ся mean, and how is it reflexive? And how many verbs are like this, that they may be used with or without the reflexive particle?

In the strict sense phrases like ‘wash (oneself)’, ‘shave (oneself)’ ‘comb one’s hair’ — мыться, бриться, причесаться are reflexive as the action is directed by the subject to himself, and transitive when used with an accusative, as in мыть машину. (The reflexive is what Chomsky calls anaphora, one of the keys to a child’s setting of linguistic parameters, supposedly, as she learns that ‘Mary sees her in the mirror’ means not Mary, and ‘Mary sees herself in the mirror’ is no one but Mary. This has a sort of Alice-in-Wonderland flavor to it,) But verbs in -ся have a large semantic range, well beyond reflexivization. The only thing they all share has been said to be intransitivity, that is, none of them appear with an object in the accusative. So: ‘study the Russian language’ is учиться русскому языку, with the dative, ‘fear lions’, бояться львов, with the genitive. This is said to be so as the particle is a trace of an accusative meaning ‘self’, as in защититься от врага ‘to defend oneself from the enemy’. In some Slavic languages, such as Czech, reflexives that semantically ‘feel like’ transitives have developed accusatives, especially in the spoken language: učím se ruštinu ‘I am learning Russian’, with the reflexive se and the accusative (fem.) noun rustinu.

Is the particle ever part of a passive construction? Yes, indeed it is, but there are some important semantic and grammatical restrictions. First the subject may not be an animate, or especially a human animate being. Second, the verb must be imperfective.
So we do indeed have passives such as: Набоков говорил, что роман Дар писался во время войны “Nabokov said that the novel The Gift was written during the war.” This sentence is an elegant way of not mentioning himself, the agent. What if it were perfective, e.g., how would Nabokov say the the novel was completed (by him) during the war? Набоков говорил, что роман Дар был закончен/написан (им) во время войны. This structure can be unwieldy and about as elegant as ‘the ball was hit by Nabokov’. Russian can avoid these structures, those with a passive participle, an auxiliary, and an agent in the instrumental, by avoiding the perfective and describing the event as unfolding and imperfective.

With an inanimate subject and an imperfective predicate, we find lots of passives, such as дом строится нашей фирмой ‘the building is being constructed by our firm’.
A verb like возвращать(ся) ‘to return’ can be ‘go back’ when reflexive, and “take X (acc) back’ when not reflexive. We have: студенты возвращают книги в библиотеку ‘the students are returning the books to the library’, студенты возвращаются в библиотеку ‘the students are returning (i.e. going back) to the library’. We may think of the reflexive particle in the latter as bearing a reflexive, accusative meaning: ‘the students are returning-selves’.

What about книги возврaщаются в библиотеку? This can’t mean that the books are going back on their own steam; it must imply an agent. We could add студентами to this sentence and we would get a reasonably grammatical, although far-fetched sounding, sentence, meaning something ‘the books are being returned to the library by the students’. Passives like this, with the agent overtly supplied, always have struck me as awkward, just like ‘the book was completed by Nabokov during the war’. (See Townsend’s Continuing with Russian, Chapter X for his discussion.)

One linguist said that ‘Hubert loves God’ is good English, but ‘God is loved by Hubert’, the passive thereof, is fishy. Why do you think this is so? But it all depends. The past passive participle alone doesn’t sound awkard, and look what Majakovsky did with the form убит ‘killed’ — Убиты! / И все равно мне / он или я их / убил. ‘They have been killed/they are killed / and I don’t care / Whether it was he or I / who killed them.' Cf. also Lermontov’s great elegy on the death of Pushkin: Убит поэт, невольник чести ‘The poet has been killed, captive of his honor’. Look how the Russian ppp short form can contain an entire passive sentence within it: сказано, сделано ‘it is said, it is done’ (‘no sooner said than done’).

Turn to poetry to resolve and transcend the sophistries of grammar.

More on passives and reflexives will follow. This is a big subject that has always attracted the attention of Slavists.

gmc

Implosion of 204

2010-03-20T13:55:00.000-07:00

The Implosion of 204

I’ve never had a course quite like this one. I haven’t given a single test or quiz the entire semester, and the students have had great difficulty, with but three semesters’ preparation, reading Преступление и наказание. And I have spent a lot of time preparing for class, much more than ever for an intermediate class. Perhaps that’s what’s wrong — I have read so deeply in Dostoevsky that... what?

I had great difficulty, too, when I read Пр. & н. for the first time, and in those days I didn’t have my edition lying around to help me. I say to you that any student in 204 willing to spend 2-3 hours of work each class period would be gaining a reading knowledge, with my aids, and, with active work on exercises and composition, she/he would be advancing her/his Russian superbly and they would feel good about it.

Especially valuable is the recorded text of the novel, which I have made available to everyone. I would be glad to give you individual help on taking apart the Dostoevsky text for grammatical purposes. We will try to do more of this in class.
You could make an exhaustive study of how participles and gerunds are used in literary narrative. For as long as you read Russian, you’re going to find them, and in my edition every last gerund and participle is translated and explained.

This, plus the inestimable intrinsic value, as they say, of the literature itself.
Many of you, or some, have worked, in spurts, like this, and done some excellent compositions with original ideas expressed cogently in Russian. And everyone has worked, at some time, or tried to, in good conscience. One or two people have taken the time to talk this over with me, which I appreciate. I know some of you, or many of you (многие из вас; this doesn’t mean absolutely many, but ‘many’ in the group of you) are disappointed to find that her Russian is not getting any better.

I feel like the Zen master who tells his apprenctices to sweep the floor and take out the garbage for a year, and come back in five years. I wonder, how does he feel, in fact?

I’m no Zen master, so I’ve no right to tell you to take out the garbage.
But it’s not over yet; maybe you will still learn some Russian!
gmc

Seeing into the Future

2010-03-18T08:23:00.000-07:00

Seeing into the Future (continued)
March 17, 2010

The old legal codices of Russia abound in conditionals and future tenses, and also even the future perfect tense, or futurum exactum, as we read it in the elegant language of the Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution: In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district where in the crime shall have been committed. This means that first there is an alleged crime (‘shall have been committed’), and then the accused shall have the right to a speedy trial. Russian could express this by using a form of ‘be’ (future) and the l-participle (what is now the Russian past tense. Here is an example from the Русская правда, the Russian Law (Правда means ‘law’ here):

Пакы ли боудеть что татебно купилъ вь търгоу, или конь или порть или скотиноу, то выведеть свободьна моужа два или мытника. In contemporary Russian: если окажется, что куплено ворованное, то надо представить свидетелей, ‘if it turns out (= OR боудеть in its conditional sense) that what shall have been bought was stolen (татебно), two free witnesses (моужа два) must show this (that it was bought at market’).

The simple future is, as I mentioned last time, expressed by any of three or four modal verbs, each with basic semantics ‘want’, ‘intend’, ‘begin’, ‘turn out to be’, and so forth. But the senses are very labile. I found this example in Gorshkova and Xaburgaev’s Historical Grammar of Russian”, p. 314. Аже не отложишь лишнего дэла и всякое неправды мы хочемъ богоу жаловатися и темъ кто правду любить (Rizhskaja gramota), ‘If you do not cease (perfective future) from your malevolent act and all illegalities we shall be constrained (хочемь) to complain to God and to those will love the law.’ The first basic meaning of хотэти is ‘want, wish; intend’, and here the writer wishes to show what recourses he may have if the evil work of his opponents goes on: namely, God, and those who stand for righteousness in the law.

The future can, of course, be expressed by a perfective present, as in contemporary Russian.

Мы коня не дамъ ни продамы его ‘we will not give up our horse nor sell him’ (Rizhskaja gramota). Note николи же всяду на нь (коня) ни вижу е более ‘I will not ever saddle him (his horse) again nor see him again’; here, in the famous tale of the death of Oleg by his horse, we find a perfective verb with future meaning followed by an imperfective present, also with future sense. In the Laurentian ms we read: идэте с данью домови а я возвращюся похожю и еще ‘go home with the tribute and I will return (imperfective present) and gather more’.

And, indeed, we find lots of unidirectional motion verbs with future meaning, just as in contemporary Russian, German, French, English and so on. From a birchbark letter from Staraja Russa, 13th century: не шли отрока эду самъ и две гривны везу ‘don’t sense a servant, I’m coming myself and will bring two golden coins’. Contemporary Russian: летом едем в Россию, English: we are going to Russia in the summer, German: wir fahren nach Russland im Sommer, French: nous voyageons en Russie cet été (that French looks funny — can anyone correct me?)

I notice that writing я, ю is standard in Old Russian after hushers; this doesn’t indicate softness, rather a morphological marking, e.g. 1st sg present. Just like our students write хочю, чищю, вижю. I don’t think there is a single student ‘mistake’ — that is, a conscious, deliberate attempt to express something in Russian, not a slip of the pen, or a typo — that doesn’t have a prototype in the history of Russian.

So it you start saying буду посмотреть ‘I will look at’ in place of посмотрю ‘I will look at’ (perfective future), I’ll understand. Indeed, if you start writing буду пoсмотрел in the meaning ‘I shall have looked at (something)’ before event X takes place’, I’ll understand that you are making up a future perfect tense just as the Old Russians did.

Not to encourage mischief. But language is a game, you know, it is meant to be played by young and old.

gmc

In The Future Don't Make This Mistake

2010-03-17T08:46:00.000-07:00

In the Future Don’t Make This Mistake
March 16, 2010

I always meditate on the reasons that students utter or write what they do in Russian. Why do they so stubbornly take so long, it seems to me, to learn what is so clear to me as the blue sky on a cloudless day. But there ‘s the rub — it seems to me because I know it as second nature, without questioning whether it makes sense, is counterintuitive, or maybe just a gratuitous solution to a problem in the language that might have been solved a dozen other ways.

Take, for example, my pious insistence that the imperfective infinitive, and it alone, is associated with phasals like начну, кончу and, of course the analytic ‘future tense’ formed by буду. No perfectives allowed. Further, the conjugated form of a perfective verb has a ‘future’ meaning. No if’s, and’s, or but’s — and I am sensitive to such linguistic metaphors. I do know in the back of my mind, of course, that there are lots of ‘exceptions’ to the perfective present = future tense, one of which I will mention here: the modal use of the P future.

Ask someone the time, and she has no watch. “Не скажу,” she says, meaning ‘I can’t tell you’, not ‘I will not tell you.’

The future tense itself is a variety of willed or predicted potentiality which has not occurred. The past can find witnesses and testimony, it may be narrated and celebrated and regretted and analyzed. The present, Nabokov said, is a luminous moving point at the crest of the vastness of the past. The future is a modal predication, a potentiality, a path not yet taken.

In Latin we learned amo, amas, amat, “I love, and so on,” amabo, amabis, amabit, “I will love, and so on,” amabam, amabas, amabat “I used to love, and so on,” as though they share equal and equivalent places in the synopses.

