In Berkeley

[philena]

First off, let me say that it is amazing, the extent to which Russian speakers miss very obvious grammatical errors in the sentences I give them on my listening tests, and then turn around and say that things are wrong in sentences which are completely okay. One might argue that they know the language better than I do, but these are sentences which I have surgically altered to make the verb not agree with the subject (plural subject, masculine singular past-tense verb), or sentences which I took from a published book that was assigned to my class to read (that is to say, if it's ungrammatical it got past the editor, my Russian professor, and all of us reading it). And these sentences are red herrings! It makes it much more difficult for me to point to the results of much more subtle tests and say that they show anything at all conclusive or even suggestive, considering that the speakers have already shown themselves to be unreliable.

But at least I don't really have to worry about that right now. I'm on break! I had a dreadful reading period/finals week, in which I need to prepare for three finals in a two-day period, and all my preparation time coincided with running my listening tests and being in the "Yeomen of the Guard", which meant I had no time whatsoever to study. I missed the cast party after the play was over because I had to study! In the end this was a good thing for my grades, but it meant that I couldn't say good bye to all my friends from the show, and this is my last year doing it, so I don't know if I'll ever see them again. *Sniff* At least Margaretta and Amy and I will hang out some, but I'll miss Francis and David and Bob and Kathy and Josie and Louis and Steve and Peter and Cedric and all of them. I'm going to try to come next year--it's "Iolanthe"!--but there's no guarantee that the people will still be there.

Mother dearest, I keep meaning to ask you, but forgetting when the proper moment presents itself. What is the rule for a pronoun like "whosoever," which can be both the object and a subject of a clause at the same time? I'm thinking of biblical prose that has sentences like "Who(m?)soever it touches will remember it." Is it "whosoever" because it is the subject of "touch," or is it "whomsoever" because it is the object of "touch"? I'd probably just use a "he whom," but it's a cop-out when you use a simpler construction because you don't want to have to deal with the more complicated one.* I'd like to know the rule. One of the psalms (I think the first one) has a similar construction, but it uses "whatsoever," so there's no way to tell what case it is.**

But for the moment I'm taking a break from all of this stuff. I'm on break, and I even did some BA work this afternoon: I went through Avanesov's Фонетика современного русского литературного языка and couldn't find the part that my BA advisor insisted was there; so then I took another book of his--Русское литературного произношение--and there was the claim! And although the book was very, very out of date, it's nice to have a citable claim that the sounds I'm looking at are presumably distinct. Then I have something to contradict! I also read all about the consonant "j" while I was searching in the first book for the part that wasn't there. That was fun ('j' is the death vowel for Old Church Slavonic, because although there's not a good systematic way of representing it in Russian, there is a way that works. In OCS there isn't, and it's impossible to tell apart from orthography certain words that in pronunciation presumably would have been distinct.) Then I had to prove to Daniel that "j" is in fact a consonant and not a vowel, which was more difficult than I would have thought. I think the most convincing argument was actually the fact that the "j" sound in Hebrew is a consonant, because as far as he's concerned, because the sound "ja" is spelled with one vowel letter in Russian (я), that means it must be a vowel.

But I'm not going to worry too much about this right now. (Hmm. Haven't I already said that?) I bought a fantasy book by Charles de Lint, and although the prose is not the best, the ideas are enticing, and if I like him, he's written much more stuff to read. (Even if I don't like him he's still written it.) That was always a consideration of mine in middle school when I was about to try a new author.

Hmm. I wonder if grades are up yet?

*Like the Russians re-arranging all their sentences so they don't need to decline the numerals.
**suddenleap, this may sound familiar.

Comments

[parisienne.livejournal.com]

Miss you friend!

[philena.livejournal.com]

Miss you too!