о гендерной справедливости
Oct. 7th, 2008 03:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
avvaВ обзорном введении в современный русский язык Дерека Оффорда (Derek Offord, Using Russian - A Guide to Contemporary Usage) есть, помимо прочего, небольшой список русских матерных слов. Автор специально отмечает, что список этот очень неполон и слова приводятся лишь для примера - но тем не менее, можно отметить, что слово "хуй", с несколькими производными, там есть, а слова "пизда" - нет. Это ли не сексизм!
А вообще-то - хорошая книга, с большим интересом ее пролистал. Всегда поучительно посмотреть на родной язык глазами иностранца [1], а книга Оффорда еще и действительно талантливо написана - большое количество полезного материала, удобная организация, ясные примеры.
[1] Вот один из множества любопытных примеров. Оффорд посвящаяет отдельный пункт разбору местоимения "который". Он пишет, что иностранца, изучающего русский язык, легко может запутать то обстоятельство, что, хотя это местоимение изменяется по роду, числу и падежу, эти свои признаки оно наследует из разных источников внутри предложения. Например: "машина, в которой ехал президент" - женский род и единственное число у местоимения "которой" взято у слова "машина", а предложный падеж - из подчиненного предложения (президент ехал в чем?). Понятно, что носителю языка такие сложности даже и не приходят в голову, а вот иностранцу, изучающему русский, и даже уже знающему и понимающему падежи, на это нужно обратить отдельное внимание.
А вообще-то - хорошая книга, с большим интересом ее пролистал. Всегда поучительно посмотреть на родной язык глазами иностранца [1], а книга Оффорда еще и действительно талантливо написана - большое количество полезного материала, удобная организация, ясные примеры.
[1] Вот один из множества любопытных примеров. Оффорд посвящаяет отдельный пункт разбору местоимения "который". Он пишет, что иностранца, изучающего русский язык, легко может запутать то обстоятельство, что, хотя это местоимение изменяется по роду, числу и падежу, эти свои признаки оно наследует из разных источников внутри предложения. Например: "машина, в которой ехал президент" - женский род и единственное число у местоимения "которой" взято у слова "машина", а предложный падеж - из подчиненного предложения (президент ехал в чем?). Понятно, что носителю языка такие сложности даже и не приходят в голову, а вот иностранцу, изучающему русский, и даже уже знающему и понимающему падежи, на это нужно обратить отдельное внимание.
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no subject
Date: 2008-10-07 01:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-07 03:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-07 02:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-07 02:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-07 02:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-07 06:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-07 02:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-07 02:18 pm (UTC)Отсутствие падежей в английском есть результат кризис
Date: 2008-10-07 03:22 pm (UTC)В отличие от других живых сегодня германских языков.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-07 02:30 pm (UTC)Вы рассчитываете на то, что Вас читают какие-то дети, которые не знают этих слов, которым не следует знать этих слов, и которые увидят надпись "детям и ханжам просьба не заглядывать" -- и не заглянут?
Или на то, что Вас читают какие-то ханжи, которым будет неприятно увидеть эти слова, а более приятно прочитать вместо этого, как их называют ханжами?
no subject
Date: 2008-10-07 02:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-07 02:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-07 03:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-07 03:06 pm (UTC)Я не хочу снова и снова вступать по этому поводу в споры, давать разъяснения итд.; убрать под кат - простой компромисс, который меня устраивает. Если кому-то мат и под катом настолько мешает, что мочи нет - это уже случай "но если залезть на шкаф и посмотреть сквозь бинокль..."
P.S. Тему детей и матерщины (и другие темы) интересно развивает Поль Грэм.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-07 03:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-07 04:39 pm (UTC)На всякий случай
Date: 2008-10-08 06:57 pm (UTC)http://translated.by/you/lies-we-tell-kids/
Re: На всякий случай
Date: 2008-10-08 09:04 pm (UTC)(интересный сайт)
no subject
Date: 2008-10-07 02:37 pm (UTC)он вызывает неловкость.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-07 02:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-07 02:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-07 02:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-07 03:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-07 03:14 pm (UTC)There are difficulties of the target language and they should be kept strictly separate from the mess in the explaining academic's head.
