Ukrainian textbooks? (was NY Times - "The Retreat of the Tongue of the Czars")

[Robert DeLossa]

Tatiana Hursky finished a dissertation, "Ukrainian through Russian," 
in 1994 that was modeled on Charles Townsend's "Czech through 
Russian." For ordering information, please see the post script below. 
As was mentioned earlier, and graciously by Prof. Chernetsky, our 
textbook has a section at the end geared toward students who have 
learned Russian first. Native Russian speakers can use it for faux 
amis, but it is nothing near a full course for them.In Ukraine, as 
far as I know, Rozmovliaimo (our text) is used both at Shevchenko 
Univ. (in Kyiv) and Ukrainian Catholic Univ. (Lviv) for Ukr. as a 
foreign language instruction. Audio files keyed to the book are 
available for free download at www.rozmovliaimo.com.

BTW, the NYT article had a bit of a red herring that Max Pyziur has 
dealt with elsewhere: Ukraine's constitution guarantees the use of 
the Russian language, but also mandates the use of Ukrainian as the 
state language. Further to his comments, the reason that Harry Potter 
sells in Ukrainian is that Viktor Morozov would lock himself in a 
cabin and race to get a Ukrainian translation out faster than the 
Russian translations (wiki and traditional versions). I think the 
Ukrainian version was the first foreign translation for several of 
the volumes--if not all of them. Bilingual (Ukr.-Rus.) readers 
generally have commented that his translations are better reads than 
the Russian ones. That's art and commerce, not just politics. A major 
point the article skirts is that Russian in Ukraine is not going away 
in many places so much as it is turning into something new. Is anyone 
out there studying the ways in which, e.g., Crimean or Donetsk Basin 
Russian (not surzhyk) is changing under the influence of Ukrainian 
independence? I heard complaints a few years ago that it was getting 
increasingly hard to find first-rate Russian-language editors in 
major Ukrainian cities, which is a big deal, given the preponderance 
of the Russian-language press there.

Levy's article is very intelligent about the colonizing aspects of 
the Russian-language question, but it doesn't give a full enough 
sense of how recent that is for most Ukrainian speakers. Ukrainian 
dissidents who advocated Ukrainian cultural autonomy were still being 
put into camps in the 80s for anti-Soviet agitation. Vasyl' Stus died 
of a beating in 1985 in a camp. Several advocates of Ukrainian 
language teaching were killed in eastern Ukrainian cities in the 
1990s. That's not to say there have not been ugly issues in the 
pro-Ukrainian language camp, just that there are a lot of still raw 
wounds that have informed how the process of Ukrainianization has 
moved forward and why Kyiv has cast a sidelong eye at Moscow's 
promotion of pro-Russian culture in Ukraine. Characters like Luzhkov 
don't help.

For me, the great irony in all this is that I can remember clearly in 
1984 touring Kyiv and having our Soviet guides (who had come down 
with us from Leningrad) shush us and tell us every time we asked 
about the Ukrainian we saw: "It's a peasant dialect, barely 
distinguishable from Russian. Really, it's completely understandable 
to every Russian, it just has a few funny, old-fashioned letters." By 
1992, there was a great hue and cry from many, many Russian speakers 
that Ukrainian was impossible to understand and impossible to learn. 
Evidently, it changed a lot in eight years.


Regards,

Rob DeLossa

p.s. Levy talks about East Germans and Russian. When I first met my 
East German in-laws in 1986, we used Russian, since my German was 
shaky. In 1992, when we met again, they forced me to use German. When 
I protested, my cousin-in-law answered in German, "When I was young 
it took me many, many years to learn how to speak Russian. When the 
Wall came down, it took me about a week to forget it all. Now I 
cannot understand a word you say when you speak it." Sometimes even 
Pushkin is not brilliant enough to overcome that kind of reaction. 
And, his verses don't come in BTUs.

p.p.s. My co-author, Robert Romanchuk, reports that Hursky is 
available from UMI: "Hursky's dissertation can be purchased as a PDF 
for $36 through UMI Dissertation Express:
http://disexpress.umi.com/dxweb  Ukrainian through Russian by Hursky, 
Tatiana D.A., Syracuse University, 1994, 274 pages; AAT 9433988"



>Whether Russian is declining or not, Ukrainian is surely becoming 
>more important.
>
>There must be textbooks to teach Ukrainian to non-Ukrainian speakers.
>
>What are the best such textbooks for English; French; German; 
>Russian speakers?
>
>I'd be especially interested in the last. A Ukrainian textbook aimed 
>at speakers of Russian would inevitably concentrate on examples of 
>linguistic interference in such closely related languages.
>
>Grover Furr
>Montclair SU
>
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-- 
____________________________________________________
Robert DeLossa
http://www.robertdelossa.net
reply to: radelo at earthlink.net

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