Monthly Archive

I continue my discussion of synthetic and analytic phonics started in my previous posts, Tale of a Fisherman and a Gold Fish and My First Book and Synthetic Phonics. Some theory could be useful:

Synthetic phonics involves the development of phonemic awareness from the outset. As part of the decoding process, the reader would learn up to 44 phonemes (the smallest units of sound) and their related graphemes (the written symbols for the phoneme). One phoneme can be represented by various graphemes, e.g. ‘oa’, ‘ow’, ‘ough’. This is, of course, one of the reasons that the English language can be so difficult to learn to read and spell. The reader would be expected to recognise each grapheme then sound out each phoneme in a word, building up through blending the sounds together to pronounce the word phonetically. This approach works well with phonetically regular words.

Analytic phonics involves analysis of whole words to detect phonetic or orthographic (spelling) patterns, then splitting them into smaller parts to help with decoding, for example onset and rime - onset (vowel sound(s)) at the beginning of a word or syllable and rime (always beginning with a vowel to form the remainder of that word or syllable).

The rimes of words can be used to help children read and spell by analogy. For example, the right rime, once known, can be used to generate another 96 words. It is therefore an efficient way to help children develop a large sight vocabulary for both reading and spelling. It works particularly well for those words that young children cannot work out sound-by-sound, for example ‘light’, ‘through’, ‘rake’. It is also an effective way of helping children to adopt the common sight words, for example when teaching the word ‘could’, children would be supported to generate and read the rhyming words that share the same written pattern - ‘would’, ’should’.

Basically, synthetic phonics is the standard approach to reading in Russia; it is widely accepted that Russian children can be taught (in their families) to read fluently by age of 5 and 6. This was experience of me as a child and as a parent; I briefly described these experiences in my previous posts, Tale of a Fisherman and and a Gold Fish and My First Book and Synthetic Phonics.

However, my daughter, at that time aged five, independently discovered analytic phonics. This happened when we came to California. Her big brother, aged seven, was taught at their American school to read; my daughter was taught only spoken English. My children came to California being fluent Russian readers, and my daughter could not allow that her brother red English, while she did not. So she started to listen to audiobooks like this one, tracing words in the book and establishing correspondence between combinations of letters and sounds:

In a couple of months she was a fluent English reader — without any help from adults. Of course, this was possible only because she could fluently read in Russian. (Actually, in Russian she also was mostly self-taught reader, as it frequently happens with younger siblings in families with strong reading environment.) And the audiobooks were real masterpieces — Dr. Suess narrated by Dustin Hoffman, of all people!

This post, as well as the previous post on Nabokov, is a result of conversations with friends (at a mathematical conference). I tried to explain to my friends why Nabokov preferred to translate Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin in prose — apparently, it was quite a scandalous decision at the time. To prove that he could write in famous Onegin’s stanza, Nabokov penned the famous poem:

Vladimir Nabokov
On translating "Eugene Onegin"
( The New Yorker, January 8, 1955, p. 34)

   1

What is translation? On a platter
A poets pale and glaring head,
A parrot's screech, a monkey's chatter,
And profanation of the dead.
The parasits you were so hard on
Are pardoned if I have your pardon,
O, Pushkin, for my stratagem:
I travelled down your secret stem,
And reached the root, and fed upon it;
Then, in a language newly learned,
I grew another stalk and turned
Your stanza patterned on a sonnet,
Into my honest roadside prose--
All thorn, but cousin to your rose.

   2

Reflected words can only shiver
Like elongated lights that twist
In the black mirror of a river
Between the city and the mist.
Elusive Pushkin! Persevering,
I still pick up Tatiana's earring,
Still travel with your sullen rake.
I find another man's mistake,
I analize alliterations
That grace your feasts and haunt the great
Fourth stanza of your Canto Eight.
This is my task -- a poet's patience
And scholiastic passion blent:
Dove-dropping on your monument.

And here is Stanza IV of Canto Eight mentioned by Nabokov:

IV

Но я отстал от их союза
И вдаль бежал... Она за мной.
Как часто ласковая муза
Мне услаждала путь немой
Волшебством тайного рассказа!
Как часто по скалам Кавказа
Она Ленорой, при луне,
Со мной скакала на коне!
Как часто по брегам Тавриды
Она меня во мгле ночной
Водила слушать шум морской,
Немолчный шепот Нереиды,
Глубокий, вечный хор валов,
Хвалебный гимн отцу миров.

In Ch. Jonston’s translation the wonderful alliterations are lost without trace:

IV

  When I defected from their union
  and ran far off... the Muse came too.
  How often, with her sweet communion,
  she'd cheer my wordless way, and do
  her secret work of magic suasion!
  How often on the steep Caucasian
  ranges, Lenora-like, she'd ride
  breakneck by moonlight at my side!
  How oft she'd lead me, by the Tauric
  seacoast, to hear in dark of night
  the murmuring Nereids recite,
  and the deep-throated billows' choric
  hymnal as, endlessly unfurled,
  they praise the Father of the world.