I blithely keep saying спрошу means ‘I will ask’, while буду спрашивать, also future, means ‘I will be asking, will ask repeatedly.’ How far from the truth this might have been, but for a different historical development! In the twelve and thirtreenth centuries Russian had a very different system, though we really aren’t sure, beyond textual examples, how it really worked.

But listen to this: it appears that, for some writers, or speakers, any modal verb: хотэти ‘want, wish’, имати ‘have to, possess’, начати ‘begin’, быти ‘be’ may be used with the infinitive of either aspect, to make a kind of future, but a kind that probably differentiated carefully among the modals. I repeat: with an infinitive of either aspect, not merely imperfective. Further news for the Delphic oracle: the present tense itself, in some usages, seems to mean future — the present tense of either aspect.
This sounds like our students’ delight: use any modal, any aspect, and, as with Humpty Dumpty, it means future, if I want it to mean future.

(By the way, as an aside: I find the verb хотэти with the first plural хочем, just like our students: хочу, хочешь, хочет, хочем, хочете, хочут. Why on earth didn’t it stay that way?)

The forms of буду аre often used in conditionals with the modal meaning ‘if it should happen, if it turns out’.

More later,
gmc

Taking notes; Chomsky attacks my teaching

2010-03-17T08:34:00.000-07:00

Note-taking; Chomsky attacks language teaching

When I was a student, I took notes in class in notebooks that were meant to be kept to the end of the term. I wrote down the instructor’s central points, his likes and dislikes — with lots of doodles and fanciful drawings on the side, like Dostoevsky did in the pages of his novels, except that he could really draw (so also could Pushkin and Lermontov, but not I). In a language class I would invariably note down the main thrusts of the drills, conversations, and lectures, unless, of course, it was all too boringly obvious anyway. I would use class notes to study for the finals. It is a very good system, but one which, I note to my sorrow and dismay, students have long ago abandonned. They often sit in class as though at an aesthetic experience, like a bullfight, say, or a play. More like a play or a pantomime, I suppose, in my classes. They think, of course, that they will remember everything important. Nothing can be any further from the truth.

You all ought to do this. What’s more, you should print out my “work for the week” files and realy pour over them, beccause they are the keys to the course. You may choose not to do this, but you lose, you lose.

Still, my policy is never to instruct students on methodology of learning. Instead, I coddle them by printing out numerous copies of the work and passing them out to helpless-looking students, more out of pity than anything else. In 204 I passed out seven such copies, to seven helpless-looking, but otherwise very intelligent, students. I could go on, but I won’t.

Now for the intrinsic weaknesses of lerarning a language in an academic environment. Chomsky always told me not to teach Russian, because nobody knows how people can learn it. “It’s a hopeless, useless task,” he told me, with his usual exaggerated sarcasm. “What you will end up doing is getting people enthusiastic about going there for themselves.” I guess he was right. All the grammar we teach is taught not by the natural methods that people use to learn.

Case in point: my latest quiz, focusing on, among other things, к Ивану, к бабушке, у Ивана, у бабушки. You all had the preposition к engraved in your alpha waves when you came for the quiz yesterday, and so you started writing к Москвe, к русскому уроку in motion expressions, when you’re supposed to say в Москву, на русский урок. It’s our fault for focusing on so many details at once. A child, learning, will also over-generalize, but he will adjust with lightning speed to the context that shapes the details.

Another example: a few weeks ago we learned спасибо за книгу, спасибо за кассеты ‘thanks for the book’, ‘thanks for the cassettes’. Now in our recent 102 quiz, you were thinking ‘Vova wants her to bring something for Belka,’ so the very best students wrote принести колбасу (что–нибудь) за Белку. Not right, but a brilliant extension, or abductive jump, made with the alacrity of a child’s brain.

I still believe it is possible to learn something in a language class, but Chomsky now tells me: “Yes, they will learn something, but you won’t know what.” He’s a bit too sure of himself, isn’t he?

gmc

Definitely

2010-03-15T08:08:00.000-07:00

March 15, 2010

Definitely

Like ждать, which may take the accusative with a definite and a genitive with an indefinite, there are many perfectives with accusative vs. imperfectives with genitive that do this too. Выпил воду ‘he drank up the water (acc), пил воды ‘he drank some water (gen. partitive)’. There are other variations of this, and the overt aspectual and nominal categories do not in themselves mark definiteness.

The category of definiteness can, however, be marked by proper names, as we have seen, by possessive and demonstrative pronouns — they all presuppose a context — and by a wide variety of pronominal anaphoras.

I like literary examples, as you know. Remember in Dostoevsky’s The Demons, when Petr Verkhovensky comes to egg Kirillov on to his promised suicide, which V. is going to use to his own nefarious ends, he says “Я за тем самым.” “I’ve come for ‘it’, or ‘for that very thing’. Этот самый ‘that very same, that same person (we two were thinking about). Это, ‘this; that’ as introductory element is used to pronominalize any new entity, abstract, concrete, singular or plural, idea, complex background — anything. Это — мои родители. Это — очень точное определение понятия пост–советское. ‘These are my parents. This is a very precise definition of the concept ‘post-Soviet’.

The demonstrative это, used to as an attributive, bears agreement but can also be used to refer to anything. As in English.
Миша хочет стать партнером в нашей фирме, и пишет мэйлы всем знакомым, просит их помощи. Ты знаешь об э т о м ?
“Misha wants to become a partner in our firm, he’s writing emails to all his friends and acquaintances and asking their help. Do you know about this?”

Demonstratives in Russian may be pressed into service whenever their referentiality can make a definite precisely definite, as in relatives, where тот is useful.

Я поставил ту книгу, о которой ты спросил, в твой ящик. ‘I put the (that) book you asked about in your mailbox.’
In Czech and Polish the demonstrative ten is so frequent in definite senses that it is verging on acquiring the status of a definite article.

In Russian and Czech the demonstrative can be used in place of a pronoun. На улицe я увидел нескольких студентов, но тe меня не заметили. 'On the street i say several of my students, but they didn't notice me.'

Conversely, in many of our familiar European languages, the numeral ‘one’ is the eventual source for the indefinite article, as German ein, French un, and, of course, English a(n).

Still, you have to admit that in the North Slavic languages — Russian, Ukrainian, Belorusian, Czech, Polish, Sorbian — there exists no overt category of definiteness. And you have to admit that the speakers of those languages know what this means, and have a devil of a time learning how to implement definiteness in English. It’s the last thing they learn, if ever.

gmc

Waiting for Godot

2010-03-12T07:52:00.000-08:00

March 12, 2010

Waiting for Godot

‘Wait for’ in Russian is expressed by the verb ждать with the accusative or the genitive case. When with the accusative, it marks a definite noun phrase; with the genitive, the phrase is indefinite. This is a slight simplification of the facts, but it’s so.

— Мы ждём поезда. We are waiting for a train (or simply: the train, any train).
— Мы ждём поезд в Петербург. We are waiting for the Petersburg train.
— Мы ждём письма от родитилей. We are waiting for a letter from our parents.
— Мы ждём письмо, которое должно содержать деньги. We are waiting for a/the letter which should contain some money.

An extended meaning of this verb is ‘hope for, await’; it usually is associated with the genitive, as indefinite. Я жду окончательной победы ‘’I expect a final victory’.

Since proper names are by definition definite, they always come in the accusative: я жду брата, жду сестру и маму.

How can we tell that брата is accusative, since the animate accusative form is taken from the genitive? We can’t until we see an example with an obvious accusative, like Женю, Ваню, сестру, маму.

‘I am expecting (I am pregnant)’ is жду ребёнка. I think this is probably genitive, but you can argue this.
How can a Russian dictionary tell us what case or cases a verb takes? Look ждать up in Ожегов and you will find an example leading off the discussion which has кого–что ‘whom/what’, which is a clear indication of the accusative — if it were only genitive, you’d find кого–чего. After all, Russians don’t know about definiteness and indefiniteness, but they do know that кто что, кого чего, кому чему, о ком о чём, кем, чем is a paradigm to help find case endings.

Is this any help, Sasha?

gmc

Definiteness and Indefiniteness

2010-03-10T08:38:00.000-08:00

March 10, 2010

Definiteness and Indefiniteness

Russian, as we know, has no articles. Indeed, words like ‘a, an, the’ prove to be the most difficult for L2 learners of English to master. ‘I read book,’ says the learner. But in English an entity has to be categorized by how much the speaker and his listeners know about it. If a Russian has been telling you that he’s reading a book in English, and you see him the next day and he says “I read book,” you can reconstruct ‘I am reading the/that book (I told you about)’ out of the sentence. But without context we are helpless. So what book?

When we use ‘the’, or proper names, we assume some past context. “Old man Fisher came.” “The cat got in the fishbowl.” “Want to go to Couter’s tonight?”

When we use ‘a’ we are introducing a new entity into the conversation that hasn’t been identified or given any context. “There is a strange man in the waiting room.” “Did you run through a red light on the way home tonight?” In the former sentence, ‘there is’ is a way of signalling the introduction of a new, specific-indefinite entity. In the second, the question signals that the noun phrase ‘a red light’ is indefinite but non-specific. We want to know whether any red light was encountered. “Did you know that you ran a red light tonight?” Here the speaker is informing his interlocutor about a specific entity that he wants to mention.

Now, what about Russian? Names, as in English, are definite, and are treated as such. — Приходила Ирина. ‘Irina was here.’ (Note the I verb, hinting that she came and subsequently left.) — Не хочешь к Старой лошади сегодня вечером? ‘Don’t you want to go to the Old Horse [a bar] tonight?’

But what about common nouns, nouns that are not proper names? Here the flexible word order and distinctive intonation of Russian both play big roles. The new information, or the rheme, usually comes at sentence-end; so also, do indefinites.
— В комнате стоит незнакомый человек. — Незнакомый человек стоит в комнате.
‘A strange man is in the room.’

— Кто читает? — Читает Маша. ‘Who is reading? Masha is reading.’ In this sentence we see that a definite can also be in the final position of the rheme or new information. So also Вчера на улице я видел вашу сестру. ‘I saw your sister on the street yesterday.’

So context is all-important for identifying an indefinite. Читая Достоевского, я входил в новый, чудесный, совершенно незнакомый мне душевный мир. ‘As I read Dostoevsky, I entered a new, miraculous new world that had been completely unknown to me.’

Gogol played with definiteness as he did with all grammatical categories. Look at the beginning of Шинель, The Overcoat. В департаменте...но нельзя сказать, в каком департменте. Ничего нет сердитого всякого рода департаментов... Итак, департамент, о котором идет дело, мы назовем одним департаментом. Итак... в одном департаменте служил один чиновник.

‘In a department...but I can’t say in what department. No one is more easily angered than departments of all sorts... So, the department in which our business is taking place, we will call “a certain department.” So... in a certain department there worked a certain civil servant.’

‘Certain’, and Russian один, may mark a specific indefinite that the speaker knows something — perhaps a great deal — about. Not in every case does English ‘certain’ answer Russian один.
— У него в поведении какая–то угловатость, нескладность. ‘In his behavior there is a certain angularity, a stiff unjointedness.’ The indefinite какой–то marks a specific indefinite which the speaker can’t yet define more closely.