The easiest way to explain is by reference to the student's mother tongue. Exactly zero difference exists between "машина, в которой ехал президент" and "(the) limo in which President was travelling".
This lack of awareness is more than common among Russian teachers struggling to explain some structures of Russian to even Russian students. I've read in some very learned grammar of Russian (stamped by the Acedemy of Sciences no less, as far as I can recall), in which the authors discovered a special and unique "verbless" sentence structures, such as "Светало. Темнело. Холодало." Anyone knowing other languages of the Indo-European group will very quickly realize (after converting those examples to refer to the future - "будет светать, темнеть, ..." - that a verb does exist there, that the verb is a form of "be", that it is dropped in a commonly known and universal process, and that the form of the remaining part unmistakably points to the subject pronoun: "оно (есть, было, будет...) светало (...,ть).
Once restored to the full form, the "unique" Russian sentence type happens to be totally parallel to a commonest structure in English (or other languages): it (was/is/will be/...) (dark/...)
Some major pronciples are completely the same for our languages (at least, among European languages). In all of them Verb forces its own "verb phrase" (i.e. one or several possible continuations after itself), but only in English they teach it explicitly. The understanding is either rudimentary or lacking in teaching of German, French and Russian.
All of our languages have verb tense systems that are much more than "past. present and future", they are __systems of meanings__ which differ depending on the type of action or state conveyed by verbs, but this is not even distantly understood by Russian grammarians.
All of our languages have countable and uncountable nouns, and the range of noun pre-modifiers (which all express __meanings__, not grammatical functions) depends directly on the nature of the noun meaning(s), but this is not even distantly understood or taught in French or Russian.
SO, TO SUM IT UP: difficulties of a given language are distinct from the mess some current grammarian is trying to impose on you, but a young student who is now knowledgeable of this by the very definition of his student-like condition, is forced to believe it's a language problem.
Very sad, I'd say.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-07 03:17 pm (UTC)nowNOT knowledgeable of thisno subject
Date: 2008-10-07 03:48 pm (UTC)This may well be so, but it seems to me that in describing the situation you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Yes, there are many similarities, and yes, pedagogically useful similarities may often be overlooked, but there are also differences which are profoundly alien to a student, and which must be described in their complexity. How do you propose to explain verbal aspect in Russian to a native speaker of English? An appeal to vague semantic differences with some analogies just won't do; the student must internalize the strict division into the two classes that is intuitively felt by all native speakers of Russian. How are you going to teach Russian speakers to correctly place articles in English? Many things are profoundly different.
Sure, I bet you can discover verb phrases in Russian, but quantitatively speaking, they're overwhelmingly important to understanding elementary English sentences; in Russian? - not so much. There just aren't that many "verb phrases" formed with the most basic Russian verbs that modify the original meaning of the verb so thoroughly; Russian prefers to just come up with more verbs, often formed with prefixes. You can't read English without understanding that the meaning of "to put up with" is not derivable, even approximately, from the meanings of "to put", "up" and "with", and that you must think of it as a separate verb, for all intents and purposes. There's no such necessity in Russian.
Finally, as concerns the original quotation, sure, syntactically "машина, в которой ехал президент" is exactly like "(the) limo in which President was travelling"; but in English, there's no need to modify the pronoun, whereas if you're studying Russian, you have to understand the case, the number and the gender the pronoun must receive.
Seems you are wrong on all counts ;))
Date: 2008-10-07 04:42 pm (UTC)1. I bet you can discover verb phrases in Russian, but quantitatively speaking, they're overwhelmingly important to understanding elementary English sentences; in Russian? - not so much.
Wrong. EVERY verb forces a certain structure of a phrase after it. Each meaning is usually associated with one or 2-3 max, and the general number of such patterns in a given language is limited numbering in roughly 2-3 of dozen or so.
Ломать что, где "что" есть твердый предмет вроде ветки палки кости и т.д.
