Павел Иосад о Зализняке
(Перепощивается из фейсбука с разрешения автора - edricson; текст написан по-английски - Паша работает в Эдинбургском университете)
Andrei Anatol’evich Zaliznyak in memoriam.
(Writing this in English, partly because someone has to and partly because
I guess it’s a bit less raw that way.)
It’s difficult to describe what he meant to us without writing a glorified
curriculum vitae. I’ll do that, but maybe it’s more appropriate to start
with a few personal moments.
The first time I heard the name was at school. In a Russian lesson, we were
doing some grammar. There is a sanctioned approach to the teaching of
grammar. It could be worse, it could be better, but (especially when taught
badly) it can be terrible drudgery: ‘learn this way of how things are’. We
were talking about gender, I think, and at some point the teacher, bless
her heart, mentioned ‘but according to Zaliznyak, things are quite
different, and *here is why*’. It was mind-blowing stuff, the idea that you
can reason about language and not just learn what the grammar book says,
and for me it came with the name.
Then of course the little black book of linguistics olympiad problems. He -
who else? - was the originator of the idea of the linguistics problem, and
he wrote some of the best ones. We started with the book at school, and
then I started taking part in the Olympiad itself, and Elena Muravenko’s
evening club - the name was always there, though I didn’t know the man by
sight.
The first time I saw him was at the annual lecture on the year’s finds in
Novgorod. This was the time before it became one of Moscow’s premier
cultural events - it was meant to be, effectively, a glorified colloquium
talk for the linguists, the Russian philologists, the archaeologists, the
historians. Still, the biggest lecture theatre available was bursting at
the seams. And it was magic. Jumping effortlessly from how to read the
scratches on the birch bark, to the intricacies of Old Russian morphology,
to modern dialects or colloquialisms, this was how you do language history.
Then came the undergraduate courses. The first one was Sanskrit. We get a
handout. Seven pages. Half a page for the writing system. The rest of it
was *all* of the grammar, and a list of roots. What are we meant to do?
‘Here is a stanza from the Mahabharata. Go.’ And we did. Oh boy we did. It
was magic, again, but now week in and week out. Did I become a
Sanskritologist? Of course I didn’t. Was I able to construct, in a few
hours, a data set for my phonology exam this year, more than ten years
later, still using that handout? Yes I was.
He was an amazing teacher. We in the linguistics department were the lucky
ones - it was actually one of our option courses on the curriculum, we were
meant to get the credits. The number of people who actually came was
insane. People from elsewhere in the faculty. From elsewhere in the
university. From somewhere else completely. And everyone who wanted would
get the chance to do the exam (in Russia, this means you come up to the
teacher and discuss your answer). Everyone who wanted could come up to the
blackboard and give their solution to the week’s work. And if you were
wrong, at the blackboard or just shouting from your seat, you never felt
belittled, or insignificant, or stupid. You were there to learn, and he
respected that.
Another of his courses I took was on the birchbark letters. This was in my
third year. By that time we’d done a semester of Old Church Slavonic and
three semesters of history of Russian. Serious courses, with lots of
reading and lots of depth. I’d read the book on the birchbark letters,
cover to cover, before we started. And still, every week, I was enchanted.
Even when I’d heard or read about the letter before, there was always some
new angle, some new fact I didn’t know. And the exam was the scene of the
most mind-blowing experience I had at university. I get a text. ‘Do you
recognize it?’ No. ‘OK, go on’. We go through it. It’s clearly colloquial,
and a pretty late one. We go through the numerous changes from the Old
Russian standard, discuss where they came from. ‘OK, can you date it?’
Well, it’s late. 15th century I guess? (In the world of the birchbark
letters, this is as late as you can go.) ‘OK. Can you show the differences
from Modern Russian?’ Hmm. Maybe a couple. What? ‘Well, of course. It’s
from the Life of Avvakum’. Mid 17th century. I leave with a stupid smile on
my face.
