Assorted grammar books
5 June 2026 01:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeSix months in, and I'm still persevering in my quest to re-learn Russian grammar while currently working my way through three textbooks in parallel, from the 1930s, the 1960s and the 1990s. Extra textbooks = extra exercises = more practice... and also alternate ways of explaining things, some of which may make more sense/prove more memorable than others.
It's certainly interesting to see the varying orders of priority in the different eras. In the 1930s they apparently expected you to learn all your case-endings *first* (which was, come to think of it, pretty much exactly what I remember doing before starting Ancient Greek ;-) The 1960s book has only just tackled the entire concept of perfective/imperfective verbs, a long, long way after the 1990s book, and in such a casual, cursory manner that I'm really not sure I would have grasped what was going on if the other book hadn't already covered it.
On the other hand, it does elucidate something that I had never realized before: all those verb-forms with the complicated extra syllable[s] in, e.g. спрашывать, подписывать, are actually back-formations, where a perfective form created by adding a prefix has changed the meaning of the original (imperfective) verb to such a degree that it now needs its own separate imperfective form!
So просить -- to request or ask for something -- took a prefixed с- to create the verb спросить, to ask a question *about* something, and писать, to write, took a prefixed под- to create the verb подписать, to write one's name *under* something, e.g. to sign, or 'sub-scribe' :-) But you then can't express a present-tense meaning by simply removing the prefix again, because that would take you back to the original sense of the root verb: "I am begging you" is not at all the same thing as "I am enquiring", and "I am writing" is definitely not the same as "I am putting myself down for a subscription". So since the 'simple' forms are already taken, as it were, new derivative variants got created... and hence we have the original concept of the imperfective писать with its perfective написать, sitting alongside the prefixed version подписать and its own new imperfective form подпис*ыв*ать...
And language being what it is, some of those derived forms are now much more usually encountered than the shorter original verbs on which they are based: there is in fact a verb крыть/покрыть, meaning 'to cover', but long before he ever meets it the learner will be taught the imperfective form of its derivative *от*крыть, i.e. to take the cover *off* or 'to open': the very common открывать :-)
(Just as one learns to say "Comment t'appelles-tu?" years before being taught the concept of reflexive verbs in French... except that it had genuinely never dawned upon me that these lengthy hard-to-spell verbs were related in any way to their original unprefixed source, or that they have a very good logical reason to exist, namely that they are needed to supply imperfective forms for verbs whose original imperfective now means something different!)
I managed to reach Part II of the 1930s book, meanwhile, which consists of 'every-day' period English conversations (such as asking to cash a cheque or expressing relief that one's boys have gone back to boarding-school, thus giving their mother some peace) translated into Russian. This provides the slightly odd scenario that all the scenes appear to be set in England, involving, say, a traveller arriving from Moscow and trying to change his letter of credit into pounds, shillings and pence, as opposed to the later textbooks, which show the English student arriving in Russia and being instructed on Life in the Soviet Union ("There is no milk," says the salesgirl with satisfaction, before sending the shopper back to queue up all over again for tins :-p)
It does contain some wonderfully entertaining phrases in the earlier section, like the train journey in the section intended to illustrate the usage of verbs (Мой племяник ехал в поезде из Лондона к морю -- "My nephew was going in the train from London to the sea") that goes suddenly and dramatically very wrong indeed: Внезарно котёл лопнул, машина сломалась, поезд остановился, и он был принуждён пойти пешком по полям "Suddenly the boiler burst, the engine got broken, the train stopped (itself) and he was forced to walk (go on foot) in the fields" :-P
Likewise, in the section on prepositions Ищите вашу тетрадь под этим столиком ("Search (look for) your copy-book under this little table") is followed by Я не могу лезть под стол в моей возврасте! and Я поднялся с пола с больщим трудом ("I cannot crawl under the table at my age!" and "I got up (raised myself) from the floor with great difficulty", the latter presumably being a sequel to the former ;-)
As the Introduction says, those English glosses in Part I are deliberately *not* fluent or idiomatic but almost entirely literal in their translation; it's interesting from a historical point of view that тетрадь (nowadays surviving only as a 'notebook') is a 'copy-book' at this date and has become an 'exercise book' by the 1960s, when students are nonetheless still learning separate words for 'nib' (перо, 'feather' :-) and 'pen-holder' (ручка, 'handle') -- vital vocabulary for the very first lesson, along with 'school-desk', which sadly I have forgotten :-)
The English in Part II, however, is distinctly period-colloquial ("The hotel wasn't up to much", "I got some good fishing", "those boys take some looking after"), and clearly not a verbatim translation!