The indefinite какой–нибудь, on the other hand, is for an entity which is probably non–specific. This we see in questions, as in у вас есть какие–нибудь вопросы, ‘do you have any questions?’

Next time: how the authors of Начало (correctly! for a change) explain the definiteness/indefiniteness of the object of ждать ‘wait for’.
gmc

Deixis; semantic questions

2010-03-09T09:40:00.000-08:00

March 8, 2010

Deixis and Semantics

In elementary Russian we learn that the adverb долго means ‘for a long time’: я долго работал, ‘I worked for a long time’. But if we want to relate the ‘long time’ or extent of a process or state to now, that is, to relate this to the speech-time, we use давно, as in я давно работаю в Тулэйне, ‘I have been working at Tulane for a long time’. Note the wonderful English present progressive aspect, which is so difficult, ironically, for Russians to learn. ‘I work long time at Tulane’ just isn’t good enough in English.

When the postal lady in Начало wants to explain why she hasn’t gotten everybody’s magazines and newspapers delivered correctly, she says я недавно работаю на почте, ‘I’ve only recently been working at the post office’, literally ‘I not-long-time work at post office’. Cf. French j’habite ici depuis longtemps ‘I’ve been living here ‘since’ a long time, with that French adverb depuis serving to fix the start of a state in the past and carry it up into the present moment, just as давно does.

 “Have you been studying Russian long?'
“Almost a year.”
— Вы давно изучаете русский?
— Почти год.

Suppose you want to say that a single event occurred a long time ago; the event is in the perfective past, say я написал письмо о новой квартире ‘I wrote a letter about the new apartment’, Insert давно: я давно написал письмо ‘I wrote a letter a long time ago’. This signals that the event of writing the letter was distant in the past from the reference point of the speaker, in this case, the present.

Suppose you are telling a story in the past tense. “I was at home after work. I had been home/had long ago arrived home a long time when the phone rang. It was my old friend Dmitriy.” Я был дома после работы. Я давно уже пришел домой, когда зазвонил телефон. This is like the pluperfect tense, which as you know, doesn’t exist as such in Russian. It may be helped along by the aspectual particle уже, as above. ‘I had arrived home long since when the telephone rang.”

Давным–давно ‘long, long ago’ is used to introduce and characterize the temporal distance of an event. It is narrative.
I like contraries, antonyms, and opposites. They often reveal an internal asymmetry, as in young and old, tall and short, quick and slow. We say ‘how old are you?’ and ‘how tall are you?’.The Russian word редко means ‘rarely’ and часто means ‘often.’ The word изредка, built out of the preposition из ‘out of’ and the word редко, is glossed to mean ‘sometimes; not often’, which is indeed not exactly the same as ‘rarely’. It is ‘rarely’ with something else added, perhaps an attentuative or a weakening of ‘rarely’; it is almost ‘sporadically’ but not quite ‘from time to time’. It is ‘rarely’, but not so baldly so, and it is not quite ‘sometimes’.

I believe there is no such thing as perfect synonymy; there’s always some subtle difference between two synonyms, be it register — the context of discourse — or style or nuance of diction.

Next time: how Russian expresses definite and indefinite articles.
gmc

Кому учиться через Пр и н?

2010-02-28T08:51:00.000-08:00

February 28, 2010

How Can One Learn Russian Through Dostoevsky?

Как учиться русскому через Достоевского?

Well, I am not sure anynore. There has been a бунт, a rebellion, in my 204 course — I use the word that entitles the chapter in Братья Карамазовы in which Ivan details the crimes of men against innocent children.

So I feel like the God to whom Ivan decided to return the ticket of life — thanks, but no thanks, not on these terms.

Well, here are some ideas. I, in your position, I would really, really study the text, with my notes. I would listen to the recording of the Russian actor reading these pages; it’s a couple of hours in length for Part I, Chapters 1-7, those pages we are reading. I think the experience of reading over and over again, without having to use the dictionary, is a marvelous learning vehicle by itself. I would listen to the voices of the всеведущий рассказчик, пьяный Мармеладов, дорогая мамаша (которую Родя любит). I would memorize a few pages by heart for recitation.

But these are practices of mine that you know about already. You may have heard my recitation of the first eight pages of Nakobov’s chapter on Chernyshevsky. But you are not me. I already know a lot of Russian, you do not. How could you memorize pages from Crime and Punishment?

But you could, you could.

Some of you have objected that not all the words are on the bottom of the page. This argument is vitiated: true, true; but those words not on the page are in the glossary in the back of the book, so all the words are in the book. Those in the glossary are the most frequent words in the text, and you might read the glossary to see what they are. You do not need a dicitonary to read this.

But, as Byron justifiably complainted to me, you feel that you are losing your grip on Russian language. (At least Dostoevsky is not making you lose your grip on your sanity.) I understand; you want to continue advancing all your skills and feeling your speaking/writing/grammar atrophy. Indeed, I agree.

So I am encapsulating some grammar topics that are really and truly useful, in distinction to the abstract musings of Jakobson’s conjugation rules. I will jump on examples in our text that can present these grammar topics. So far: infinitive constructions, predications with не–, real and unreal conditions, and more. I will give you great examples from the heart of the novel itself.

A good example: Нет мамаша, нет Дунечка, не обмануть меня вам. Raskoln’kov here says, bitterly and angrily: “No, darling mother, no dear Dunia, you’re not going to trick me.” Here you see the tremendous modal power of the Russian infinitive. Check the word order: ‘not to trick me is-it-to-you (dative)’. And our latest handout has a set of expressive unreal conditions from a letter of the young Dostoevsky to his brother.

I think you have to tell me, precisely, what grammar you want to look at. Sasha has already mentioned that you want to speak more in class. She's right I am sure.

So we still have eight weeks left, and a magnificent murder lies ahead for us!

Счастливо,gmc

Last Chapter on Conjugation

2010-02-24T15:12:00.000-08:00

February 24, 2010

Russian Conjugation -- Finale

I’ve omitted quite a few details, all of which in the long run are important one way or another, but this has gone on long enough. We need a demonstration of what all this does and what its descriptive power is like.

Let’s take some of the base forms for verbs I discussed at the beginning of this discussion. The morphophemic stem p’ok is a velar stem, so it will have substitutive softening in the present endings 2nd sg to 2nd pl. The vocalic endings will have round vowels u and o, according to the rule of acuteness attraction, since the stem is itself unstressed, so that all endings bear a stress. So here is the present tense: p’okU, p’očOš, p’očOt, p’očOm, p’očOt’e, p’okUt. In Cyrillic this is пеку печёшь печёт печём печёте пекут. (The phonemic transcription will reveal the reductions in the vowels: p’iku p’ičoš.) The infinitive will be печь, as velar stems have infinitives in чь and o is not permitted between two soft or palatal consonants. The past tense will be, phonemically, p’ok, p’ikla, p’ikl’i, with end-stress everywhere, as the velar stems have, and with the masc ending l suppressed. The imperative, also stressed, will have i, causing bare softening: пеки.

This shows us that in producing the forms of the present, infinitive, and past tenses the stem category must be specified, since it spells out lexically within its entry the movement of stress and the interplay of consonants and vowels at morpheme boundaries. These interplays may be strongly conditioned by the category of the verb, namely, the type of the last C and the stress pattern.

The general rules, for example, V(1) plus V (2) > V(2), C(1) plus C(2) > C(2), apply across all stem categories. To see how widespread this is, let’s look at the verbs ending in j (spelled й, or as a soft vowel letter after a vowel). These are suffixed stems, unlike p’ok, and embrace a variety of derived stems, like спрашивать, опазывать, советовать, делать, уметь. Note that, of course, there is no jot (j) in any of these infinitives. Why? Because the j, seen as a C, is deleted before a C ending (an ending beginning in C), and so jot disappears before infinitive and past, but is maintained in the present and imperative with their V endings.

So: делаю делаешь делает делаем делаете делают. Note that to the learner the endings seem to be –ю, –ешь, –ет, еtc., which are analyzed into j-u, j-iš, etc. here. This analysis is hard to teach because the very Cyrillic spelling seems to belie it.

In Jakobson’s analysis, the endings are not ю, ешь. ет, etc., but rather u, iš, it, im it’i, ut, in phonemic transcription with reduced vowels. The phonemic spelling is crucial, because the rule of intensity attraction predicts unstressed endings will begin with a high (diffuse) vowel: u, i. And so it is. The morphophonemic base stem is d’él-aj—, showing the interior root and stem, with stem-stress througout. This predicts all of the forms of the verb. The jod is everywhere and in every case deleted before any C.

Most handbooks give the endings as the naive student sees them, and conveniently contrast them with stressed endings spelled like иду идёшь идёт идём идёте идут. The problem with jod remains, however. What was it doing in the endings of делать and then disappearing in идти? When you look at these stems in the wider context of Russian verbs, you have to concede that the jod is part of the verb stem that appears only before V, just like the n in denu, the v in živu.

In verbs like давать даЮ даёшь даёт, where the vowel of the ending bears stress (this is the so-called deep truncation before va), the vowel changes to o, as a stressed V in a hard stem (rule of acuteness attraction).

It is interesting that in Russian spelling we see e for phonemic i, and ё for phonemic o. The o developed from stressed e in Old Russian. Nonetheless Jakobson points out that the vowel of плАчешь ‘you weep’ and and that of вИдишь ‘you see’ are phonemically the same. In a more abstract analysis, you might want to derive the former from an underlying o, and the latter from an i. This, however, goes outside of Jakobson’s model, which in itself captures an important generalization.
Some more examples, to see what generalizations they conceal.

Жить живу живёшь живут, жил, жилА, жили. This is a resonant stem in v that behaves very much like jot stems, also resonants. The v is lost before the C-endings of infinitive and past. Endings of the present are stressed, and so bear the rounded vowels if not soft (rule of acuteness attraction). The morphophonemic base živ lacks a stress, so that the present endings are stressed, but in the past, there is mobile stress — only the feminine ending bears the stress, otherwise it stays on the stem.

Compare the stress of unstressed suffixed stems, where the mobility appears in the present, but the past has stressed fixed on the theme vowel. There is only one suffixed stems that has past mobility: родитьс(ся) родился, родилась 'to be born'. These may be very important verbs, e.g. l’ubi, kup’i, p’isa, poluči. Example of mobility: куплЮ кУпишь кУпит кУпим кУпите кУпят. купил, past tense купила, купили. The unstressed endings show a diffuse (high) vowel u, i (rule of intensity attraction — weaker position is unstressed, so weaker vowel (diffuse).

This neatly described the Russian of Jakobson’s Moscow generation, where people said видют, учут though they wrote видят, учат. Now this is archaic and the rule is less attractive today. But still serviceable!
Looking briefly at the consonantal unsuffixed stems, we see an unproductive but important group. There are eight C’s, after the resonants j n m l r, that verbs may end with, and they are the very symmetrical group p b t d s z k g. Four voiced, four voiceless, two dental fricatives, four stops, two labial, two dental, two velar. They share an important trait: they maintain the group C(1) -C (2) at least some of the time. They are the exception that proves the rule!