Of course, for the anglophil and anglophone Nabokov Eugene Onegin, a Byronic novel, had special attraction. Canto Eight, by the way, has an epigraph from Byron:

Fare thee well, and if for ever
Still for ever fare thee well.

I’ll try to find Stanza IV in Nabokov’s translation and place here, for comparison; it happened to be harder than I thought — to my surprise, my University’s library has no copy.

 Своенравное прозванье
 Дал я милой в ласку ей:
 Безотчетное созданье
 Детской нежности моей;
 Чуждо явного значенья,
 Для меня оно символ
 Чувств, которых выраженья
 В языках я не нашел.
Baratynskii

This is a continuation of a discussion of formal linguistic games that I started in the very first post of this thread, Poetry with a whiff of mathematics and Poetry with a whiff of mathematics IV. I quoted a few lines from Александр Левин:

От Щербы Да не будет у бокра куздры, а у куздры бокра перед лицем Моим, ибо Я так будланул, и Мною так будлануто…

which is, of course, a clever play on Schcherba’s famous nonsense phrase

Гло́кая ку́здра ште́ко будлану́ла бо́кра и курдя́чит бокрёнка.

I expressed mild surprise that Levin did not use Shcherba’s word штеко. I personally love it; I always thought that Shcherba’s phrase should read дикая собака динго for глокая куздра штеко. Anonymous left a very subtle comment in defense of Levin:

Штеко - это, судя по всему, прилагательное (штеко ≈ сильно). В стилизации под конкретный текст из священного писания прилагательные, в общем, не нужны.

But one should not underestimate the huge redundancy (in an information-theoretic sense) and flexibility of Russian language. Indeed, why not try

“сиди оштекую Меня”

или

“оштекнели вы, а мы ошуяли” (Даль)?

Если “шуя” или “шуйца” - левая рука, то почему бы “штека” не могла бы быть правой рукой? Тогда “штеко будлануть” означало бы “будлануть с правой руки”, то есть со всей силой — и со всей правотой. “Сиди оштекую Меня” после этого выглядит очень логично. Более того,

“яко аще не избудетъ штекда ваша паче книжникъ и фарисей”

тоже не выглядит совсем уж неуместно.

Balance ( 1989) is an animation film directed and produced by twin brothers Wolfgang and Christoph Lauenstein. It has to be seen to be appreciated. Perhaps, only twin brothers could make a film like that.

This is a continuation of a discussion of formal linguistic games that I started in the very first post of this thread, Poetry with a whiff of mathematics. I quoted a few lines from Александр Левин:

От Щербы
Да не будет у бокра куздры, а у куздры бокра перед лицем Моим, ибо Я так будланул, и Мною так будлануто…

which is, of course, a clever play on Schcherba’s famous nonsense phrase

Гло́кая ку́здра ште́ко будлану́ла бо́кра и курдя́чит бокрёнка.

I expressed mild surprise that Levin did not use Shcherba’s word штеко. I personally love it; I always thought that Shcherba’s phrase should read дикая собака динго for глокая куздра штеко.

Anonymous left a very subtle comment in defence of Levin:

Штеко - это, судя по всему, прилагательное (штеко ≈ сильно). В стилизации под конкретный текст из священного писания прилагательные, в общем, не нужны.

But one should not underestimate the huge redundancy (in a information-theoretic sense) and flexibility of Russian language. Indeed, why not try

“сиди оштекую Меня”

или

“оштекнели вы, а мы ошуяли” (Даль)?

И я выхожу из пространства
В запущенный сад величин,
И мнимое рву постоянство
И самосогласье причин.
И твой, бесконечность, учебник
Читаю один, без людей -
Безлиственный дикий лечебник, -
Задачник огромных корней.

Вокруг него система кошек,
Система окон, ведер, дров
Висела, темный мир размножив
На царства узкие дворов.

Дале деревья теряют свои очертанья и глазу
Кажутся то треугольником, то полукругом -
Это уже выражение чистых понятий,
Дерево Сфера царствует здесь над другими.
Дерево Сфера - это значок беспредельного дерева,
Это итог числовых операций.
Ум, не ищи ты его посредине деревьев:
Он посредине, и сбоку, и здесь, и повсюду.

От Щербы

Да не будет у бокра куздры, а у куздры бокра перед лицем
Моим, ибо Я так будланул, и Мною так будлануто. [и т.д.]

Sofia Tolstay looks into a window of a room where her husband, Count Leo Tolstoy lies dying. Astapovo junction, 1910. A still from an infamous documentary footage.

This post is a late contribution to a wonderful conversation on literature that I had with my Turkish friends a week ago .

As a response to my post about a fox in my garden, my old friend Owl sent me a link to an article on domestication of foxes. The article is in Russian, which makes it unaccessible to most readers, therefore I put here a key picture:

Selection of foxes in the direction of greater”domesticity” leads to emergence of dog-like features, like a curled tail or soft ears.

I am happy that the experiment (started 50 years ago) continues: as a student of Novosibirsk University, I almost every day walked past kennels where experimental foxes (ancestors of the one featured above) were kept.