I also did Old Persian, and Arabic. And the annual lectures, which had
swollen by the time I left. The last time I saw him was just before I left
for Tromsø. It was a talk at the Slavic Studies Institute. It had been
suggested that I do a talk if I wanted to do the PhD there with him. The
PhD thing fell away when it became clear I was leaving, but I’d promised
the talk. It was an awful time, just after I’d defended my undergraduate
thesis but before our final exams. I was very busy at work, and I didn’t
want just to talk about my thesis results, because there was no Slavic
there at all. So I talked about laryngeal phonology - something I ended up
doing for the thesis anyway, but after a very roundabout trip - but I had
very little time to prepare. I found the handout recently. It was just as
bad as I remembered it to be. It didn’t seem to put him off at all. He
asked some questions. He was his usual understated, kindly self.
So what did he do? His PhD was a formalized description of the entirety of
Russian nominal inflection (he was given the equivalent of the Habilitation
straight away). This doesn’t sound like much (in fact, it sounds downright
boring), but it’s not. Too often linguistics, and especially perhaps
‘formal’ linguistics, devolves into fairly meaningless chasing of
definitions. Also, it’s Russian, what could one say that hadn’t been said
before about its inflection? Well, it’s exhilarating. Not a single word
wasted, but it still reads like a novel. And it works. There is still
nothing that works better. (Oh, and did I mention it’s the 1960s? No
computers, no corpus search, nothing. Just slips of paper and sheer
dedication.)
Then came the stress. He’d formalized Modern Russian stress patterns. Then
found manuscripts that yield information on Old Russian stress. The ‘red
book’, ‘From Proto-Slavic stress to Russian’, described the entirety of
just that in what, ten pages? It’s the Basic Accentuation Principle of
Halle & Kiparsky, always there but never big in the West, also discovered
in Russia (not just by Zaliznyak), but here tried and tested and found to
work at an incredible level of detail.
Then the birchbark letters. Again, this is Slavic. One of the best
understood Indo-European branches, and attested at a reasonable time depth.
How often do you get to rewrite the history of a whole branch of
Indo-European, after almost two hundred years? Well, he did. And to do
this, he had to know everything. From Polish dialects to the meanings of
obscure dialect words, to ‘human interest’ stories like how much tribute in
furs you had to pay to Novgorod in the 13th century.
And then the clitics, and the Tale of Igor’s Campaign. A major text, found
and published in dodgy circumstances, then perished in the Moscow fire of
1812. Linguists agree it’s genuinely old and not a later forgery, but do we
*really* know? Many disagree. Well, *now* we *know*. Zaliznyak’s book is a
masterpiece of linguistic argumentation, except you don’t have to be a
linguist to understand all of it. And it’s genius. How do you notice that
the chronicle uses different rules for the chronicler’s voice and direct
quotation? But he did. And he rewrote the history of Russian (and Old
Russian) clitics. One would think it’s obvious, but it’s not. Again, he
took material that was always lying there, right in front of us, and made
it sparkle anew.
And finally the writing, oh the writing. In English, academic writing is
muscular and fairly confrontational. Take a stand and defend it against all
comers. Reiterate it again and again. For each paragraph, make it clear how
it relates to the overall argument. It works, even if it devolves into
‘avoid the passive voice at all costs’ in unskilled hands. It’s also
teachable to students. You can break it down and bash it into people’s
heads (I know, I underwent the procedure). Then there is the German style.
Bore your reader into submission. Regiment your paragraphs. Go through
every single bit of the data. Even if the reader doesn’t remember it by the
end, they’re confident you’ve done it. Then make your point. Maybe. But it
is no accident that Zaliznyak’s preferred foreign language, of the dozens
he was comfortable with, was French.
He writes to solve a problem. He states the problem. He gives you the tools
to solve it, and walks you through. He’s with you every step of the way,
but he always takes you seriously and never talks down to you. You are
never bored. You always know where this is going, and you know you will
solve everything. And by the end, you’ve cracked your problem. And also,
you’ve learned an awful lot more along the way.
Many people, in Russia certainly, use that style. I used to. But it’s hard,
and I mean *really* hard to pull off. So there is a lot of poor writing
about. I’m certainly guilty of it. I now write in the English way, because
I’m sure I can be competent without being sparkling. Well, Zaliznyak was
brilliantly sparkling. Also, he would never write a paper to ‘make a
theoretical point’ or ‘defend one theory against the other’, which is
something reviewers look for all too often over here. He would write to
solve a problem, and if he needed to build a theory along the way, you
could be sure you would get a tight, clear, and perfectly understandable
explanation of it. But also the solution.
