glokaja kuzdra

[Robert A. Rothstein]

Shcherba's famous sentence is "Glo'kaia kuzdra shte'ko budlanu'la bo'kra
i kudria'chit bokre"nka."  This is the version cited (complete with
accent marks as reproduced here) by Lev Vasil'evich Uspenskii in the
section "Glokaia kuzdra" of Chapter 6 (also called "Glokaia kuzdra") of
his book _Slova o slovakh_. The book was originally published in 1954;
the edition that I have in front of me was published by "Detskaia
literatura" in Leningrad in 1971 (in a combined edition with Uspenskii's
_Pochemu ne inache?_).  In this section Uspenskii tells how Shcherba
dictated the sentence to one of his students on the first day of his
"Introduction to Linguistics" and asked the student to analyze the
sentence.  This was in 1925 in the Institut istorii iskusstv in
Leningrad.
    According to K. V. Dushenko, the author of _Slovar' sovremennykh
tsitat_ (Moscow, 1997), p. 412, Uspenskii's 1954 citation of "Glokaia
kuzdra..." was the first time it ever appeared in print.  Dushenko also
cites an oral account by the writer Iraklii Andronikov to the effect
that Shcherba first version was "Kudmataia bokra shteko budlanula
tukasten'kogo bokrenochka."

                                                            Bob
Rothstein

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