Those in labials and dental plosives change those stops to s before the infinitive ending -ти. Dental stop stems lose their stop only before the past tense: в’ед– > вести вёл велА велИ. Velars lost the stop only in the infinitive (печь). Dental fricatives preserve their final consonant everywhere: несу несёшь несут, нести, нёс, несла, несло, несли, нёсший, неси.

One of my favorite C-stems is the velar žg– ‘burn’, present žgu, žžoš, žžot (жгу жжёшь жжёт), where the long жж is pronounced soft (palatalized), as it is both across morpheme boundaries and in roots, as in извозчик ‘coachman, driver’, вожжи ‘reins’, дрожжи ‘yeast’. Past tense of the verb is жёг (the masculine past drops the ending l, but keeps the velar; a fill vowel is necessary so the word can be pronounced) жгла жгли жгли, infinitive (с)жечь like печь, and past passive participle (со)жжён with that beautiful palatal.
That’s all for this topic,
gmc

Russian Conjugation IV

2010-02-16T14:37:00.000-08:00

Russian Conjugation IV

Softness or hardness of the final C. If the final C is soft (palatal or palatalized) it stays soft throughout, and in the 1st sg it is substitutive: вижу видишь видят, люблю любишь любят. As we saw in the last chapter, C-a in a polysyllabic stem (that is, not бра—ть, жда—ть, зва—ть) is substitutively soft before any V. This produces писать писал написан написав ~ пишу пишешь пишут пиши. Without a doubt this is a difficulty for learners, especially when you throw in the past passive participle and get попрошен, куплен, отвечен, but написан, смазан, выколот.

Things are also tricky in the closed stems (consonantal, suffixless), where only the velar stems taken substitutive softening, the others, simple softening. Hence we get: переведён, вывезен ~ испечён, сожжён.

If we understand the types говорить сидеть молчать бояться, писать, мазать, искать, плакать, we turn now to see what happens to the C at the end of all other stem types. It undergoes bare or simple softening before any vowel other than u. Velars display this bare softening only before the zero imperative ending, elsewhere they are subsтitutive. The present tense endings o and i alternate here. Example: лгать ‘to lie, tell untruths’ лгу лжёшь лжёт лгут, лгал, ждать ‘wait for’ жду ждёшь ждут ждал, печь ‘to bake’ пеку печёшь печёт пекут. This includes a number of very important suffixed as well as non-suffixed stems, such as — I give the 3rd sg — живёт, едет, идёт, тонет, исчезнет, берёт зовёт умрёт крадёт.

The imperative. This is a remarkable category, as it has a zero alternating with i (softening the final C). No other inflectional endings in nouns or verbal does this — but no other category is quite like the imperative in function. The vowel occurs after two consonants or with fixed stem stress. будь, оставь, познакомься, ответь, читай, спрашивай, арестуй; чисти, изчезн. Note all the suffixed stems in —j with fixed stress on the stem, and see the two ways Russian has of spelling zero after a soft C: soft sign, short i. Mobile stress items have i: купи, получи, пиши, ищи.

Note the strange-looking imperatives in velars сядь ‘sit’ from сесть and ляг, лягте ‘lie’ from лечь лягу ляжешь. The imperative of this latter has a zero, all right, but no softening at all.

The group j—i is admitted only if the full stem ends in ji—. There aren’t many examples, but one of them is таи ‘hide’ from taji—, but stoj— by rule gives стой, пьй—, пей. Note бояться боишься but бойся, according to his rule here, also смеяться смеёшься смейся, also петь поёт поют, пой, all according to this seeming ad hoc rule.

One more chapter to pull thing together. I will take some sample verbs and show how his rule derives their forms.

This article — if you are still suffering through this summary — came out of a bet Jakobson had with the American linguist Leonard Bloomfield, namely, that he could make a set of fully synthronic rules (not referring to historical data) for the explicit derivation of the Russian verb from a single base form.

As I say, people have gone crazy over this for years
gmc

Russian Conjugation III

2010-02-12T08:26:00.000-08:00

Thursday, February 11

Russian Conjugation III

Another concomitant change is the familiar suffixal -ova- of the infinitive/past going to -uj- in he present. He puts it: “Before dropped a, the group ov is replaced by uj”. It can also be part of the root: ковать кую ‘forge’, and two of my favorites, плевать ‘to spit’, плюю, блевать блюю ‘to vomit; notice the soft C in the stem that accounts for the юю; and the more familiar совет—овать совет—ую ‘advise’, танц—евать, танцую ‘dance’.

In the same category of concomitant changes Jakobson puts the limited changes of the vowel o in monosyllables and zero in nonsyllabic stems, before dropped j, to i: мою моешъ моют, мыть мыл ‘wash’; пьй—у (пью), пить, пил ‘drink’. Note that ‘i’ comes out ы if the preceding C is hard, but и if it is soft. (The morphophonemic base of this last verb is p’j—, as the zero cannot occur before the infinitive or past masc. morpheme, but i could occur in all these environments. This also sets up the explanation of the imperative of this verb, Part IV, to come.)

Before dropped nasal, zero in monosyllabic stems is replaced by a: на–чн—ут, на–чал ‘begin’.

Now to scrutinize some other stem structures. An open full stem can end in any of the five V’s i, e, a, o, u. The last C before the V is soft (palatal ч щ ж ш or palatalized) before e and i, hard before u and o, and hard or palatal (never palatalized) before a.

This is really a remarkable generalization. We get говорить ‘speak’, видеть ‘see’, молчать ‘be silent’, писать ‘write’, исчезнуть ‘disappear’, колоть ‘stab’. The stems morphophonemically are govor’—i, v’id’—e, molč—a, p’is—a, isčez—nu, kol—o.

I haven’t noted the stresses, as they are a further complication, but it is a stroke of great originality that he uses stress to help determine the present tense endings. There is no talk of first or second conjugation at all. Instead the acoustic distinctive features are invoked here.

If the endings are stressed, he says, they begin with an unrounded vowel in soft open full stems, like those of говорить, молчать above: говорят, говорит, молчат, молчит. (The first sg is always у/ю). If the stem is NOT soft, open, and full, the endings begin with a rounded V: So ждать. ждёшь, ждут, нести, несёшь, несут. This is the rule of acuteness attraction. Soft stems (palatal and palatalized) take unflatted (unrounded) vowels (i, a), and hard stems take flatted or rounded vowels (o, a). The roundness also reduces the pitch, so o and u are grave in this opposition, while i and u are acute.

If unstressed, all stems have endings beginning with a high vowel (see Conjugation part 1): u, i. This the the rule of intensity attraction. Unstressed vowels are less sonorous than stressed vowels. The high vowels are diffuse and of lesser sonority, while the low vowels are more sonorous.

Note how these rules account for the vowels in рабОтает, спрАшивает, пИшет, Едет (pronounced i) as well as those in живёт, ждёт, начнёт, which we ‘feel’ are somehow part of the same conjugational pattern, vs. the soft open full stems, which are ‘second’ conjugation and have i, a.

This remarkably original idea has proven far too abstract for teaching purposes, to say the least.
In soft full stems (palatal or palalatized) the final C of the stem preserves its softness throughout, but in the first sg it is substitutive. This is the переходное смягение that we see in derived imperfectives like спрашивать and in past passive participles like спрошен. Here are the correspondences:

t k ч (щ)
x s ш
g d z ж
zg zd жж
sk st щ
l r л’ р’
p b пл бл
m мл
f фл
v вл

Сижу, куплю, люблю, вижу, мажу, пишу, чищу, графлю.

A stem-final C followed by a or o in a polysyllabic stem is softened substitutively before any V ending. This is a very general rule that seems somehow ad hoc. Why does this take place in polysyllabics? Isn’t there some deep j that got in there somehow? This has always been a sticking point for readers. It produces писать, пишу from p’isa— but пИсать пИсаю from p’isaj—.
The fourth and last part of Russian Conjugation will follow.

gmc

Saints Win

2010-02-09T11:59:00.000-08:00

February 9, 2010

Saints Win! We Win!

This, the third and final postseason game for the fate-favored heavenly New Orleans Saints, was special. Now can I not carp and whine about slamming the quarterback, the knock-‘em-down-kill-‘em flavor of the Warner and Favre victories; this was a pure psychological victory. The Saints cashed in their “Bring the Wood” baseball metaphor, which Reggie Bush enthusiastically embraced and in the full flush of the bat he led them to victory with his slashing open-field running against the Cardianls. Now it was, what, a chess game, or a poker game, a beat-‘em-mentally game.

The amazing surprise of what the special teams on the Saints call their ‘ambush’ — the onside kick, and in an unbelievably daring moment, at the outset of the third quarter (it had never been attempted so early in a championship game) — had Peyton Manning and the Colts downcast and dispirited. They had been planning on a long, productive drive downfield to another touchdown, which would have made the score 17-6. Of course, the ‘ambush’ was risky, but if successful, the Saints’ coach gambled, the Saints would maintain the momentum they had controlled for the entire second quarter. And so it was. The Saints’ kicker, asked if he had been nervous, said “I was terrified.” But he did it and, by the luck of the draw, the Saints found it. It was then the Saints who drove and scored their first touchdown of the game to open the second half, and it was the Colts upon whom the realization dawned that this was going to be a very tough game, and a mental game. It was not to be “Bring the Wood,” it was to be a battle of brains.

The first quarter found the Colts moving the ball up and down at will, looking for all the world as though they would run away and hide. But then the second quarter found the Saints and Drew Brees moving the ball up and down at will and eating the clock, gobbling the time away while Manning sat glowering like a horror movie protagonist — I tell you, that’s what he looked like as he sat limply waiting.

I liked how the second quarter ended, with a goal-line drive which failed for the Saints on a running play. It was, I think, a good call. Time was running out and the Colts, when they inherited the ball, were back almost to their goal line. There was time enough — three minutes and more — for Manning to do something, but his response was weak and timid: three running plays and out. Suddenly the Saints had the ball again and, with Garrett Hartley’s charmed foot, were able to kick the field goal that they had disdained earlier. So it was 10-6 and absolutely no harm done by the fourth-down run which had failed. The Colts were already primed for the set-down, already looking defensive, and the opening ambush of the third quarter, which returned the ball and, soon, the lead, to the Saints, as I say, dispirited them.

Sometime in last quarter, I believe, it was the Colts facing a fourth down, but instead of going for it, they kicked, and missed, a fifty-one-yard field goal attempt. One has no pity for such weakness. Sorry to crow, but a championship team has to know better.

They were playing just about errorless football, as were the Saints. No egregious fumbles lost, no big turnovers, no — shall I say it — no interceptions. But this was the Saints’ specialty in 2009-10, anticipating the pass and picking it, and here it came. “I could see it, I could smell it,” said Tracy Porter, “I have seen him do this so many times in film review. I knew the route and the intended receiver, Bruce Wayne, so at the right moment I stepped out on the coverage and in front of my man. Then I was home.”

