Ради Бога, and pass the Rosetta stone!

[philena]

We finally got past the point where we're just listening to a minutely-detailed and not so interesting or sink-in-able lecture on grammar, and have finally started reading texts! And it's fabulous! The assignment for Thursday is Matthew 4:1-25 (which is all of it), and the entire experience is thoroughly rewarding. I sit down, write out triple-spaced the text, figure out the forms of the verbs and the declensions of the nouns (there are 4 separate declensions for a noun, and within each declension a different paradigm for singular, dual, and plural, and within each of those there is a masculine, a feminine, and a neuter. I rely heavily on charts), write everything down in the spaces, and after all that is done I look back to see what words I don't understand. Only rarely is there something I can't figure out from its Russian cognate, and generally then it's an adverb of some kind. The best part is when something seems thoroughly weird, and then I read my version of it and I realize I was right! Or when something seems thoroughly weird but I'm pretty sure it's right, and then I read my version and realize that what the English translation says can't possibly line up with the OCS version I'm working with, which means that the meaning of the sentence for the Slavs was a different meaning. For example, in Matthew 4:6, there's a part that goes, "He shall give his angels charge concerning thee," which I've got as "He will order his angels about you (singular)." And the "about you" in my translation just seemed really clunky, but as it turns out I was right! And then there's the part in the next verse that goes "Again, the devil taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain, and showeth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them." And first of all, instead of "exceeding," the OCS just has "very," but the best is the part about the kingdoms of the world. Because as far as I can figure out, the agreement between "all" and "kingdoms" means that the noun can only be the dual accusative. Which means that actually the OCS says "Again, the devil took (aorist) him onto a very high mountain and showed (aorist) both of the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of it." (I guess it means the glory of the world--it's a singulary pronoun, not dual, and certainly not plural, which means it can't be the glory of the kingdoms.) All two of the kingdoms, yo! I'll find out in class tomorrow whether I'm right, but I'm pretty sure I am. Of course, another thing you have to deal with is the fact that this manuscript is actually transliterated from the Glagolitic, and also the inflectional endings tend not always to be spelled the same way, so the cities could somehow be plural. But I'm betting they're not.

Anyway, back to work! I've only gotten nine verses done, and I need 25 by tomorrow. But the motivation is crazy-strong!


Edit First, it has been brough to my attention that I never specified what language I'm talking about. The language is Old Church Slavonic.

Next, I take it back about the two kingdoms. In fact, what is going on is that in the Glagolitic alphabet (from which this text was transliterated), the difference between a and jat'* is lost, and when they are transliterated into Cyrillic they are just all transliterated as jat'. Now, jat' is the ending for the neuter accusative dual, while a is the ending for the neuter accusuative plural. Which means that the transliteration caused a plural to look like a dual. But it wasn't actually. Huh. Good to have figured that out!

*Jat' is a vowel which is not the same as a. We don't really know how it was pronounced.

Comments

so?

[annabananaface.livejournal.com]

What language is this in again?

Re: so?

[philena.livejournal.com]

Oops. Heh. Old Church Slavonic.

[parisienne.livejournal.com]

neeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeerd :)

[juniper949.livejournal.com]

are you taking the class with Victor Friedman? I loved this class. It was so much fun. (When I picked up my final VF told me that I had done better than anyone else!!)

[philena.livejournal.com]

I do not have any aspirations to do better on the final than anyone else, but I agree that the class--and Victor Friedman--is awsome. Except for this one grad student who is an obnoxious know-it-all, even though he hasn't actually prepared the material better than anyone else. He just acts as if he knows everything. The problem, of course, is that he is friends with other people in the class, who think it's funny and affectionately call him a brown-noser, while I'm the only one seething in my seat at the manifestation of The Kid who one would think should have had his Kid-ness knocked out of him well before grad-school!

[b0bb.livejournal.com]

What's your major?

Old Church Slavonic is not easily discernable even for Russian native speakers with linguistic education, but without special OCS training.

[philena.livejournal.com]

I'm double majoring in linguistics and Slavic languages. As far as I can tell, all the difficulty in OCS will be with the verbs. Even if you can't tell from a quick look what case a noun should be in, it tends to be clear from context (prepositions, obvious posessives, or simply a verb that demands Dative), but the verbs have all these different tenses and different stems and participles everywhere, and my Russian-accustomed brain looks at them all and goes boom.

[b0bb.livejournal.com]

Interesting.
What are the career choices with such a degree?
Purely academic? Or something in translatation/interpretation as well?