kofe, stress, language, dogma, but no opera

[Alina Israeli]

>At least to my nonnative ear, it scans better as "vorЧn ni zhЗryat ni
>vЗryat."

It's iambic poetry: Вот ваши сестры - как хотят; А ведь Ворон ни жарят, ни
варят

A vEd' vorOn ni zhArjat nI varjAt


> Stem-stressed "zvonit'" is simply taken as a mark of a poorly educated
>person.

That's a dogmatic, not even prescriptive approach to language.

In 1973, Gorbachevich in "Trudnosti slovoupotreblenija i varianty norm
russkogo jazyka" (slovar'-spravochnik) (Nauka, Leningrad), p. 158 wrote:
zvonit', zvonjU, zvonIsh' i razg. zvOnish'.

1976, Rozental' i Telenkova in "Slovar' trudnostej russkogo jazyka" (Moskow
"Russkij jazyk"), p. 184: zvonIt', zvonjU, etc. [razg. zvOnish', zvOnit,
zvOnim, zvOnite, zvOnjat]


As I wrote earlier, purists decided to battle this verb since early in 19th
century, or it would have shifted, like varjAt -> vArjat, and no one would
have known by now that it used to be different.


>Lots of Moscow born and bred people make this mistake, and it really
>incenses those who don't.

That's an unfortunate sign of the stratification of the society. A few
stresses could be learned if need be; Margaret Thatcher learned to speak a
whole different way in order to fit in into the upper class where she
wanted to belong.

>It's very much like "lozhit'" instead of "klast'," "zalazhu" instead of
>"zalezaiu" etc. in being both pervasive and extremely irritating to those
>who don't say it.

This is a morphological anomaly that some prefixed verbs are conjugated
differently from unprefixed, i.e. lazit' - lazhu, oblazit' - oblazhu,
slazit' - slazhu, but with the prefix za- the pattern is broken. Those who
believe in the linguistic process of leveling of the paradigm should look
at those making this mistake with certain indulgence and think that maybe
in a century everybody will be speaking this way. It is when most people
make the same "mistake" that the mistake becomes norm.


>Just because it is a popular expression, does not mean it
>is correct.  Very many people speak incorrectly - or
>sloppily.  Idiomatic versus correct written/spoken usage.

As a mother you should correct your children, to be sure; as a teacher, you
should tell your student what is the accepted norm (accepted by the
Academy, by the dicitionaries published by the Academy), but as a linguist
you might be interested in linguistic facts expecially if you believe that
language changes and the dictionary that was considered a norm a generation
ago (Ushakov) is a bit obsolete, and even some language data has changed
since the publication of the 17-volume dictionary, which is hardly
surprising, 50 some years have passed since the first volume, 40 since the
last one.

>There is also the 'street language' or uneducated spoken
>language.

I wonder what the Latin luminaries were saying when they heard the Vulgar
Latin, which evolved into French, Spanish and Italian, as part of its later
mixing with the street language of uneducated people, because very few
could read and write, but they all could speak, I am sure of that.

I suggest a quick look at Chukovskij's book published in 1952 where he is
incensed with the use of "perezhivat'" in a sense of 'worry', even though
he called his book on Russian language "Zhivoj kak zhizn'". Those who grew
up after 1952 would not even know that this word was once controversial.

And finally kofe:

>My advanced students are reading "Nos" right now,
>where to their great glee, they found Ivan
>Jakovlevich having to choose between:
>
>" ... не буду пить кофий, - сказал Иван Яковлевич, -

It is somewhere in Chekhov "Даже кофий пила без всякого удовольствия" which
has become proverbial. The reason I am saying is that Chekhov was quite a
bit later. It is also found in early 20th c. lit.

__________________________
 Alina Israeli
 LFS, American University
 4400 Mass. Ave., NW
 Washington, DC 20016

 phone:    (202) 885-2387
 fax:      (202) 885-1076 

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