This postIn my phonology class today, the guy who sits behind me pulled out a copy of Crime and Punishment in Russian. Enter drool. Exeunt attention to professor and grades for this semester. Yes, I’ve decided to start reading C&P in Russian. Granted, I don’t know Russian, other than two or three words and 75% of the Cyrillic alphabet. But with a Russian-English dictionary in one hand, a Russian grammar book in the other, and a lot of patience, it shouldn’t be a problem. :)
I do have a role model in mind with this mad escapade, mind you. In Surprised by Joy, which unfortunately I didn’t bring with me to campus today, C.S. Lewis tells how the “Great Knock” (Kirk) would give him a cursory sketch of the grammar of Greek (or Italian or French or what have you) and then plunge straight into the texts, reading a hundred lines at a time and then having Lewis go through them himself. At first Lewis would only be able to get through a few of the lines, but eventually he was able to not only meet but even surpass his teacher’s quota. End result? He got really good at reading those languages. (Though he mentions having stopped progressing with one of them — Italian, maybe?) Anyway, I’m going to follow the same method and see what happens. I rather like the idea of jumping right in and dealing with foreign texts in their native habitat, rather than muddling through contrived examples, caught in nets and pierced onto chloroformed boards for inspection. (Um, if they don’t use chloroform to make those insects stay put, then just take what I said and replace it with the real thing. My science is rusty. :))
Speaking of texts in their native habitat, today’s reading for my Aeneid class brought us to the death of Priam. It was gripping! I didn’t quite have tears welling up but it was close, and when I got to “jacet ingens litore truncus, / avulsumque umeris caput et sine nomine corpus,” I got goosebumps. Most of my experience reading Latin literature has been purely intellectual, an exercise in translation. But with the Aeneid, and especially with this part surrounding Priam’s death, the text has started to come alive, to read as a story and not just as a sequence of lines to be translated. I feel like I’m actually reading. It’s great. :) I want to read Don Quixote in Spanish, Faust in German, Les Miserables in French, The Iliad and The Odyssey in Greek, the sagas in Old Icelandic, and so on. Ad infinitum, if I can. :) I wonder why I didn’t major in comp lit…
Anyway, I’ll close with a quote from my Language page on Blank Slate, about Thomas O. Lambdin (who happened to write the Coptic textbook I used):
…Prof. Lambdin simply does not dabble in his languages. He attacks them, not only with zeal (though that is always present), but with a plan, to conquer them. First, learn the basic grammar as it is commonly understood (or misunderstood), some basic vocabulary; read some texts. Then, like a linguistic pathologist, take the language apart: scrutinize the lexical bones, particularly those idioms, usually associated with the most common verbs, that present obstacles in every language; analyze the morphological muscles, render them unformidable; track down the syntactical tendons, overlooked by others. Meanwhile, put most of the dictionary on flash cards and commit it to memory. Now read the best of the literature like a native, until boredom sets in from lack of challenge, and it’s time to move on. The number and range of languages that have been subjected to this process is remarkable: there are the Semitic languages, of course; but also Berber, Finnish, Turkish, Swahili, Hindi, Chinese, and some fifty or sixty others, it seems…. And when called upon to transmit his knowledge and understanding, another side of his extraordinary linguistic ability came into play; as a teacher of language, he is simply the best. It is one thing to be able to learn languages; it is quite another to describe them with such clarity that others are able to gain a similar understanding. Occasionally, an available grammar would meet with his approval and be used. But more often, he would find the grammars too frustrating; if he did not feel comfortable with a language after going through a given grammar, he would not expect his students to. So he would write his own, a clear report of the dissection process described earlier, the morphology and syntax broken down into easily comprehended lessons, the vocabulary glossed in such a way that the words really do have meaning, and exercises, lots of exercises, written to ensure that the grammar and vocabulary make sense and are remembered, so that by the time the first texts are encountered, the language is an old friend, not a dimly perceived, refractory set of vaguely familiar forms.
Mmm. :)