Now, we will have to look for the solutions ourselves, and I hope we can at
least try. We will miss him.
Andrei Anatol’evich Zaliznyak in memoriam.
(Writing this in English, partly because someone has to and partly because
I guess it’s a bit less raw that way.)
It’s difficult to describe what he meant to us without writing a glorified
curriculum vitae. I’ll do that, but maybe it’s more appropriate to start
with a few personal moments.
The first time I heard the name was at school. In a Russian lesson, we were
doing some grammar. There is a sanctioned approach to the teaching of
grammar. It could be worse, it could be better, but (especially when taught
badly) it can be terrible drudgery: ‘learn this way of how things are’. We
were talking about gender, I think, and at some point the teacher, bless
her heart, mentioned ‘but according to Zaliznyak, things are quite
different, and *here is why*’. It was mind-blowing stuff, the idea that you
can reason about language and not just learn what the grammar book says,
and for me it came with the name.
Then of course the little black book of linguistics olympiad problems. He -
who else? - was the originator of the idea of the linguistics problem, and
he wrote some of the best ones. We started with the book at school, and
then I started taking part in the Olympiad itself, and Elena Muravenko’s
evening club - the name was always there, though I didn’t know the man by
sight.
The first time I saw him was at the annual lecture on the year’s finds in
Novgorod. This was the time before it became one of Moscow’s premier
cultural events - it was meant to be, effectively, a glorified colloquium
talk for the linguists, the Russian philologists, the archaeologists, the
historians. Still, the biggest lecture theatre available was bursting at
the seams. And it was magic. Jumping effortlessly from how to read the
scratches on the birch bark, to the intricacies of Old Russian morphology,
to modern dialects or colloquialisms, this was how you do language history.
Then came the undergraduate courses. The first one was Sanskrit. We get a
handout. Seven pages. Half a page for the writing system. The rest of it
was *all* of the grammar, and a list of roots. What are we meant to do?
‘Here is a stanza from the Mahabharata. Go.’ And we did. Oh boy we did. It
was magic, again, but now week in and week out. Did I become a
Sanskritologist? Of course I didn’t. Was I able to construct, in a few
hours, a data set for my phonology exam this year, more than ten years
later, still using that handout? Yes I was.
He was an amazing teacher. We in the linguistics department were the lucky
ones - it was actually one of our option courses on the curriculum, we were
meant to get the credits. The number of people who actually came was
insane. People from elsewhere in the faculty. From elsewhere in the
university. From somewhere else completely. And everyone who wanted would
get the chance to do the exam (in Russia, this means you come up to the
teacher and discuss your answer). Everyone who wanted could come up to the
blackboard and give their solution to the week’s work. And if you were
wrong, at the blackboard or just shouting from your seat, you never felt
belittled, or insignificant, or stupid. You were there to learn, and he
respected that.
Another of his courses I took was on the birchbark letters. This was in my
third year. By that time we’d done a semester of Old Church Slavonic and
three semesters of history of Russian. Serious courses, with lots of
reading and lots of depth. I’d read the book on the birchbark letters,
cover to cover, before we started. And still, every week, I was enchanted.
Even when I’d heard or read about the letter before, there was always some
new angle, some new fact I didn’t know. And the exam was the scene of the
most mind-blowing experience I had at university. I get a text. ‘Do you
recognize it?’ No. ‘OK, go on’. We go through it. It’s clearly colloquial,
and a pretty late one. We go through the numerous changes from the Old
Russian standard, discuss where they came from. ‘OK, can you date it?’
Well, it’s late. 15th century I guess? (In the world of the birchbark
letters, this is as late as you can go.) ‘OK. Can you show the differences
from Modern Russian?’ Hmm. Maybe a couple. What? ‘Well, of course. It’s
from the Life of Avvakum’. Mid 17th century. I leave with a stupid smile on
my face.
I also did Old Persian, and Arabic. And the annual lectures, which had
swollen by the time I left. The last time I saw him was just before I left
for Tromsø. It was a talk at the Slavic Studies Institute. It had been
suggested that I do a talk if I wanted to do the PhD there with him. The
PhD thing fell away when it became clear I was leaving, but I’d promised
the talk. It was an awful time, just after I’d defended my undergraduate
thesis but before our final exams. I was very busy at work, and I didn’t
want just to talk about my thesis results, because there was no Slavic
there at all. So I talked about laryngeal phonology - something I ended up
doing for the thesis anyway, but after a very roundabout trip - but I had
very little time to prepare. I found the handout recently. It was just as
bad as I remembered it to be. It didn’t seem to put him off at all. He
asked some questions. He was his usual understated, kindly self.