Ломать кого - другой смысл
Ломать устройство, или устройство ломается
Показать кому что; указать на что-то ---- и так далее. КАЖДЫЙ глагол влечет за собой определенное продолжение. It's not that verb patternd do not exist ini Russian. There is no tradition in listing them precisely in the dictionaries; the imprecise knowledge, unawareness or pretence is that the verb phrase is somewhat arbitrary and can consist or some vague "objects" or "adverbial phrases". В русском языкознании и в европейских языках в 19 веке было принято выделять только "переходные" и "непереходные" глаголы.
It's like saying that zebu, elephant and giraffe are all cows and the only difference between them is their height, so elephants and giraffes are in one group, while the bison yacc and zebu are in another.
2.How do you propose to explain verbal aspect in Russian to a native speaker of English?
By direct comparison, because tense systems in a language are not "grammatical constructis", but are SYSTEMS OF MEANINGS. I actually wrote excatly such comparative explanation of tense in Russian and English about 17-18 years ago, which was modelled on the system of meanings as demonstrated and analyzed in Leech, Svatvik "Communicative Grammar of English".
It's a system of meanings. To take one example: if a verb is a momentary "event" (such as "knock"), "he's been/he was knocking" means he repeatedly did it. If a verb is a "state", "the snow's been lying +somwhere or for some time" means the state lasted, and so on.
Meaning, a type or class of the verb determines the meaning of some "forms". The full system of English (and Russian) tenses can be understood as a set of certain "situations" or "meanings": how to report of events, how to tell stories (3 forms there, one can show that some things happened "against the background" of some other events, etc.).
Same stuff with articles. Both in Russian and in English WE EXPRESS THE SAME BASIC nano-IDEAS. They are build into the language and it's not possible to express yourself avoiding those micro-abstractions (as in programming you cannot avoid creating variables, comparing or branching).
Those micro-ideas comprise the "core abstractions" of a language, and if you explain through these MEANINGS, direct comparison between languages becomse possible.
"Овес нынче дорог" "Нарушитель наглый пошел" has a direct equivalent in the usage of English articles, which convey this very meaning. Only the tradition on teaching that came from the 19th century and the idea that there exists one "correct" language (usually Latin) with "universal grammar", while other living languages must be described as deviations from this ideal HINDERS teaching of core cognitive units/abstractions/meanings built into languages.
While still on the subject of articles (or, more generally, pre-modifiers to nouns), do you realize that in russian we also have countable and uncountable nouns and that qualifiers to them are different?
When viewing it on the level of meaning, you begin to see direct equivalents, and rightly so: grammatical systems are most stable in languages, and ours all belong to the same historically defined group.
Re: Seems you are wrong on all counts ;))
Date: 2008-10-08 01:14 am (UTC)It's a system of meanings. To take one example: if a verb is a momentary "event" (such as "knock"), "he's been/he was knocking" means he repeatedly did it. If a verb is a "state", "the snow's been lying +somwhere or for some time" means the state lasted, and so on.
Well, the aspect of the verb in Russian (and other Slavic languages) exists; you can't skirt around it by focusing on higher-level semantic mini-structures. There's no ignoring the fact that every native speaker of Russian has a strong intuition that every verb fits either the question что делать? or the question что сделать?, and different semantic situations call for the appropriate type to be used. A speaker of English who's studying Russian will have to consciously learn that fact and strive to use the correct aspect appropriately, until this knowledge is internalised and becomes automatic (unless of course they're learning the language by osmosis, which is a different kettle of fish). And I don't see how studying that fact makes one a follower of outmoded 19C theories or a believer in the universality of Latin (??? - not sure where that came from). Aspect, very plainly, exists.
Similarly, articles exist in English and do not exist in Russian, and I just don't see how any number of analogies on a micro-semantic level are going to replace teaching students about articles and guiding them in their correct placement. Yes, I do realize that Russian has countable and uncountable nouns, but that's hardly any help at all.
Re: Seems you are wrong on all counts ;))
Date: 2008-10-08 03:25 am (UTC)It strives to introduce semantic descriptions of all grammatical structures (according to a linguistic fashion of 1980s), and in my view succeeds.
You already know the traditional categories and ways they are usually explained, so this will be an easy reading and a fresh outlook on the language for you.
What is known as "aspect" (что делать/что сделать) in Russian is as much a part of the English verb system as it is in Russian. It's just one, only one of the micro-meanings included in that set usually exp[lained as "tenses" etc.