Final score 31-17. Sounds more one-sided than it was, or was it? We had them beat all the way.
“We never got our momentum,” said Manning. The Saints took it away.
I don’t like football, but I did enjoy that game. Who Dat!

gmc

Russian Conjugation II

2010-02-03T08:55:00.000-08:00

February 3, 2010

More on Russian Conjugation

I continue here my brief summary of the principles in Jakobson’s epochal article of 1948, “Russian Conjugation.”

The present tense and the imperative use vocalic endings (V), while the past tense and infinitive use consonantal endings (C). This is the basic opposition in the system. Most verbs have, to the observer, two very similar stems, one ending in a C and taking V endings, the other ending in a V and taking C endings. They form a dichotomy.

Examples: жив—у, жив—ёшь, жив—ёт, and so on, for the present and imperative; these stems end in a consonant, but endings start with a V.

Past: жи—л, жил—а. жил—и, infinitive жить. These all have stems ending in a consonant (here, a resonant), and endings in V.

For this overarching rule, sonorants and resonants are considered consonants, but they form a special subdivision of consonants, as we will see.

Then stems are classified. Open full stems lose their final V before a V. So, still using Cyrillic, лёжа—у > лёжу ‘I am lying down’, and so on for the present tense лёжу—ишь, лёж—ит, but past лёжа—л, лёжать.

Narrowly closed stems are those in the sonorants j, v, m, n, which acoustically are more like vowels, but still are not full vowels. These stems are always closed before any V and always open before any C. Using Roman letters for analysis: d’elaj—u ~ d’ela—la. See how the j disappears in the Russian spelling: делаю делаешь.

Then there is another important, but unproductive class, the broadly closed stems, those in k g t d s z b r. They are all ‘irregular’ but central to the system, something like strong verbs in English. You have to know them and use them all the time, but they are special. These stems stay intact before some of the C endings, even though they end in C’s.

In this class, terminal dentals drop only before the past ending: v’od—u ‘I lead’ but v’ol (вёл) ‘I led’. Stems in s z b r are never truncated, keeping their C’s always: несу несёшь несёт; нёс, нёсла; нёсти. (Notice what happens in the past tense here: нёс—л# in the masculine turns into нёс).

Deep truncation is one of my favorite Jakobson terms (it calls to mind Adorno in its esoteric allure). Example: the suffix ну drops in the past if it means ‘change of state’: исчезнуть, исчез, исчезла ‘to disappear’. Another example: before j—, the group va, if preceded by a, is omitted in the present (not the imperative) and the stress falls on the following syllable. This sounds complicated and it is indeed hard for you to learn. It is very much like a strong verb in English.

So: давать ‘to give’, продавать ‘to sell’, отдавать ‘to give over, to pass’, have the present tenses даю даёшь даёт даём даёте дают, and so on. This works also for compounds of -знавать and –ставать.

gmc

Saints Alive

2010-01-29T07:41:00.000-08:00

January 29, 2010
Saints Alive

Now nearly a week after the Saints’ thrilling overtime defeat of the Vikings, the passions of football — so volatile, so atavistic, so animal in us the fans — rise up from the unconscious. I am angry that the Saints’ defense is so pointedly focused on physically hurting the quarterback, as they did Favre. I dislike the man, but he kept popping up like a Punchinello even when his ankle was beaten and twisted to a pulp, I grudgingly give him his due. He lost by his own weakness, a love of the risky cross-body pass, which a sharp-eyed Saint defender picked up on and picked off. That kind of defense I admire; I deplore ‘kill the quarterback’.

On the other hand my dander gets up when I read in the NYTimes a litany of missed calls by officials in the game, most if not all in favor of the Saints, especially including the now infamous double hit on Favre, from above and from below, too far below. The article deceitfully implied, without saying so outright, that the officials gave us the game. Listen, you blockheads, the final score is the final score, and can you count the Vikings’ turnovers, you blockheads?

I am pleased to hear that the celebrating, drunken crowds in the Quarter on Sunday evening did not riot and vandalize property, as we would expect in any European city after European football. I am pleased, but not surprised. Isn’t this the way we are in New Orleans? After, we say, “we’re not Philadelphia or Chicago,” placing the madding crowd a lot closer to home. Now the Carmelite nuns in New Orleans became huge Saints fans this season, and they prayed — with gusto and almost ecclesiastical violence — for St. Joseph to help them. “When we won the toss in overtime, I knew we had it,” chortled Sister Miriam, who obviously has been watching the NFL every weekend (!). Then another sister, perhaps the Mother Superior, or whatever, explained, “we knew what it meant when the ball went through the goalposts and the referee raised his arms! We understood that, we knew!!” (applause and delight all around from the sisters). “And the warmth and kindness of the crowds, no violence — these are godlike qualities,” she added, projecting her vision of the world onto New Orleans. The identification of the city and the Saints, resurrection and redemption, death and rebirth — these are all eternal verities, I guess.

Oh, well, it’s all for the good. I still dislike football, aside from what the Saints are doing — football, a game where much of importance that we have just witnessed is reviewed, challenged and nullified, as though it never happened at all. Not so in baseball (except for the very recent admission of instant replay review of playoff homers, upon challenge, which I deplore).

Next week, let’s get Manning! On him, Saints! Knock him down!

gmc

Morphophonemics and the Rule of Intensity Attraction

2010-01-24T12:14:00.000-08:00

January 23, 2010

Morphophonemics and the Rule of Intensity Attraction

I am going to try explaining Jakobson’s famous article of 1948, which remains perhaps the single most influential study on the formal description of verbal morphology of all time, prefiguring Chomsky’s “Sound Pattern of English” and many others. Scholars have spent their lives working out the ramifications of Jakobson’s truly visionary 13-page sketch.
So in simple terms, or as simple as I can make them, for you who have learned a few, or maybe more than a few, Russian verbs and how they work.

First, morphophonemic transcriptions. This is the alphabet of the deep (abstract) base form of verbs. One abstract base form per verb. Choose as your basic form, Jakobson says, the one which may occur in the environment where the other one, too, may occur. What? Let me quote that precisely.

“We take as basic the alternate which appears in a position where the other alternate too would be permissible.” Take Russian я смотрЮ, pronounced smatr’—U and ты смОтришь, pronounced smOtr’—iš. (I write all stressed vowels as capitals). These are phonemic transcriptions, where we see that the vowel ‘o’ occurs under stress, while the vowel ‘a’ occurs outside of stress. Now, we choose the variant smOtr’— as basic because we could, conceivably, have a phonemic word smAtr’—, but we couldn’t have a phonemic smotr—U, because ‘o’ always reduces to ‘a’ outside of stress. That helps us pick the morphophonemic base: the one with ‘o’, even if ‘a’ occurs in most of the present tense forms.

A more complex example is the Russian word печь, ‘bake’, conjugated пекУ печёшь печёт печём печёте пекУт, past tense пёк пеклА пеклО пеклИ, infinitive печь. Now the phonemic transcription mirrors the softening of consonants and reduction of vowels: p’ik—U, p’ič—O-š, p’ič—Ot, p’ok—#, p’ik—l-A. Study these carefully. Soft ‘p’before the vowels. ‘e’ reduces to ‘i’ outside of stress. Past masculine has ‘o’, the other pasts ‘i’. What should be the basic form here? Here again we look for the stressed position. Now, ‘o’ is not admitted between two soft consonants, in normal standard Russian, so the infinitive is forced to печь , where both the p’ and č are soft (we don’t write č’to indicate softness, because č is always and everywhere soft). But both ‘o’ and ‘e’ can occur after a soft consonant and before a hard, as пёк ‘he baked’, and сек ‘he chopped’. So the basic morphophonemic form is p’ok—, unstressed. This, even though the vowel ‘o’ only actually occurs in the masculine past; that’s because it is forced out by the environment in all the others. We look at the phonemic shapes to see how the pronounciation will be, but we look to the morphophonemic shapes to see the underlying base.

So you are actually learning morphophonemics and phonemics when reading the first few pages of this article. Just another example or two. Take the verb лежАть ‘to be lying’, я лежУ ты лежИшь он лежИт они лежАт, лежAл, лежAла, gerund (with the meaning ‘lying, recumbent’ лёжа. Here are some phonemic shapes: l’iž—A-t’, l’iž—U, l’iž—I-š, l’Oža. Again the base form will be l’ož—a; ‘o’ is turns to ‘i’ unstressed after soft.

One more example: ‘to drink’, пить, пью пьёшь пьёт пьём пьёте пьют, пил, пилА, пили, imperative пей. In this verb we see an example of a situation that comes up frequently in the Russian verb: there seems to be one stem for the infinitive and past tense, and another for the present. Indeed, if we take the non-syllabic p’j— as the base (the present stem) we add the vocalic endings, and for the nonpresent forms, there has to be a vowel inserted, with which ‘j’ will alternate — ‘i’. Compare, for a very productive category, the present stems d’elaj—, pon’imaj— with the past stems dela—, pon’ima—. Here we see that a resonant (j), or potentially any consonant, will be truncated before another consonant — that is, any nonpresent ending. VC and CV are permitted across the boundary from stem to full form, but VV and CC are not.

In this way Jakobson turns the question “one stem or two” into a deeper observation about the behavior of morphophonemes when in contact with each other.

Wait a minute, how do we get the imperative пей? Why isn’t that the basic stem? Well, because the ‘e’ would have to be deleted in every other form, or changed to ‘i’. Better to assume that the imperative has an inserted ‘e’, since, of course, a word cannot be nonsyllabic in Russian verbs, so p’j— inserts the vowel but keeps the ‘j’ before zero. The ending of the imperative will be zero, as it is unless the ending is stressed.

If unstressed, the present tense endings begin with a high vowel, ‘u’ for 3rd person and ‘i’ for the others. This is called the rule of intensity attraction. The diffuse (high, or close) vowels i, u appear when the endings are unstressed, or of weaker intensity. Thus плАчут, плАчешь, плАчет, пИшешь пИшут, вИжу вИдишь, вИдют [this is older Moscow pronunciation for a present-day mid central vowel]. Note that e and и boil down to the same phoneme here, ‘i’, because if the e is unstressed (weak), it goes up to the diffuse, or weaker, high vowel, and the third pl ending я, if unstressed, in older Moscow norm went to у. (But not any more, which seems to vitiate the rule.)

More later. That wasn’t so bad, was it?

Oh When the Saints

2010-01-19T07:51:00.000-08:00

January 19, 2010

Oh When the Saints

I pull for the Saints only for the city’s sake. I don’t like football and don’t like to watch it; the emotional strain is overpowering and the brute physicality of the game numbs. I’m a baseball man. I like the long, slow, subtle poetry of the season.

Kurt Warner, in one play, was covered by Saints’ defenders ‘like a pack of wolves’. The winners willed themselves to victory by sheer straining effort — so unlike baseball, where all is restraint, calm, alert observation. The Cardinals had a fine, lithe runner, Hightower, who scooted to a touchdown on the very first play, plunging the Dome into tombal silence; they had a wonderful receiver who made his presence known, too late, in the second half. Yet generally the Cardinals impressed me as light, ethereal, quick but not thunderous, like the Saints. They didn’t have a chance.