I'm able to spot a few fairly obvious typoes here and there, which is gratifying: Проставте Ваме имя is pretty definitely an error for Проставте Ваше имя (possibly the author's handwriting ;p) And I'm interested to see the 'poetic' instrumental endings in -ою and -ею in apparently everyday usage here (за едою, которую мне дают по утрам); I wonder when they went out of fashion. (It's a useful distinction, the absence of which I rather regret, since it means that *all* the feminine oblique case-endings are now basically the same; good for fudging things while composing answers in Russian, but not good for understanding the function of words in a sentence!)
I was, however, pretty puzzled by the appearance of sporadic hard signs after the preposition в, also presumably an archaicism. I could have understood it if, as I originally thought, the hard sign was inserted in the case of a following vowel (as in отъехали), presumably indicating that the consonant should not be softened, or if it corresponded to the modern added vowel that prevents the words from running into one another (во время), but I couldn't see any consistent pattern to the hard signs where they turned up.
Я посмотрю, что они могут сделать въ этом отношении / Если у них нет ничего в Отделнии, то они сделают для Вас что-нибудь въ Главной Конторе
- here we have three occurrences of в in the space of two sentences, twice with a hard sign and once without, none of them followed by soft vowels, one with a hard sign followed by a double consonant, one with a hard sign followed by a hard vowel, one without a hard sign and followed by a hard vowel!
And earlier on in the same dialogue we have запишите Ваше имя въ книге but послать их в стирку - one with hard sign followed by a double consonant, one without hard sign but followed by a double consonant - and в восемь часов. So I really can't work out what is triggering the hard signs in this orthography... I feel like the Americans randomly flailing round between 'thee', 'thou', 'thy' and 'thine' :-(
(It's not that I'm ever going to need to do it myself, but I like to *understand* -- just as I can see the relationship between the old prestre and modern prêtre and the old Thränen and the modern Tränen...)
Meanwhile I'm exceedingly perplexed by my own historic marginal note in the 1990s textbook reading, cryptically, adverbs like noble gases...! (The chapter deals with the declension of adjectives, and the footnote is immediately under 'Expressions of time', i.e. this year, next year, last year -- and I simply have no idea at all what I can have meant. My best guess is that the teacher *probably* said something about adverbs, as opposed to adjectives, being 'unreactive', like noble gases, e.g. they don't decline at all. But that's a wild guess.)
It's certainly interesting to see the varying orders of priority in the different eras. In the 1930s they apparently expected you to learn all your case-endings *first* (which was, come to think of it, pretty much exactly what I remember doing before starting Ancient Greek ;-) The 1960s book has only just tackled the entire concept of perfective/imperfective verbs, a long, long way after the 1990s book, and in such a casual, cursory manner that I'm really not sure I would have grasped what was going on if the other book hadn't already covered it.
On the other hand, it does elucidate something that I had never realized before: all those verb-forms with the complicated extra syllable[s] in, e.g. спрашывать, подписывать, are actually back-formations, where a perfective form created by adding a prefix has changed the meaning of the original (imperfective) verb to such a degree that it now needs its own separate imperfective form!
So просить -- to request or ask for something -- took a prefixed с- to create the verb спросить, to ask a question *about* something, and писать, to write, took a prefixed под- to create the verb подписать, to write one's name *under* something, e.g. to sign, or 'sub-scribe' :-) But you then can't express a present-tense meaning by simply removing the prefix again, because that would take you back to the original sense of the root verb: "I am begging you" is not at all the same thing as "I am enquiring", and "I am writing" is definitely not the same as "I am putting myself down for a subscription". So since the 'simple' forms are already taken, as it were, new derivative variants got created... and hence we have the original concept of the imperfective писать with its perfective написать, sitting alongside the prefixed version подписать and its own new imperfective form подпис*ыв*ать...
And language being what it is, some of those derived forms are now much more usually encountered than the shorter original verbs on which they are based: there is in fact a verb крыть/покрыть, meaning 'to cover', but long before he ever meets it the learner will be taught the imperfective form of its derivative *от*крыть, i.e. to take the cover *off* or 'to open': the very common открывать :-)
(Just as one learns to say "Comment t'appelles-tu?" years before being taught the concept of reflexive verbs in French... except that it had genuinely never dawned upon me that these lengthy hard-to-spell verbs were related in any way to their original unprefixed source, or that they have a very good logical reason to exist, namely that they are needed to supply imperfective forms for verbs whose original imperfective now means something different!)
