RUSSIAN FOR THE SCIENTIST.
By JohnTurkevich '28 and Ludmilla B. Turkevich.Princeton: D. Van Nostrand, 1959. 255 pp. $5.95.
The beginning of the space era inaugurated on October 4, 1957 made it obvious that the modern scientific progress is not confined to the people speaking Latin and Germanic tongues and that we had better add seven more letters to those we know and learn what the 33 letters look like in Cyrillic and what they spell. With this in mind, Professor John Turkevich '28 and his wife produced a text entitled Russian for the Scientist. In publisher's words, "This concise textbook is designed to give the English-speaking scientist or engineer a direct path to command of the Russian he must know in order to make use of the Soviet scientific literature."
The scientific reading material in Russian for the Scientist is selected by Professor Turkevich from the Russian textbooks and encyclopaedias on aeronautical engineering, biology, physics, and chemistry with particular emphasis on scientific nomenclature. The material is well illustrated by neat, welllabeled drawings of the scientific apparatus. One may say without equivocation that Professor Turkevich's selections for the text are useful and happily made.
One cannot, however, dismiss as easily the more difficult part of the text pertaining to the morphology of the Russian language. It is, apparently, largely the work of Mrs. Turkevich, a Russian teacher at Princeton. The brevity of Mrs. Turkevich's .morphological exposition is indeed praiseworthy, and should point the way to sanity for writers of basic grammars of foreign languages. The vocabulary, for the most part, is scientific, pertinent. There are also faults in Mrs. Turkevich's morphology. These lie in the lack of care needed to give the morphological statement of the text the precision and terseness commensurate with its scientific reading material, and purpose.
Russian stress, as one Dartmouth student put it, is a "bum." The academic term for this is "variable." Considering that the Russian Literary Pronunciation and Stress by Avanesov is available to every scholar, there seems to be little excuse for marking wrong stresses, a veritable jam of which is found, for example, on pages 210 and 211. The use of the traditional Russian order of the six cases in the face of the more logical, easier one for the American student adopted by contemporary American Russian texts (Lunt-Harvard, Corny-Yale, and others) is an archaism. No Russian grammar text should omit a table of consonant mutations. These are ever-present in the Russian speech and on the printed page. An incomplete table of prepositions or a non-existent prefix "ned" (p. 197), obviously a misprint, indicate haste. There are other omissions and commissions.
The above will suffice to suggest to the authors that in the second printing of the text they must look to a better synthesis of the reading material and the grammar text, and to competent proofreading and criticism.
Nikita Balieff, the famous Russian comedian once said, "The Russian language is the easiest language in the world ... for the Russians." This cabaret jest may sound as a truism; nevertheless, the fact is that Russian, a highly inflected language, does not lend itself to a casual or a hasty approach even by a literate native speaker. Blazing a shortcut to reading scientific Russian is a pioneering task demanding besides linguistic skill, a time-consuming, painstaking effort. Although the Turkeviches' shortcut is a bit rough, it is timely and useful.