So what did he do? His PhD was a formalized description of the entirety of
Russian nominal inflection (he was given the equivalent of the Habilitation
straight away). This doesn’t sound like much (in fact, it sounds downright
boring), but it’s not. Too often linguistics, and especially perhaps
‘formal’ linguistics, devolves into fairly meaningless chasing of
definitions. Also, it’s Russian, what could one say that hadn’t been said
before about its inflection? Well, it’s exhilarating. Not a single word
wasted, but it still reads like a novel. And it works. There is still
nothing that works better. (Oh, and did I mention it’s the 1960s? No
computers, no corpus search, nothing. Just slips of paper and sheer
dedication.)
Then came the stress. He’d formalized Modern Russian stress patterns. Then
found manuscripts that yield information on Old Russian stress. The ‘red
book’, ‘From Proto-Slavic stress to Russian’, described the entirety of
just that in what, ten pages? It’s the Basic Accentuation Principle of
Halle & Kiparsky, always there but never big in the West, also discovered
in Russia (not just by Zaliznyak), but here tried and tested and found to
work at an incredible level of detail.
Then the birchbark letters. Again, this is Slavic. One of the best
understood Indo-European branches, and attested at a reasonable time depth.
How often do you get to rewrite the history of a whole branch of
Indo-European, after almost two hundred years? Well, he did. And to do
this, he had to know everything. From Polish dialects to the meanings of
obscure dialect words, to ‘human interest’ stories like how much tribute in
furs you had to pay to Novgorod in the 13th century.
And then the clitics, and the Tale of Igor’s Campaign. A major text, found
and published in dodgy circumstances, then perished in the Moscow fire of
1812. Linguists agree it’s genuinely old and not a later forgery, but do we
*really* know? Many disagree. Well, *now* we *know*. Zaliznyak’s book is a
masterpiece of linguistic argumentation, except you don’t have to be a
linguist to understand all of it. And it’s genius. How do you notice that
the chronicle uses different rules for the chronicler’s voice and direct
quotation? But he did. And he rewrote the history of Russian (and Old
Russian) clitics. One would think it’s obvious, but it’s not. Again, he
took material that was always lying there, right in front of us, and made
it sparkle anew.
And finally the writing, oh the writing. In English, academic writing is
muscular and fairly confrontational. Take a stand and defend it against all
comers. Reiterate it again and again. For each paragraph, make it clear how
it relates to the overall argument. It works, even if it devolves into
‘avoid the passive voice at all costs’ in unskilled hands. It’s also
teachable to students. You can break it down and bash it into people’s
heads (I know, I underwent the procedure). Then there is the German style.
Bore your reader into submission. Regiment your paragraphs. Go through
every single bit of the data. Even if the reader doesn’t remember it by the
end, they’re confident you’ve done it. Then make your point. Maybe. But it
is no accident that Zaliznyak’s preferred foreign language, of the dozens
he was comfortable with, was French.
He writes to solve a problem. He states the problem. He gives you the tools
to solve it, and walks you through. He’s with you every step of the way,
but he always takes you seriously and never talks down to you. You are
never bored. You always know where this is going, and you know you will
solve everything. And by the end, you’ve cracked your problem. And also,
you’ve learned an awful lot more along the way.
Many people, in Russia certainly, use that style. I used to. But it’s hard,
and I mean *really* hard to pull off. So there is a lot of poor writing
about. I’m certainly guilty of it. I now write in the English way, because
I’m sure I can be competent without being sparkling. Well, Zaliznyak was
brilliantly sparkling. Also, he would never write a paper to ‘make a
theoretical point’ or ‘defend one theory against the other’, which is
something reviewers look for all too often over here. He would write to
solve a problem, and if he needed to build a theory along the way, you
could be sure you would get a tight, clear, and perfectly understandable
explanation of it. But also the solution.
Now, we will have to look for the solutions ourselves, and I hope we can at
least try. We will miss him.