Linguistics

Studia Caroliensia offers a selection of new research in Slavic linguistics and folklore in honor of Professor Charles E. Gribble. Gribble has touched the lives of literally thousands of students, professional colleagues, and lovers of Slavic languages and cultures, both directly through his own teaching, research, and publications, and indirectly through his labors as head of Slavica Publishers. Now Professor of Slavic Languages at The Ohio State University, he has retained the same dedication and enthusiasm for all areas of Slavic philology through forty-five years of teaching, scholarship, and leadership in the Slavic field. The essays collected in this volume offer a sampling of the range of scholarly themes on which Charles Gribble has worked over the years. Contributors include fellow students who studied together with him at Harvard, former students whose own contributions to the field have been shaped by his teaching, authors of books published by Slavica, and professional colleagues from around the world whose research has been influenced by his work.

This book presents a systematic approach to the spelling and pronunciation of Contemporary Standard Russian. Beginning with the standard orthography, three transcriptions are derived: the first is appropriate for grammatical (morphological) analysis, the second and third for phonology and phonetics. Students start with what they know--the spelling--and, by using ordered sets of rules, they learn to rewrite Russian words in a way that shows the details of their actual pronunciation. The principles reflected in the rules are valid for all Russian words and are worth knowing in their own right; at the same time, students become familiar with many of the notational devices and technical terms that are commonly used in linguistic description, in addition to many basic grammatical principles of the Russian language. This book my be used by students with one year of Russian and is suitable also for advanced classes.

The first systematic view of onomatopoeia focuses on the relationship between onomatopoeia and grammar in Czech. It demonstrates that onomatopoeia as a linguistic device can add a special dimension and depth to the progression of text, such as the type of sound source, volume, size, path, property of movement, tactile nature of the moving object, and the landing site. The book applies concepts of from cognitive linguistics, but is written in a manner that is user-friendly to linguists of all types who are interested in looking at sound and form from a viewpoint that hasn't been made explicit.

Winner, 2015 AATSEEL Award for Best Book in Linguistics (American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages)

Book Reviews

Review in Slavic and East European Journal, 60.4 (Winter 2016)

In “The Other” in Translation: A Case for Comparative Translation Studies, Alexander Burak brings theorists and practitioners together and discusses ways of resolving specific translation problems on the basis of middle-range theories (Robert Merton’s term) relating to word and sentence semantics and text pragmatics. The middle-range solutions are considered from the perspectives of neutralization, domestication (naturalization), contamination, foreignization, and stylization as modes of negotiating “the other” in translation. The author uses six concrete case studies to consider some “accursed” problems (“the untranslatable”) of Russian–English translation. Burak advocates comparative translation discourse analysis (CTDA) as a way of capturing and negotiating the fluid nature of the textual and extra-textual other. Besides providing a realistic, usable methodology for comparative translation discourse analysis, Burak also shows how different translators often initiate significant cultural change. The comparative translation studies contained in the book provide us with additional tools to monitor and analyze cultural change. The book is meant primarily for Russian-to-English and English-to-Russian translators and students of translation with some knowledge of Russian, but it will also be useful to advanced Russian language learners and Russian heritage speakers. Alexander Burak is Assistant Professor of Russian Studies in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Florida, Gainesville, USA. He is a graduate of the Translators’ and Interpreters’ Department of the famous Maurice Thorez Institute in Moscow (currently named the Moscow Linguistic University). He has a Ph.D. in sociology from Moscow State University (MGU). He is the author of two books—Translating Culture 1: Words (Moscow: R.Valent, 2010) and Translating Culture 2: Sentence and Paragraph Semantics (Moscow: R.Valent, 2013)—as well as numerous other publications on translation.

Book Reviews

Review by Marina Rojavin in "Slavic and East European Journal," vol. 60, no.1, 2016

The second revised edition of this innovative book teaches the user to read Bulgarian by taking advantage of the similarities between Bulgarian and Russian. Fifty-one sections explaining the structure of the Bulgarian language are reinforced by thirty-six reading selections, fourteen of them new. The book can be used with a teacher or for self instruction. Persons without a knowledge of Russian will need to look up more words in a Bulgarian-English dictionary. Starting with the first reading selection broad use is made of proverbs, which provide content intended for native speakers and interesting for the message conveyed, but with limited vocabulary and only those grammatical structures which have been explained to date. New reading material includes, among other things, uncut short stories by Elin Pelin and Yordan Yovkov, the first thirty-six articles of the new Bulgarian Constitution, a short epic song starring Krali Marko and Sharko the Wonder Horse, a selection of Gabrovo jokes, encyclopedia articles (on Cyril and Methodius, the Bulgarian language, three leading scholars, St. John’s Day), poetry by Hristo Botev, and more. Charles Gribble taught Slavic languages and linguistics for forty-nine years at three universities: Ohio State, Indiana, and Brandeis. In 2006 the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences honored him with the Marin Drinov Award for his scholarly contributions in the field of Slavistics and Bulgarian studies and for his development of scholarly collaboration between the USA and the Republic of Bulgaria. In addition to his other achievements, Charles Gribble was co-founder of Slavica Publishers and served as its president from 1966–97.