It is true, Reggie Bush was thrilling. The touchdown run in the first half, when he found himself for a moment surrounded by defenders, and whirled two or three times like a dancer, and then just about literally disappeared from the scene for a score. Like Roadrunner. It was superb entertainment.

The flea-flicker, too, is a joy to behold — when it works, as it did Saturday.
The Saints, toward the end, refrained from smashing Warner to the ground, instead, supporting him when he was caught. A gallant gesture. So too, was Warner gallant, when he went after the Saint who had intercepted his pass — and, in the process, Warner was just about killed. He could have suffered a serious head injury, not a “shoulder injury,” which would have put me in the hospital for two weeks, while Warner returned to play the second half. He himself admitted he was concerned. “I will have to think about playing another year or not.” I’d say he’ll have to think. Don’t do it, man.

What’s going to happen next Sunday? The Saints have waited so long for this. Let’s hope Favre doesn’t carve us up for dinner. Kill ‘em, Saints! Hammer them! We can beat those Vikes! Who does Favre think he is, the old bastard, coming back at his age? Hammer him down, boys.

gmc

Oddments

2010-01-19T07:13:00.000-08:00

January 16, 2009

Oddments

Some patches of thoughts. Some words where stress in Russian really makes a difference: трУсить трУшу means ‘go chicken, chicken out’, while трусИть мукУ means ‘pour flour’. Flour is мукА, while ‘torture’ is мУка. Those of us who read more literature than cookbooks tend to forget about flour.

We say ‘pour the water’or ‘pour the sugar’, while Russian has two verbs, лить for liquids, and сыпать for grain, appropriate for a people to whom bread is so important.
Someone says to Kirillov in Dostoevsky’s The Devils: Не вы съели идею, а вас съела идея, ‘you didn’t swallow an idea, you have been swallowed by an idea’, literally, you (acc) ate (vb) an idea (subj). The object-verb-subject word order, possible in this highly inflected language, is a good way to do a passivization, and here the speaker wants to keep the words in the same order in each parallel clause.

Ободрать, обдирать ‘strip (bark) of a tree’ and обобрать, обирать ‘pick (berries), take from’ both may mean ‘steal, fleece’. The prefix o(б) has the sense of movement all around the surface of a three-dimensional object or a group of entities, objects, or people, as in обходить все мазазины ‘go around to all the stores’.

The word for ‘now’ in Russian comes as two. Сейчас is deictic, that is, it has a precise nearness to the moment of speech, meaning ‘now’, ‘in just a minute from now,’ or ‘a moment ago’. Thus its tremendous frequency in spoken Russian: сейчас скажу, мама сейчас пришла, сделаю это сейчас же ‘I’ll tell you in a second’, ‘Mother just now came in’, ‘I’ll get it done at once’. It rarely is completely cotemporaneous with the moment of speech, as in ‘I’m now in the moment’. Note in rapid speech он ща придет ‘he’ll be here in a second’. Теперь, on the other hand, is non-deictic. Its function is textual, referencing the experiential past that led up to now. Теперь я могу жить и работать как следует ‘now I can live and work the way one should’, теперь мы начнем четвертую главу ‘we will now begin chapter four’, а теперь я сыраю романс Шумана, ‘and now I will play a Schumann romance’.

The word давно ‘a long time (ago)’ is deictic and refers to the speech event, unlike долго ‘for a long time’. Oн давно умер ‘he died a long time ago’, это было давно уже ‘this was a long time ago’. In a related sense the word refers to an event or a process which took place, or began to evolve, a long time ago, seen from the speech time, and is still going on. Он давно спит, мама давно пришла ‘he has been asleep for a long time’, ‘mother arrived quite a long while ago’. It can refer to an event which preceded another past event by a long time: он давно уже стал врачом в нашей деревне, когда его жена уехала в Петербург, ‘he had already long since become a doctor in our village when his wife left for Petersburg’. This is effectively a contextual pluperfect, with давно and a distant-past P verb.

The constative past I, which I discussed recently in my аspect blogs, refers to a past event which is not deictically connected with the present moment. Я читал Войну и мир,vs. я прочитал Войну и мир ‘I have read War and Peace (and we can now talk about it)’.

Nouns, too, can have different kinds of aspectual dimensionalities. Compare ‘old house’, ‘old dog’, ‘old man’, ‘old exercise’, ‘old student’ (?), ‘old picture’. In each case in both English and Russian we have the same adjective. The word старинный adds a patina of positive value to the last period of age, which may last well beyond the expected. Старинная ваза ‘antique vase’, старинные обычаи ‘old-fashioned customs’ (this may be condescending, which is one of the ways we look upon age). Старый праведник ‘the old righteous man’ is incongruous, but старый сладострастник, or, as Connie Garnett translated this phrase in The Brothers Karamazov, in her illimitable Victorian English, ‘the old voluptuary’. In English we can say ‘the old bastard’ of a man who is quite young; Southerners say ‘this old hole’ as a kind of affectionate-augmentative. The title of the TV show This Old House names a house that isn’t necessarily old at all, but has gone through at least one past stage and needs to enter a new one.

Aspect is a way of viewing, of understanding. of entering into entities and becoming one with them. In Slavic aspect has a way of sneaking up on you and tricking you. Remember our old friend пИсать пИсаю ‘urinate’? Well, there’s a common verb записать meaning ‘note down, register’, and the past passive participle is записан. So that a записанный лифт can be a ‘registered elevator’ or, possibly, especially in Russia, a ‘pissed-on elevator’ (cf. Белки и Вова: “Нет, Белка, нет, нельзя!”)

Well.

gmc

Aspect II

2010-01-12T09:16:00.000-08:00

Aspect II

January 12, 2010

Let’s look again at how aspect is formed. Take a telic I verb, that is, one that aims at a goal, a completion or boundary-crossing, such as искать ‘look for, search for’, (ищу ищешь ищут) a telic verb that is resolved in the moment of discovery. With the prefix раз– the diffuse, bare verb gains a kind of contoured, more specified, concretized meaning, ‘search with intensity, across a certain territory’; the P разыскать means to search out and successfully find. The marked derived I разыскивать is a contoured process verb culminating in the achievement event itself. Cf. рвать I ‘tear’, P оторвать ‘tear off’, разорвать ‘tear up’. This is always a happy blending of prefix and root verb, and can be compared to English function word and verb, as ‘seek out’, ‘find out’, ‘look up’, ‘write down’, ‘sing through’. The verb alone is always a diffuse and unshaped notion, while the function word, or prefix, gives it contour, direction, territorial locus.

A key difference is the extra sharpness of focus we get in the inevitable Russian I ~ P, or P ~ I. If the verb is P, you know some sort of goal has been reached. If the verb is I, however, as in English, only context can tell you. So I is excellent for simply naming a process, activity, or state, without saying there is a boundary. This is especially interesting in the I past ‘constative’, or naming an event that ‘happened’ once, at least, in the past, without asserting any change of state.

Here are some examples of the I constative. Приходила мама ‘mother came’ (implying, most likely, that she left again and is no longer there), vs. пришла мама ‘mother came (she arrived, she is here now), which is very close to a perfect in meaning, with present relevance. Cf. кто здесь открывал окно? who had the window open here? (implying it is now closed, but the wind blew over a flower pot), vs. кто здесь открыл окно? ‘who opened the window here?’ (the window is wide open at the moment of speech). Some of the restrictions on these constatives are very strange and counter-intuitive. In wh- questions ‘asking for the agent or instigator’, the I is very common: кто сгроил этот дом? ‘who build this house?’ (the completed building is in plain view). One does not say, however, кто писал Войну и мир? ‘who wrote War and Peace?’; one must say, willy-nilly, кто написал Войну и мир?, with the P verb. Ехplanations for this are ad hoc: this is an eternal work of art and exists beyond a printed book or a cybertext, etc., which, in their appeal to aesthetic nirvana don’t strike me as convincing.

The I is supposed to be possible in the constative meaning if the focus is diverted from the essential event itelf. Example. You see a friend who has a nice haircut. You say: — Tебя неплохо подстригли, ‘You have a nice haircut there’. Спасибо, he says. You say: Кто подстригал? ‘who cut your hair?’ In a sense the I here is a kind of verbal reference to the original P event. Example. Здесь я написал мое первое любовное письмо к Аде ‘here I wrote my first love letter to Ada.’ Then you add писал карандашом ‘I wrote it in pencil’, referring to the first instance, a P, with an I, and focusing on the instrument.

So it is not true, not true at all, that a I past can be translated “was ....x-ing,” as in French j’écrivais le livre ‘I was writing the book’. Any event in Russian can be denuded of its goal or boundary-crossing and made into a ‘mere’ process.

Verbal Aspect I

2010-01-09T13:55:00.000-08:00

January 9, 2010

Dear Students,

Well, here I am again with my boring, rambling lectures. I look forward to the Spring semester, as my classes get pared down, the chaff drops away and the fruit of the field remains. Excellent! Welcome to 2010, which in my numbering system for files, is 10. So January 9, 2010 is 100109. The first day of the year was a binary number, 100101, which, as you know, is 29. Is that right? Sounds right to me. Any mathematicians here?

You know that there is a binary opposition of two aspects in the Russian verb system, a privative opposition, wherein the perfective (P) always bears a semantic marker, and the imperfective (I), is unmarked. So we say the perfective signals change of state (A > B), crossing of a boundary, completion of an event or beginning/end of a process; the imperfective doesn’t signal anything at all. Formally, the P is marked by its prefix: прочитать –– читать, but the derived imperfective is marked by its suffix: прочитать > прочитывать ‘read through’. The I usually bears one of two canonical meanings: it means an event or action in process: я читаю книгу, я читал книгу ‘I am reading a book’, ‘I was reading a book’ or an iteration of events: ‘I read books’, ‘I used to read books’. Note that the I past can mean ‘I read the book’, ‘I read a book’: я читал книгу. But the P past я прочёл/я прочла книгу means ‘I read the book, finished it’, or, with perfect meaning, ‘I have read the book’. These meanings are specific to P; they are explicit, they are there, at hand. If the I means one of those, it is submerged in context.

There is a wide range of meanings here, as every single verbal idea has to be either P or I, but not both and not neither. As Jakobson used to say, “in English, verbs have aspects [e.g. progressive aspect: I am singing], but in Russian, aspects have verbs.”
This then entails that specific contexts have very specific ways of implementing the semantics of P and I. For example, to say something is forbidden, one uses the I; to say it is physically impossible, the P: нелься переходить улицу ‘do not cross the street/, нельзя перейти улицу ‘it impossible to cross the street’.

The imperative, when expressng a polite invitation to a social action, like ‘sit down’, ‘come in’, ‘take off your coat’, is normally I. So: садитесь, входите, раздевайтесь. Giving an order to a dog to sit, stand, or lie, one uses the familiar P: сядь, ляг! A doctor examining a patient may say сядьте сюда на стол, ‘sit over here on the table’, since politeness is not an issue. When responding to a knock at the door — and one doesn’t know who is there — one will use the P: войдите ‘come in’. If one recognizes the visitor, the polite I takes over: входите.

