MOSCOW, Oct. 13, 2003 -- What’s a lemma?
If you guessed a self-destructive primate from Madagascar, you‘re not ready for linguistics class.
One of my students sprang it on me in a private lesson this morning. It turns out that a lemma is – if I understand it correctly, and I’m not at all sure I do – simply the root word of a word family without any of its suffixes or other variations.
I’d never heard of it either, and I guess if I’ve managed to scrape by for seven decades without at least a nodding acquaintance, it’s not too essential for survival; so whether I’ve got it exactly right makes, I think, not too much difference to your quality of life or mine.
One of the perks of being an English teacher in Moscow is that you don’t generally have to suffer dummies.
If they’ve got the ambition and the ability to pursue a foreign language seriously, they’ve got at least minimal brainpower, and if they can afford it, they’re probably reasonably affluent as well, which means either they’ve got a rich old man or they themselves are successful businessmen – or women.
Or they’re Russian mafia.
But not too many Russia mafia are interested in learning English, since first they’d have to master Russian.
Anyway, most of my students are cultured and interesting.
A case in point is Valera, my Saturday morning private student. I managed to put my collection of personal crises on hold long enough to meet with him for an hour.
Valera is reasonably young – early 40s – and is something of a genius with computer software. But it seems to me that most Russians are! Something in their genes seems to make them particularly clever with computer software. Maybe there’s some hidden binary link between understanding chess and understanding computers. America is full of Russian computer experts, and probably at least half of my students are software aces.
Incidentally, I think I’ve figured out why Russians are so good at chess, which requires patient advance planning of a whole series of moves before the player ever sets his fingers to the board. The Russian language is so complex – six different noun cases, each with different endings for masculine, feminine, and neuter, singular and plural, with a completely different set for the adjectives describing them.
So before a Russian ever opens his mouth, he’s got to subconsciously map out the whole series of adjectival and noun endings through to the end of the sentence. Thus, I contend, Russians develop their ability to chart and plan from the time they begin learning the first “da.” So the jump from nouns to knights and prepositions to pawns is a natural progression.
Anyway, Valera’s been working at computers for nearly 20 years and has rubbed elbows with some of the big guys, including Kasspersky, who wrote one of the most popular virus protection programs.
Valera’s command of English is also quite good, and he’s always looking for ways to improve his method of study. He’s been reading Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and has now attacked Dickens’ David Copperfield. Finding Dickens much more difficult to read than Austen prompted him to explore exactly why.
Their mid-19th century convoluted writing styles didn’t differ that much, so it must have to do with vocabulary.
To test his thesis, Valera dashed off a software program that read the two texts and created a dictionary of the words contained in each, and then counted and compared them.
While his exploration probably wouldn’t meet the requirements of academic research – he didn’t intend for it to – it did point up some interesting differences: Dickens’ active vocabulary was almost twice that of Austen’s – which isn’t surprising, given the fact that Dickens was a court clerk and newspaper reporter before he took up the pen in earnest, while Austen’s world was much more circumscribed and focused on such crucial domestic issues as finding a rich young stud who could be persuaded to marry your not very rich or pretty daughter.
But what was immensely interesting is the comparatively small vocabulary needed to be able to comprehend and enjoy these 19th century authors. With a vocabulary of around 1500 words a reader could understand 95% of Pride and Prejudice. To reach that level of comprehension of Dickens’ work, you’d need only about 1000 words more.
Twenty-five hundred lemmas – we can substitute “words” -- is still well within the range of any medium- to upper-level English student.
Jane Austen’s 1500 words would enable you to understand about 90 per cent of almost any book.
So if I – or any teacher -- had Valera’s genius, technical competence, and innate curiosity, we could assess a student’s vocabulary level and match it – perhaps even tailor it -- to the most appropriate book for expanding and solidifying his vocabulary.
Neat, huh! What I most wish is that I could do that in Russian so I could lay my hands on a Russkiy tome I could delve into easily and enjoyably with a vocabulary of a couple of thousand words.
Valera’s little project also underscored the technical progress that has been made in the past decade. He said when he first attempted roughly the same thing about 10 years ago, it took him a month. This time he did it in three days!
His next step is to make similar analyses of more recent authors – Hemingway, for instance.
With Valera’s exit at 11:15, I again have a few moments to ponder my way out of the quicksand.
I showed Misha my letter from Vanya yesterday afternoon, as planned.. “Vanya agrees with you,” I pointed out. “Maybe I’ve made a big mistake.”
“We can’t undo what’s been done,” he replied. “We have to deal with the reality of the present. I will never again feel the same toward you as I felt before.” Still, it was clear we both were feeling a lot of emotion and some relief that the door was open again.
Misha reminded me that he had never said he loved me.
“If you don’t love me, I don’t understand why you are so angry that I have other boyfriends. And you had sex with me; how could you have sex with me if you didn’t love me?”
“I had sex with you because I felt close to you. I don’t love Dima either, and I have sex with him because I feel close to him. The only one I’ve ever loved is Valera,” the 17-year-old fellow orphan and high school student from our early days together.
“I have loved all the people I’ve had sex with,” I countered. “You called this a bordello, but all the people I’ve had sex with are people I loved.”
What he had actually been so angry about, Misha said, was that he considered himself the “hozyaika,” the master of the household and plenipotentiary of household affairs. We had had an agreement: I would take care of him financially, and he would take care of me physically. This was our apartment, he contended!
“I tried to keep the apartment clean, and the toilet and the bathtub and the house phone repaired and do anything else that needed to be done. I washed your clothes and took care of you and kept the kitchen clean so you could have students. I considered that my job. And you didn’t even consult me about inviting Yegor or Shurik to live here. You just invited them, and all of a sudden, it’s not my house anymore.”
I smiled. “You want to be the boss?”
“I’ve always been that way. Even in the orphanage, when I was five years old.”
“You’ll be gone a month,” I reminded. “That gives me time to think, and you time to think.”
“I’d like for you to think about what you expect from me if I move back,” Misha said.
And I’d like for you to think about the circumstances under which you’d return,” I replied.
Without hesitating, he replied: “I’ll be the hozyaika, and you and I will live here alone. I don’t care how many lovers you have, but they can’t live here. Maybe they can live here temporarily -- for a week or two or a month or two or three, but it will be our house.”
Well, at least that’s a place to start negotiating. I’d like to restore the closeness we once had – even if he doesn’t love me romantically.
It felt good to hug and kiss him again. We slept together last night for the first time in a couple of weeks.