I managed to reach Part II of the 1930s book, meanwhile, which consists of 'every-day' period English conversations (such as asking to cash a cheque or expressing relief that one's boys have gone back to boarding-school, thus giving their mother some peace) translated into Russian. This provides the slightly odd scenario that all the scenes appear to be set in England, involving, say, a traveller arriving from Moscow and trying to change his letter of credit into pounds, shillings and pence, as opposed to the later textbooks, which show the English student arriving in Russia and being instructed on Life in the Soviet Union ("There is no milk," says the salesgirl with satisfaction, before sending the shopper back to queue up all over again for tins :-p)
It does contain some wonderfully entertaining phrases in the earlier section, like the train journey in the section intended to illustrate the usage of verbs (Мой племяник ехал в поезде из Лондона к морю -- "My nephew was going in the train from London to the sea") that goes suddenly and dramatically very wrong indeed: Внезарно котёл лопнул, машина сломалась, поезд остановился, и он был принуждён пойти пешком по полям "Suddenly the boiler burst, the engine got broken, the train stopped (itself) and he was forced to walk (go on foot) in the fields" :-P
Likewise, in the section on prepositions Ищите вашу тетрадь под этим столиком ("Search (look for) your copy-book under this little table") is followed by Я не могу лезть под стол в моей возврасте! and Я поднялся с пола с больщим трудом ("I cannot crawl under the table at my age!" and "I got up (raised myself) from the floor with great difficulty", the latter presumably being a sequel to the former ;-)
As the Introduction says, those English glosses in Part I are deliberately *not* fluent or idiomatic but almost entirely literal in their translation; it's interesting from a historical point of view that тетрадь (nowadays surviving only as a 'notebook') is a 'copy-book' at this date and has become an 'exercise book' by the 1960s, when students are nonetheless still learning separate words for 'nib' (перо, 'feather' :-) and 'pen-holder' (ручка, 'handle') -- vital vocabulary for the very first lesson, along with 'school-desk', which sadly I have forgotten :-)
The English in Part II, however, is distinctly period-colloquial ("The hotel wasn't up to much", "I got some good fishing", "those boys take some looking after"), and clearly not a verbatim translation!
I'm able to spot a few fairly obvious typoes here and there, which is gratifying: Проставте Ваме имя is pretty definitely an error for Проставте Ваше имя (possibly the author's handwriting ;p) And I'm interested to see the 'poetic' instrumental endings in -ою and -ею in apparently everyday usage here (за едою, которую мне дают по утрам); I wonder when they went out of fashion. (It's a useful distinction, the absence of which I rather regret, since it means that *all* the feminine oblique case-endings are now basically the same; good for fudging things while composing answers in Russian, but not good for understanding the function of words in a sentence!)
I was, however, pretty puzzled by the appearance of sporadic hard signs after the preposition в, also presumably an archaicism. I could have understood it if, as I originally thought, the hard sign was inserted in the case of a following vowel (as in отъехали), presumably indicating that the consonant should not be softened, or if it corresponded to the modern added vowel that prevents the words from running into one another (во время), but I couldn't see any consistent pattern to the hard signs where they turned up.
Я посмотрю, что они могут сделать въ этом отношении / Если у них нет ничего в Отделнии, то они сделают для Вас что-нибудь въ Главной Конторе
- here we have three occurrences of в in the space of two sentences, twice with a hard sign and once without, none of them followed by soft vowels, one with a hard sign followed by a double consonant, one with a hard sign followed by a hard vowel, one without a hard sign and followed by a hard vowel!
And earlier on in the same dialogue we have запишите Ваше имя въ книге but послать их в стирку - one with hard sign followed by a double consonant, one without hard sign but followed by a double consonant - and в восемь часов. So I really can't work out what is triggering the hard signs in this orthography... I feel like the Americans randomly flailing round between 'thee', 'thou', 'thy' and 'thine' :-(
(It's not that I'm ever going to need to do it myself, but I like to *understand* -- just as I can see the relationship between the old prestre and modern prêtre and the old Thränen and the modern Tränen...)
Meanwhile I'm exceedingly perplexed by my own historic marginal note in the 1990s textbook reading, cryptically, adverbs like noble gases...! (The chapter deals with the declension of adjectives, and the footnote is immediately under 'Expressions of time', i.e. this year, next year, last year -- and I simply have no idea at all what I can have meant. My best guess is that the teacher *probably* said something about adverbs, as opposed to adjectives, being 'unreactive', like noble gases, e.g. they don't decline at all. But that's a wild guess.)