In the infinitive, when conceptualizing a complex action of intellectual experience, one has to use the P: я хочу увидеть Красную площадь, я хочу прочитать эту книгу, я хочу рассказать вам, как это было ‘I want to see Red Square’, ‘I want to read this book’, ‘I want to tell you how it was’. These forced P infinitives may strike us as too strict. Why P, when I don’t necessarily know if I want to read the whole book? And I thought увидеть meant ‘catch a glimpse of, see’. Well, not exactly always.

Still the basic meaning of I and P somehow is there. A good example: дом еще не загорелся (P), но несколько раз загорался (I ) ‘the house hasn’t burned down yet, but several times it caught on fire’.

Context is all.

gmc

New Hawk Flies Into Hall

2010-01-06T15:00:00.000-08:00

January 6, 2010

At 2:00 pm EST today Andre Dawson was elected to the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.
A humble man who worked ceaselessly to perfect his great gifts, called “Hawk” for his intense gaze, he gave Cubs’ fans happiness in the arts of the outfield done well. They salaamed him in the right field bleachers for his dignity and his excellence, waiting, with just the right angle of vision, for Dawson to throw behind not a runner but the batter rounding first, or even to throw a batter out at first on a sharp single to right.
Only he and Willie Mays hit over 400 homers and stole over 300 bases. Well, Mays and Dawson and one other of ill repute, the bionic man Bonds, who squandered his own great gifts in dishonor.

Sandberg, another man known for silent professionalism, praised Dawson more than any other colleague and outspokenly demanded the election that at last, today, came to pass.
I remember Cubs announcer Jack Brickhouse, with the Expos at Wrigley, telling his listeners ominously, “And here comes Andre Dawson. He murders the Cubs here.” And inevitably, wham, there went the game again. But lo and behold (Lo and behold, said Humbert), Dawson became a Cub, under, for him, humiliating circumstances that we would not be given to understand for some time. And now hear Brickhouse: “Here’s Andre!” And there was hope again.
We also remember moments that are indelibly inscribed on the mind’s eye of imagination, indelibly, never to disappear. One day in Wrigley, the afternoon sun long in the sky, the Cubs trailing 6-4, two out, bottom of the ninth. It is a Saturday afternoon in July, in the 1980s; the stadium is filled with fans who didn’t yet have to pay $140 a seat (I know; I was there). A man gets on base; no matter who. Dawson is up. He gets a low curve ball over the plate but very low, and muscles it on a line over the basket in left to tie the game. A surprised roar of delight rises and echoes in the stadium, just as everyone is preparing for departure we are stopped in our tracks. The game goes on for several innings before the (inept) Cubs finally win a game that Andre willed them to win.

That’s one indelible memory; a truism, but a true one nevertheless.

gmc

Finale for fall semester

2009-12-04T14:06:00.000-08:00

Finale

December 4, 2009

Dear Students,

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

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

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

GMC

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

2009-12-01T15:03:00.000-08:00

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

December 1, 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

gmc

Men and Women at Russian

2009-11-28T17:54:00.000-08:00

Men and Women at Russian

November 28, 2009

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

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

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

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

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

gmc

Some Nasty Words

2009-11-25T09:40:00.000-08:00

Nasty Words We Don’t Appreciate

November 25, 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

gmc

What's it All For?

2009-11-23T08:48:00.000-08:00

What’s It All For?

November 23,2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is what it's all for.

gmc

Bad Day in Black Rock

2009-11-20T08:56:00.000-08:00

November 20, 2009
Teacher/Course Evaluations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Really and sincerely,

gmc

Matters of Life, Death and Sex

2009-11-19T08:10:00.000-08:00

Matters of Life, Death and Sex
November 19

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

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

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

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

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

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

gmc

Minorities in Russian

2009-11-15T14:53:00.001-08:00

Minority Students of Russian

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

gmc

Our Father Who Art in Heaven

2009-11-12T09:46:00.000-08:00

Our Father Which Art in Heaven

November 12, 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

gmc

Tsar of all the Russias

2009-11-11T14:23:00.000-08:00

November 11, 2009

Tsar of All the Russias

November 11, 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

gmc

Truth

2009-11-09T08:41:00.001-08:00

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

2009-11-09T08:29:00.000-08:00

Irrealis

November 9, 2009

Dear Students,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

gmc

Learning Languages at Their Feet, or Meeting my Expectations

2009-11-05T14:29:00.000-08:00

November 5, 2009

Learning Languages at Their Feet, or Meeting My Expectations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Registration for Spring, 2010

2009-11-04T14:00:00.000-08:00

November 4, 2009

Registration for Spring, 2010

Dear Students,

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

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

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

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

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

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

gmc

Slow Reading

2009-10-31T07:22:00.000-07:00

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?

2009-10-25T14:42:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-24T09:42:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-21T08:47:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-15T14:12:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-13T07:21:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-10T15:11:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-08T12:29:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-04T14:29:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-03T14:59:00.000-07:00

Dear Students,

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

How to Learn Russian in a University

2009-09-29T14:27:00.000-07:00

Sept 29

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

gmc

Russian Native Speakers — Again

2009-09-26T14:26:00.000-07:00

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

Why Russian Native Speakers Can't Teach Russian

2009-09-25T09:09:00.000-07:00

Dear Students,

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

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

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

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

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

gmc

Tarantino Again

2009-09-22T14:15:00.000-07:00

Dear Students,

Tarantino Again
Sept 23

Dear Students,

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

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

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

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

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

gmc

The Greatcoat

2009-09-18T09:45:00.000-07:00

Dear Students,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

gmc

Tarantino and Language

2009-09-16T09:03:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

Hamlet живет здесь

2009-09-15T09:17:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

Hamlet: What man dost thou dig it for?

Graved: For no man, sir.

Hamlet: For what woman, then?

Grave: For none, neither.

Hamlet: Who is to be buried in it?

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

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

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

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

Russian Pig

2009-09-10T12:10:00.000-07:00

The Russian Pig

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

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

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

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

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

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

gmc

Slavic Heritage Students

2009-09-09T07:48:00.000-07:00

Dear Students,

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

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

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

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

Who is Taking Russian 101?

2009-09-06T10:34:00.000-07:00

Dear Students,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

gmc

The Importance of Written Assignments

2009-09-03T14:56:00.000-07:00

Dear Students,

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

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

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

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

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

gmc

Milk and the Second Pleophony

2009-09-01T09:15:00.001-07:00

Dear Students,

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

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

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

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

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

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

More on Czech and Russian

2009-08-31T14:35:00.000-07:00

Dear Students,

On the perfective of делать: in Russian с– here, as in сделать is close to a zero perfective (a P without additional prefixal meaning). Though there is no single Russian prefix that dominates as a 'zero', we would think of по– and за– before с–, and in Czech, u- is a zero P only for a small group of verbs, usually perception-verbs — cf. Russian увидеть 'catch a glimpse of'. In one class a group of students who knew Russian began mechanically conjugating what they were guessing was the P of dělat, podělat: podělám, poděláš... But beware! this means 'I will defecate, you will defecate...' I say this simply as an illustration of the perfidy of the 'reasonable guess' in Slavic aspect.

Russian has ничего не поделаешь 'you can't do anything about it' as a modal P, indefinite subjectless; otherwise, usually сделать as zero P. Cf. не скажу 'I can't tell you' in another modal usage of the P future mentioned in class.

I think it is best to learn a few very important verbs as P/I pairs, as in my handouts. When we take a longer look at motion verbs, we will see a good number of prefixed P's and derived I's with spatial meanings in the prefix. These meanings may develop other meanings connected with time. We have seen уйти, уходить, прийти, приходить, выйти, выходить in some very basic spatial meanings: (1) go away from (2) come to (3) come/go out of. Remember some of the salient examples from the videos.

Лена, ты уходишь? Куда, если можно спросить? 'Lena, are you leaving (=going out)? Where, may I ask?

Koгда ты придёшь домой? When will you get home?

Профессор сейчас в оффисе? Нет, он вышел. 'Is the professor in his office?' 'No, he's stepped out.'

(в метро) Вы выходите на следующей остановке? 'Are you getting off at the next stop?'

pdf, htm and Russian; why the Czechs hated Russian

2009-08-30T11:32:00.000-07:00

Dear Students,

In posting my assignments for the coming week I notice that I am wavering between htm word-built files and pdf files. Both work fine, of course, and both print out well, but the pdf is fully formatted to the page. I am sometimes adapting old files from earlier versions of my courses, which means that either I rewrite the old file, be it pdf or web page, or give it to you unchanged but with commentary. I begin to feel that the old files all ought to be rewritten and revised for dates as well as commentary and analysis. I am still getting into the swing of the semester, as you can see.

In fact I dislike and distrust Word and write all my non-teaching documents in Mellel (a Tel Aviv-based application) and then pdf-them, as the internet does not understand Mellel. So I guess the answer for me is to make everything pdf and rewrite all my past pedagogical work.

I often meet students who have had excellent high school Russian backgrounds, sometimes as many as three years. Preparation of this thoroughness is much rarer in Russian than in familiar Western languages, but it can be an excellent foundation. Meeting every day and speaking the target language is the ideal. It is strange to think that, for example, a student with two years of high school Russian would be placed in 102 — meaning she will have to wait for Spring to enroll; a student with three years of Russian should surely go into 203, one would hope or expect, but it's not always the case. Connor in my 203 has been a year away from Russian, but I can see his preparation was very solid and that he is quick with languages. Everyone is different. A great high school teacher can make a big difference.

One has to want to learn a language, so much work goes into it. In Soviet Czechoslovakia, Russian was required and few people but linguists, Slavists, readers of literature, and other intellectuals really wanted to learn Russian; it was roundly despised by the hoi polloi because it stood for the occupying nation and its language of hegemony. (See Jan Sverak's Czech movie Kolja.) Some witty jokes circulated mocking Russian: куда вы идёте? 'where are you going?' was facetiously translated into Czech as kam jdete, idiote? 'where are you going, idiot?', and я забыл свою домашнюю работу 'I have forgotten my homework' became Czech zabil jsem pana domácího 'I have murdered the concierge' (see the retro movie Rebelové).

It is the case that neighboring language groups, like neighboring villages, tend to despise one another. The folk etymology for Budweiser, coming from the name of a Bohemian village, is 'there will be more of them (people)' — probably the linguistic invention of people from the next town.

2009-08-27T09:14:00.000-07:00

Dear Students,

It's been an eventful first week. I believe no one in my classes is exhibiting Swine flu symptoms, so that's one plus. The tropical depression of the week will be diverted to the Atlantic, as have the previous ones.

