Terms "gerund" and "verbal adverb"

[Alina Israeli]

Some changes in terminology are useful for education purposes,  
elimination of the III declension is not: students never manage to  
remember that there is one hard feminine declension and two soft, and  
the second soft (formally III) is somehow totally different while the  
hard and the first soft are a basic variation of one another. So  
until you break it to them that this is not a variety but a different  
declension you do not get the proper instrumental с любовью,  
общественностью and the like.

As for modifiers vs. pronouns, I don't think Russians with a filfak  
education should at all object: one is part of speech (части речи)  
(noun, verb, pronoun), the other is part of a sentence (члены  
предложения) (subject, predicate, modifier, which is определение in  
Russian).

Whether to call it I and II conjugation or by thematic vowel — that  
is more or less six of one or half a dozen of the other, whatever one  
prefers, as long as they don't forget that the 3 person plural forms  
are distinctly different.

On Feb 6, 2008, at 8:55 AM, Richard Robin wrote:

> Changing traditional terminology to suit our learners is nothing  
> new. We
> used to talk about first and second conjugations. Now we talk about  
> е/ё- and
> и-theme verbs. We don't number the declensions as Russians do, but  
> rather
> give them descriptive names. And we refer to words like твой and  
> этот as
> modifiers, even though not calling them pronouns produces howls of  
> protests
> from Russians with a filfak education.
>
>

Alina Israeli
LFS, American University
4400 Massachusetts Ave., NW
Washington DC. 20016
(202) 885-2387 	
fax (202) 885-1076
aisrael at american.edu




-------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Use your web browser to search the archives, control your subscription
  options, and more.  Visit and bookmark the SEELANGS Web Interface at:
                    http://seelangs.home.comcast.net/
-------------------------------------------------------------------------