When all usage cases are explained as meanings, this becomes just one of them, not much different from others.
Он сходил и купил. = "reports". He went and did. I've done. etc. etc. The meaning is not new for an English speaker. A naive speaker is not aware of those meanings, as it is not aware a verb can express a state, an event or activity, or be reflexive (or used reflexively), but all the meanings are there. All you have to do is point to it and then say that in Russian the same meaning when expressed looks like this.
The big, big mistake of traditional language teaching is that instead of teaching the language it teaches a special language that allows to talk ABOUT a language.
So a learner is placed in an impossible position when he wants to speak: he has (internally, in his head) to translate the "rules" and principles into concrete examples, then attempt to say it -- instead of simply expressing meanings directly.
Three major theories or approaches that changed my view of languages were Collins COBUILD descriptions/definitions (one has to appreciate what they did, explanations are in the Introduction and on the Net), I was simply reading the entries, page after page, and it changed my internal perception of the English language after some pages, the internal idea of how a language is "constructed" so to say.
Then I'd recommend that Grammar which attempts to describe "structures" as systems of meanings rather than treating grammatical words as if they were different from anything else in the language and sort of imposed on it externally. One can combine that approach with reading a few grammar word entries in the COBUILD dictionary
And try also George Lakoff's "Metaphors We Live By", a (only partly) successful attempt at describing the built-in system of metaphors in human languages and an explanation of mechanisms with which new meanings are created in a language (or, one may say, in the human mind).
These three descriptions changed my perception of the English language (and generally, how languages operate and how they are internally constructed). I began to understand it differently, on a different level.
It might be the change was a result of my own thinking, too, but the change did happen.
Re: Seems you are wrong on all counts ;))
Date: 2008-10-09 08:27 pm (UTC)I readily agree with you on the importance of micro-concepts as you describe them. Indeed, I was much impressed by COBUILD (I had access to a software version a while back, but seem to have lost it), and although I haven't read it extensively, the feeling you describe - of your understanding of the language structure changing and improving just by reading a large corpus of natural sentences - is familiar to me.
What I don't think I agree with you on is where you insist that this kind of teaching by phrasal examples must totally replace teaching with grammatical concepts. I don't see how it's a "big, big mistake of traditional language teaching" to use those. And it seems to me that you're treating what you suppose to be "the big mistake" with such derision that you're lumping unfairly very different methods in there, some of them indeed erroneous. E.g. your bringing up Latin and dogmatic Latin-based grammars threw me off: I certainly agree that those are silly and harmful, but to my mind there's a world of difference between that and teaching a student about articles or verbal aspect.
Your comments inevitably remind me of using total immersion as a way to teach a language. Sure, it'd be great if we could all learn languages by total immersion as small children. And it might be a good idea to teach languages by total immersion as adults - I don't know if there're studies on the efficiency of that, but certainly historically "naive" immersion has been the most common way of learning a second/third/etc. languages. And you could argue that a micro-concept-based teaching is just immersion sped up and magnified - because what we do when we learn a language by immersion in a natural setting is aping phrases, ways of expressing thoughts, etc.
However, what's natural isn't necessarily the fastest or the surest way to learn a language, particularly when we can't immerse a student in the target language environment for a few months or more. It's clear to me that students who already know what e.g. articles and the perfect tense are, will benefit from tools lieke COBUILD or a grammar based on communicative structures. It's not clear to me at all that students who don't understand articles and the perfect tense are better off learning that way, too. I just don't see why it'd necessarily be better, and I can see a few hypothetical reasons as to why it'd be worse.
Re: Seems you are wrong on all counts ;))
Date: 2008-10-09 08:29 pm (UTC)I'll try to find some time to read Leech & Svartvik, too.
Wrong index to a database
Date: 2008-10-10 07:49 am (UTC)It's a standard grammar of the English language today. I keep it for reference.
2. My true derision is reserved for the "submersion" methods of teaching, you might be surprised to learn ;))
I do not advocate throwing out all grammar, I just see much sense in explaining it not as formal structures and rules, but as certain ways of conveying meanings established in a given language.