Technology ages so rapidly that we are caught in the interstices. The video player on my "smart console" in 119 can't rewind, and as far as I can tell there is no remote supplied; therefore to show you a scene, I have to set the cassette in the language lab before every class. That's a bother, but not so much as what I did in some past years: push a TV plus video player from the fourth floor to the basement classroom and return it immediately after class. Now, if I call technical support about the rewind on my console, they'll say they have to remove the video unit to repair it, so I would lose video for a month or so. Perhaps I could call and ask for a remote. Ironically, there's a phone in the classroom with a direct line to the support people, who are very helpful and well-trained. I think I'll try it next week and ask for a remote.

We'll have a short quiz both in 101 and 203 on Friday, 28 August. It's a pop quiz, more of an exercise than a quiz. In 101 I will dictate some names of famous people, e.g. Фёдор Михайлович Достоевский, Иосиф Виссарионович Джугашвили, etc. Don't tell anyone in class, but the first looks very good, with that й in there. In 203 I'll just ask some questions about the 7.1 text, and maybe something like на каком курсе, на каком факультете вы учитесь? I like to have papers to correct as it helps the students and helps me to diagnose problems very early on. Only people reading this will know as it is just a check on how things are going this first week. Reading this blog is not required, but I hope it will be valuable.

gmc

2009-08-24T14:39:00.001-07:00

Dear Students,

It's been an eventful day and it was a pleasure to meet you all.
203 students for tomorrow T 25 Aug please напишите краткое сочинение на тему: О себе. Мой главыный предмет, что я хочу делать после Тулейна, и т.д.

101 please find the site www.tulane.edu/~gcummins and read the syllabus; get the text and learn the alphabet!

That's a lot for a chaotic first day. Keep in mind: if you don't do the complete assignment, don't be concerned, come to class in any case (not if you have Swine Flu).

Remember that Tuesday classes don't meet in the same room. Check the Schedule of Classes on the Registrar's page.

The first week is a time for stretching and getting used to change. Get on a good diet, get enough sleep. The weather is perfect.

gmc

2009-08-23T11:32:00.000-07:00

Dear Students,

The provost sent around a cautionary note asking faculty to have materials ready for Blackboard just in case we are closed for the Swine flu (he actually put it more delicately).

You will be able to find all assignments not on Blackboard, but on my site at www.tulane.edu/~gcummins. You can also print out pdf files of materials from that site. Blackboard is not a very good application, in my view. For years I've been trying to figure out how to get Blackboard to allow students at home to access site-licensed video and audio materials that belong to our textbook. It hasn't been possible outside of Tulane, or the Language Learning Center. I'm not allowed to put them on my own site, as that does not have access limited to my class. So I'm stuck — I can't use commercial products. In a pinch, I can record brief segments on my ipod and put them on the site for 101.

Im hoping we will not close for the flu, nor for a hurricane. If you have flu-like symptoms, do not come to class, but email me at cummins.g@gmail.com that you are ill, so I'll know what's up.

If we do close for one or another reason, I'll but some audio files on my site for 101. 203 will be accessing postcasts.

Итак, увидимся! Завтра начинается новый учебный год. Я буду рад вас видеть. До завтра,

гмс

2009-08-22T12:34:00.000-07:00

Dear Students,

As you will see on my syllabi, the textbook I have ordered for both 101 and 203 is Начало. This book has been much vilified by students and observers for its diffuseness and lack of apparent organization; the criticism is largely ignorant, even when it comes from those Russianists who do not themselves teach Russian. Nonetheless the criticism is not fully unjustified. Let me say just a few words.

For fifteen years we have not only been existing in post-Soviet history, but also in the 'communicative language-teaching era'. All, or many, or the majority, of the major textbooks for Russian, and many for a variety of other languages, including Czech, German, and others, look about the same: massive multi-moduled lessons with a spilling-out of contemporary photos, placards, social realia, aids and remarks in various type styles and a confusing array of video and audio aids. The instructor who knows that the real meat — grammar and vocabulary — is what's essential, not charming photos of well-known cathedrals, has to distill it himself as in an alembic.

My lesson plans are designed to burn off the crap and chaff and preserve the important materials, so that the student will do well to print out my handouts and follow my instructions closely. It will be well nigh impossible to actually find anything in this book, Начало, without my guide and index, and even then there are problems. One of the worst is that grammar is presented in stages from fuzzy to closer focus to near-to-complete, and the student neve knows where it started or ended. The justification for this is that this is how kids learn languages when they are thirteen months; but we adults are no longer so advantaged as to be one and a half. We have to ratiocinate. Chomsky said, with his usual penchant for sarcasm: "No one knows how to teach a language, so it is impossible. It has to be learned."

The first textbook I used at Tulane had no pictures and no realia. It had all the grammar and nothing but the grammar. Can you imagine how that book, no longer in print, would throw students into despair? I used that book, along with my own short stories, in Russian, to add some vocabulary spice. (The stories, Петя и Вера, presented a humble young mechanic in the Soviet Union who loved a snobbish, alcoholic, brilliant young woman who was a university student. She despised him but he loved her. There was a kind of pseudo-Tolstoyan glint in there, but not much else. I also wrote detective stories about Профессор Малышев, a university professor of Slavic who, in his spare time, solved murders.)

Those times have gone past, like the days of one's life, like so much used toilet paper, fluttering in the wind, glimpsed from the rear car of a passenger train. Nowadays we have to be, we want to be, we are — "communicative."

I do indeed believe in the use of the target language as much as possible in class, and students do want this too. It is a firm belief of mine that with a really good grammatical/lexical grounding in the university, one can get to fluency in-country much more rapidly than without. I know it in myself, and you, too will see that it works. But you need to follow my notes instead of despairing in the book. In 203 much of our work will be beyond, above and in other universes from that of "the book." Indeed, I must admit I have to work very hard to "learn a language' — a phrase with many faces — and I have always had trouble reaching true fluency. So I know from hard experience of failure.

The bright side is that you can do it, you are at least as talented as I, so you need only the motivation. Give me the suspension of disbelief, believe in my suggestions. This will be easy.

gmc

2009-08-20T09:09:00.000-07:00

Dear Students,

I note that the Registrar has assigned us a room, both for 101 and 203 — N119, which I optimistically believe, is smart. Excellent.

I have placed the syllabi for both courses on my site, www.tulane.edu/~gcummins. I will not print out copies for you, expecting that you have that capability. If not, please let me know and I will print out the syllabus for you. You will find complicated assignments on the site as we move into our work, and it would be practical for you to print those out rather than refer only to the site. If you really have no easy access to a printer, let me know.

I recommend but do not require Genevra Gerhart's book "The Russian's World." The other text we will be using is my Helps to Russian Grammar, which you will find in pdf on the site.

The single most important requirement in my courses is regular attendance — not perfect homeworks by any means, but attendance. If you have to miss, just let me know, in advance, if possible, and if you are ill, email me.

The single most important requirement for learning a language is enjoying the process. If it is not fun it is not going to work. I liken it to regular physical workouts or to running; if you dislike it, it won't work, and if it gets monotonous, it won't work. When I run, I memorize poetry or long passages from Nabokov (like the Черныш excerpt some of you heard in my Nabokov course.) Reviewing and memorizing something not only reduces the pain, it is worthwhile and fun in itself, and it is a portal into meditation in movement. This isn't for everyone. You have to have your own path. The last language I tried to learn was Hungarian, and I got sidetracked after a summer, but I luxuriated in its strangeness — not a word was a cognate, while its rhythm was like that of the surrounding Central European languages, so it was strange and familiar at once. Try to find a good routine for studying Russian, in a place where you won't be interrupted.

Buddha be with you. Buddha is related to Russian будить 'awaken' < boudhh- or something. Slavic lost all aspiration inherited from Indo-European.

gmc

2009-08-19T09:19:00.000-07:00

Dear Students,

Today is August 19, Wednesday and the opening of the semester is around the corner.
Unfortunately I note that the registrar hasn't posted our meeting rooms — in fact most SLA courses (School of Liberal Arts -- that's languages, philosophy, music, art, English, sociology, history) aren't listed yet.

I hope we can get a smart classroom for both 101 and 203, as visual modules are important to our work. 101 has a charming video that I find very useful.

For 203 and for later in 101 I recommend the podcasts "Taste of Russian," (say that with a thick Russian accent!) They have some refreshingly slangy and up-to-date podcasts on contemporary subjects, with full text available on their site. The designers are two men around thirty, I would guess, who are fully post-Soviet in their education, both with excellent senses of humor (чувство юмора) who have come up with coherent, tangy dialogue. I have always hated "conversation lessons" — Chomsky has some amusing remarks on that score — but these, for the most part, are good.

Try to get a Russian bilingual dictionary, perhaps the Oxford R-E and E-R in one small volume. It has a surprising amount of morphological information. I recommend Ожегов: Толковый словарь русского языка for investigating basic word usage, idioms, and verbal valence. Both are available at ruskniga.com (Brooklyn).

Chomsky on conversational lessons for foreign language students: one man worked like a beast learning "doing shopping" in German, all sorts of produce vocabulary and the like, numerals of course, syntax of questions (Wo ist Brot, bitte?). Proudly setting foot for the first time in a German store, he was confronted by another customer, who asked him, "Pardon me, sir, I've forgotten my glasses at home. Might you please read the label on this can for me?" The poor fool couldn't understand a word said to him.

The moral of the story I leave for you to find.

The word for Russian is, as you know "russkee" or русский. It comes from the name of the old East Slavic area, Русь, which makes a derived relational adjective by adding -ский. Русьский > русский. It denotes Russian as an ethnic group and as a language.

Best of luck in settling into New Orleans and Tulane.
gmc

Introduction

2009-08-11T11:33:00.000-07:00

Dear Students,

These postings will be a convenient way for us to communicate in Russ 101 (Introductory) and Russ 203 (third semester). Daily assignments will be given on my own site, indexed by date (www.tulane.edu/~gcummins).

Here I want to give you some ideas about how to study this — or any — language, ideas that I hope will be of use to you. I hope to be getting your responses and your own ideas as the semester and the academic year unfolds, or rolls on.

In my mind right now are Aug 29, 2005 and Aug 29, 2008, when our semesters were rudely interrupted before they got going by Katrina and Gustav. Always optimistic, I think all will be well this time. I note that we have a "fall break" this year (a couple of days, I think) and that our Aug 24 first-class date is the earliest in my long memory.

Many students ask me about a Russian dictionary. It's good to have one, as it isn't convenient to look everything up in the index of a textbook. There is the Langenscheidt's Russ-Eng Eng-Russ dictionary, that is ok; the Oxford Russian has a good deal of information about the inflection of words. These might be available in the trade book section of the Tulane bookstore, or use Ruskniga.com to order them. This is a dependable online site based in Brooklyn. Get an MP3 file of something in Russian, to listen to as you get more proficient. Prices are low and delivery is fast. There's a nostalgic, exile-like flavor to this site; most of the users left Russian in one or another wave of emigration. If you are just starting Russian, using Ruskniga might be a little tricky; find someone who has had a year of Russian to help you. (Heads-up: поместить заказ means 'place the order' and charge your credit card; be sure you know what you've ordered.

I don't imagine anyone will read this before classes start. Good luck as you settle in at Tulane. Please write if you have a question.
Sincerely,
G M Cummins
August 11, 2009