short form Russian adjectives

[Olga Meerson]

Dear John (and perhaps some of the other SEELANGers who may be interested?),
You are right, especially about my students. But then, if it were up to them, they would rather have all Russian participles alike. As for solncu merknushchu, the logic is Latin indeed but empirically and historically, Church Slavonic. As at one point I had to deal with texts in that interesting language on a near-daily basis (for my liturgical duties), I even now occasionally need to explain these forms to RUSSIANS, not to my American students. Well, at least the Sunday troparion in Tone One (when the stone had been sealed by the Jews and the slodiers were guarding Thy most pure Body, Thou hast risen on the third day o Saviour...) is something every Russian church singer knows by heart but hardly understands: "kameni ZAPECHATANU ot iudej i voinim STREGUSHCHIM prechistoe telo Tvoe voskresl esi, tridnevnyj (this logic of the LONG-form adjective is also not exactly transparent to the native Russian mind!) Spase, daruiaj mirovi zhizn'..." These texts, to me, are like daily quot
es from Pushkin, or Tiutchev, or something equally basic for a Russian, esp. a Russian philologist. But to my singers, although being well-known, they in no way become really comprehensible. So, even without, or before, Demetrius Anatolii filius Ursus, we have the Moscow Patriarch, and the Russian Church Abroad, and many, many conservatives within the Church who have decreed, and not yet decreed otherwise, that these forms are obligatory and irreplaceable with a Russian that would be more transparent-- claiming that, allegedly, Russians' knowing some of these texts by heart is tantamount to understanding them. I on my part have no complaints: this has forced me to learn a language that seems to be like Russian but actually is like Latin, and this sort of education is very valuable, especially to a philologist. The only trouble I am having is when I have to teach it to others--not Americans but Russians, as it is well known that nothing is harder to teach than things that your
 pupils believe they already know or understand! At any rate, expressions like solncu pomerkshu i zemle pokolebavshejsia are my daily linguistic encounters, not even points to show off to you or other SEELANGers. It is quite a phenomenon--the hidden bilingualism of Russian Church-goers. Russian is, of course, projected on the Church-Slavonic they hear all the time, but this Russian itself remains rather affected. I have many pages of a book on that topic but keep being distracted or scared: it is a sacred cow. There are many wonderful specialists on such projections, the best among them that I know being Olga Sedakova (for lexical paronymity) and Alexandr Kravetskij (for syntactic and morphological calques, as well as lexical paronymity). I know the topic only empirically but that is what has convinced me that the socio-linguistic problem here is huge and fascinating.
o.m.



----- Original Message -----
From: John Dunn <J.Dunn at SLAVONIC.ARTS.GLA.AC.UK>
Date: Monday, March 3, 2008 8:39 am
Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] short form Russian adjectives

> I can see the logic of 'solncu merknushchu', though not its appeal, 
> unless, that is, you like your Russian to be like Latin.  Some 18th-
> century writers presumably did, but I can't see it catching on 
> again (unless Demetrius Anatolii filius Ursus decrees differently). 
> Participles are altogether strange: Lomonosov thought they 
> belonged to high poetry, but found them too useful to be able to 
> follow his own precept, and it is presumably this usefulness, which 
> owes something, but not everything, to Latin, French and German 
> models, that allowed them to come through the language-mincer of 
> the 18th century rather more intact than one might have expected 
> (or our students might have wished).
> 
> John Dunn.    
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Olga Meerson <meersono at GEORGETOWN.EDU>
> To: SEELANGS at BAMA.UA.EDU
> Date: Sun, 2 Mar 2008 10:05:30 -0500
> Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] short form Russian adjectives
> 
> Their use in dative absolute makes perfect sense to me: they are 
> adverbial there, rather than predicative. For predicates, it 
> defeats the purpose to use them--a real verb does as well (actually 
> much better). But solncu merknushchu (var. of pomerkshu) is 
> logical, no? It is even shorter than 'kogda solnce merknet'? Of 
> course, active perfectives are both more understandable and more 
> useful, but even present imperfectives could be justified. But all 
> that belongs to the stylization of a situation when short form 
> adjectives, to begin with, may function non-predicatively.
> o.m.
> 
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: John Dunn <J.Dunn at SLAVONIC.ARTS.GLA.AC.UK>
> Date: Sunday, March 2, 2008 8:35 am
> Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] short form Russian adjectives
> 
> > A.A. Zaliznjak's Grammaticheskij slovar' russkogo jazyka gives 
> > useful information about which adjectives do or do not have short 
> > forms, though the careful terminology used in the explicatory 
> part 
> > of the dictionary (p. 69) illustrates to perfection the 
> difficulty 
> > in making categorical statements about what does or does not 
> exist 
> > in Russian.  I agree with Frank Y. Gladney about the short forms 
> of 
> > active participles (it is one of the potential differences 
> between 
> > participles and our old friends quasi-participial adjectives), 
> but 
> > they did exist for certain 18th-century writers, who would use 
> > them, for example, in latinate pseudo-dative-absolute 
> > constructions.  It is amazing what one can do with a bit of 
> > determination and a classical education.
> > 
> > John Dunn.
> > 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: gladney at UIUC.EDU
> > To: SEELANGS at BAMA.UA.EDU
> > Date: Wed, 27 Feb 2008 11:09:13 -0600
> > Subject: [SEELANGS] short form Russian adjectives
> > 
> > Frans Suasso cites E.Tauscher and E.G. Kirschbaum, Grammatik der 
> > russischen Sprache, where they state, "Keine Kurzformen haben 
> > haufig von Verben abgeleitete Adjective auf -lyj, z.B  ustarelyj 
> > 'veraltet, unmodern', umelyj 'eschickt, gewandt', ostalyj 
> > 'rückständig'. osirotelyj 'verwaist'." 
> > 
> > This is generally true of active participles in Russian.  There 
> are 
> > no short forms corresponding to _ustareiushchii_ or _ustarevshii_ 
> > either.
> > Frank Y. Gladney
> > 
> > 
> > John Dunn
> > Honorary Research Fellow, SMLC (Slavonic Studies)
> > University of Glasgow, Scotland
> > 
> > Address:
> > Via Carolina Coronedi Berti 6
> > 40137 Bologna
> > Italy
> > Tel.: +39 051/1889 8661
> > e-mail: J.Dunn at slavonic.arts.gla.ac.uk
> > johnanthony.dunn at fastwebnet.it
> > 
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> 
> John Dunn
> Honorary Research Fellow, SMLC (Slavonic Studies)
> University of Glasgow, Scotland
> 
> Address:
> Via Carolina Coronedi Berti 6
> 40137 Bologna
> Italy
> Tel.: +39 051/1889 8661
> e-mail: J.Dunn at slavonic.arts.gla.ac.uk
> johnanthony.dunn at fastwebnet.it
> 
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