Russian 2210 (Structure of Russian for Language Teachers)
Russian 1400 (Advanced Russian Morphology)

2010-01-06

Read Gribble chapters 1 and 2 (available on Courseweb)
Visit the Discussion Board on Courseweb (http://courseweb.pitt.edu). Post any questions or comments you might have and reply to postings by others to the extent that you can.

Issues raised by participants during the first meeting are listed at http://clover.slavic.pitt.edu/structure/2010-01-06_issues.html.
We noted that standard Russian pronounces unstressed о the same way as unstressed а, so that, for example, the first vowel in город sounds like о but the first vowel in the plural города sounds like a very short а (more like the sound called schwa and written ə [upside-down e] in the International Phonetic Alphabet [IPA], pronounced like the first vowel of English about). Belarusian, engagingly, spells this vowel reducation. See the examples at http://clover.slavic.pitt.edu/structure/belarusian.html.

In response to Beach’s question (on the Discussion Board) about the frequency of Russian stress patterns, see the bibliography at http://clover.slavic.pitt.edu/structure/stress-bibliography.html.

Course syllabus
On-line dictionaries
On-line grammars
Print grammars
Books and sites about Russian
Russian language textbooks
- Calendar of presentation of grammar topics in Russian 0020 (Elementary Russian 2) (approximate; topics will not necessarily fall exactly on the designated days)
- Table of contents for Russian, Stage 1: Live from Russia (first-year textbook used at the University of Pittsburgh)
- Weekly syllabi for Russian 0040 (Intermediate Russian 2) are available to members of the course on Courseweb in a folder in the Course Documents section of the site
Midterm examination (take-home, open-book)