I.e. I do not believe that best learing is by memorizing a tourist phrasebook. I simply believe that phrases traditionally taught as abstract structures are in fact ways to communicate meaning, and when they are explained from that perspective, rote learning gets substituted with more intelligent act of understanding.
For example, when teaching the system ot tenses, it is very good to explain the formal set of "operators" which are only 4 in number:
1 modal + inf
2 have + ed
3 be + ing
4 be + ed
..and that they combine only in the given order (e.g. 1+3 he may be visiting, 2+4 he has been told that...)
But as to the meanings and usage of these structures one would much better learn how stories are told, reports and plans are made, etc. etc.
The problem here is that of "a wrong entry index". As a programmer you'll understand it right away.
Supposing you have a phone book with names, phones and addresses, and need to find all people living in some small street.
The information is there, but to get it you'll need to scan the whole book!
If the same information were listed according to a different key, the task would become very easy.
The same with traditional explanations of grammar categories. In real life someone needs to make predictions, plans, reports or tell stories. If he is taught "grammar" as a list of "tenses", each has a certain number of "uses", he'd have to scan the whole memorized list, pick something appropriate, then try to construct his phrases.
This is re-combination inside your head is excruciatingly painful, and stops only after a different internal "index" is finally formed by the student, completely rearranging the taught categories.
If he was taught the same structures according to a different "entry" or "index", he'd have to refer in his memory to something prepared to be picked up and delivered.
So I do not advocate "immersion" methods (which exclude rational explanations for the sake of fantasy of "becoming a child again", and so produce extremely poor results with educated logical adults). I'm simply trying to tell that we have to rearrange structural explanations and teach them as "meanings to convey" to eliminate the unnecessary and frustrating reformulations produced by the traditional teaching methods.
Or, to say it a bit differently, traditionally it was presupposed that a student meets with his language when reading a text that has already been correctly produced by a native speaker. Then his rask is to PASSIVELY RECOGNISE what he encountered. Then giving him a verb form and listing its various uses is correct. It's the right index to the database.
But if you expect the same man to produce in the target language actively, a different index must be generated first.
Тигры
Date: 2008-10-08 03:46 am (UTC)Кому попадья, а кому свиной хрящик --- хорошо: "я люблю шоколад", но "я люблю свиные хрящики". Аналог с английским полный.
Артикли важны не сами по себе, а как часть группы слов/значений которые выражают количество, определенность и кучу других микро-смыслов (notions, sometimes they call such descriptions of language "Notional Linguistics") и которые в целом составляют группу модификаторов сушществительных идущих перед ним.
Если мы опишем систему смыслов связанных с существительными, то смыслы будут сходны в обоих языках, а артикли станут лишь одним из способов выражения некоторых из них. Сами смыслы русскоязычному будут знакомы, но их придется ему указать и научить видеть в русском.
Я вынужден отвечать абстрактно, потому что иначе придется переписывать все длинные объяснения, комментария не хватит. Попробую привести пример, однако.
Вот один из микро-смыслов. Опустим его название пока что. По-русски он выражается так:
Уссурийский тигр исчезающий вид. Тигры большие кошки. (или из старого анекдота про охотника, как охотиться на тигров) прыгаешь на тигра и начинаешь крутить ему яйца. (а если это тигрица? - крути свои, они тебе больше не пригодятся).
Во всех случаях говорится о тигре in a generic sense, о "тиграх вообще". А привел три способа выразить это на русском. ОНИ ПОЛНОСТЬЮ СОВПАДАЮТ С УСТОЯВШИМИСЯ В АНГЛИЙСКОМ, но там их обычно объясняют как Э"грамматику про артикли".
Надо же объяснять как СМЫСЛЫ:
THE tiger is... Tigers are.. Jump on a tiger and.. Смысл передается как "the tiger" (как биологический вид, официальнее), разговорно как множественное число, или альтернативно как один пример из многих.
Артикли исчезли. Появился СМЫСЛ, a "notion" of how to convey "generic" meaning about some object. Сами смыслы универсальны (полагаю, для большинства индо-европейских языков), ученик не учит что-то марсианское и абстрактное, ему просто показывают как тот же смысл передается на другом языке.
вот в чем идея