Question

[Psy Ling]

I can agree about Russian humanitarian style - it is vague and sophisticated, 
non-transparent and ... so on
however this term предметно-практическое is in Soviet-Russian pedagogy for a 
long time. E.g.:
http://74202s035.edusite.ru/p29aa1.html
http://festival.1september.ru/articles/563723/
The idea was to introduce not only theory in education but practice and objects 
(_predmet_). It was kind of opposition to scholastic approach during Soviet 
times. Unfortunately the language was kind of pseudoscholarly newspeak still...

 Psy Ling




________________________________
From: Olga Meerson <meersono at GEORGETOWN.EDU>
To: SEELANGS at bama.ua.edu
Sent: Thu, February 24, 2011 12:13:53 PM
Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] Question

I think the problem is that Russians thing in abstract nouns--
sometimes losing their referents and thus being too smart for 
their own good, while the English language requires that the 
burden of the meaning be in actual predication, i.e., that the 
verb would MEAN something.  This saves the English language 
Academia from a rapid deterioration into meanigless theorizing 
idolatry. The deterioration, of course, occurs here as well, 
but not as rapidly: structurally, the unit of meaning is the 
sentence, with overt predication, not some kind of a smart-
sounding term, which, can be described in Gogol's words about 
Petrushka and his reading habits: "что вот-де из букв вечно 
выходит какое-нибудь слово, которое иной раз черт знает, что и 
значит". Such an apt description of "learned" writing and love 
for technical terms in the Humanities!
Avoiding terms won't do either. The only way out, apparently, 
is to start writing while investing the actual thesis in the 
actual predicates of actual sentences.  English is a tough but 
useful trainer for this mentality. I know this first hand, as 
I learned the hard way, being a native speaker (and writer!) 
of Russian.

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