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Russian, impossible for English speakers? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Merv Bilingual Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5358 days ago 414 posts - 749 votes  Speaks: English*, Serbo-Croatian* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 57 of 58 22 June 2010 at 4:51am | IP Logged | ||
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I don't quite follow Bodmer's logic. The fact that Russian is more conservative than, say, Spanish, does not
reflect backwardness or isolation at all. After all, since he believes the Greco-Roman world was formative in the rise of Europe (and I agree), according to his ideas, Latin and ancient Greek, both of which are characterized by an extraordinary degree of inflection and rather complicated grammar, would also be "inferior." Russia's technological backwardness is more a result of the Mongol enslavement and being cut off (or even put off) from Western culture and trends by Germanic crusaders and a highly aggressive but rather culturally stagnant Roman Catholic power to the West (Poland-Lithuania). Russia chose as her "mentor" Byzantine Greece. That was OK back in 800 A.D. (when Byzantium was comparable to or ahead of the Holy Roman Empire/Italy/Moorish Spain), but in 1300 A.D., Byzantinum was in decline and culturally dying, and merely fighting for its survival at the hands of invading Muslim Turks (the death knell came in 1453). It took Russia a while to realize that it could not continue along this path and that it would have to turn to the West for interaction, and this was done mostly by Peter the Great and his successors. Russia and the Russian language have remained true to both cultural influences: a Slavic language written in a Greek-based Slavic-centered alphabet, highly influenced by the liturgical South Slavic language known as Old Bulgarian/Old Church Slavonic, with significant influences from Greek, French, German, Latin, and English as well. I have to say that it is a bit shocking to see people write disparaging comments on Slavic languages or more specifically the Russian language even in the early 20th century. By then, Russian had experienced a golden age in literature and Russian poets and novelists had shown themselves to be fully capable of keeping up with or, in many cases, superseding their Western contemporaries. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| publius Newbie United States Joined 5385 days ago 7 posts - 10 votes | Message 58 of 58 22 June 2010 at 12:15pm | IP Logged | ||
Exactly. Don't assume that Bodmer believed that Latin and Greek were the gold standard, against which all other languages are to be measured (and found wanting). That was a common belief among Englishmen of his day, but that's not what he wrote. Here's a quote from Loom of Language: "For three hundred years since the days of Leibniz and Bishop Wilkins, the movement for promoting an interlanguage which is easy to learn has been obstructed by the traditional delusion that Latin is peculiarly lucid and 'logical.' "In so far as the adjective logical means anything when applied to a language as a whole, it suggests that there is a reliable link between the form and the function of words. If this were really true, it would mean that Latin is an easy language to learn; and there might be a case for reinstating it as a medium of international communication. Though no one could seriously claim that Latin is as easy to learn as Italian, classical scholars rarely disclose the implications of the fact that it is not. The truth is that Italian is simpler to learn. . . . "In Latin, as in the more highly inflected living Indo-European languages such as German and Russian, the genitive is so elusive that Hermann Paul, a famous German linguist, defined it as the case 'that expresses any relation between two nouns. "The functional obscurities of the cases of classical Latin, in contradistinction to the well-defined meaning of the case affixes in an agglutinative language such as Finnish, would make it a difficult language, even if the case affixes were fixed as they are fixed in Finnish. The truth is that the connection between form and context is as flimsy as the connection between form and function. The irregularity of classical Latin burdens the memory with an immense variety of forms assigned to the same case." Earlier in the book, he makes much the same point, but rather more concisely and colorfully: "To all the intrinsic difficulties of learning a language such as Latin, old-fashioned grammarians and schoolmasters have added the distracting pretense that such table manners have a rational basis. This is false. The grammar of an agglutinating language such as Finnish (or Esperanto) is mainly concerned with meaning. The grammar of an amalgamating language such as Latin is mainly concerned with social ritual. If you hope to master a language such as Latin, the question you have to ask is not what any one of a half a dozen different affixes which grammarians describe as trademarks of the ablative case signify. They have no unique meaning. Each case affix of a Latin noun is the trademark of a shelf of diversely assorted idioms. The business of a learner who succeeds in emerging from the fog of false rationality in textbooks of classical grammar is to find out in what situations Latin or Greek authors use these affixes. The use of Latin case forms is a social habit, like eating asparagus with the fingers. The only reason for making an exception of asparagus is that the people with money do so." 1 person has voted this message useful |
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