This will be another short post. I am in Middlebury, enjoying my last day before the pledge. I am not taking the pledge, but it applies to me, so I will probably not be able to write in English. I’ll see what I can do. Does someone want to volunteer translating skills? Just for fun :) I don’t think I will be able to post a lot either way. I don’t have time to breathe now, and I have not started teaching yet; I will be teaching 4th level.
I love this place. It is full of energy, and the company is amazing. By the way, if you want to know what I look like, now’s your chance - a photo had been added to my bio.

My laptop is dying. What are the English equivalents of на последнем издыхании and на смертельном одре? “Drawing its last breath” and “on the deathbed” are probably correct but not as expressive - the Russian expressions are relics of dvuyazychie ‘diglossia’, or Old Church Slavonicisms. neither of those terms are accurate to describethe way Old Russian coexisted with OCS in the East Slavic area - but we can call those expressions bookish or knizhnye without fear, I think. Anyway, my laptop. It is dying. The internet access is gone beyond repair - it’s a hardware problem, fixing it will be as expensive as buying a new used one. Keyboard is often stuck. I am at a loss - it is uncomfortable to be stuck without access in my room, and I need to work on something for my dissertation. Catwings is my second laptop - first was the ibook Mogget. Third one? I can’t go through laptops like that :(

I think I have waited long enough to announce my summer plans. To make a long story short, I will be teaching Russian in Middlebury School this summer.
Due to the nature of Middlebury school and the language pledge, I am not sure how much I will be able to post here. There is some hope yet, since I will be leading an Internet club (yes, there will be a club weblog, or at least that’s the plan). I will keep you posted.

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1. What is your favorite childhood memory?
I am eight. I wake up very early in the morning. Everything is quiet; when I look up from where I lie in my bed, I see motes of dust dancing in the thin slanted pillars of light. The air is pale and translucent, full of the most unusual smell, a grassy smell, a quiet smell. I cannot describe it. The most intense feeling of happiness fills me and I jump up from the bed, and my whole body sings to me, “you are already in Vorkuta!” I run to the window and look out and I see it for the first time: the tundra in flower. Our apartment building is the last before it begins - stripes upon stripes of pale joyful color, pink and purple and primrose yellow and whitish red. It covers the land from our house straight without breaking, until it meets the Ural mountains on the horison - blue and opaque, receding before the dreamy opulence of the tundra.
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I am in a very strange tense mood right now, and can’t really concentrate on a long, well-thought-out post… So I thought I would unwind by posting a meme. But Friday Five is gone for good, and there is nothing else I like. Yes, I looked around… For example, I could participate in a Wednesday meme called “What’s on.. right now“. Today’s question reads:

What’s On your porch Right Now? (If you don’t have a porch, feel free to substitute with ‘deck.’)

Exactly my thought : if they don’t have bread, let them eat cake - or in Czech, at’ jedí dort (I guess you could also say at’ jedí keks, moučník or even rohlíky… how do you say it in Czech?!) And thus, because I have no porch or deck or even a cake, I am completely meme-less.

Why won’t you contribute some questions? Anything you want to ask, but not about the absolutive. Not today.

I explain at Justin’s why Old Church Slavic syntax is not derived from Latin.
It’s a longer comment, but it is not long enough to say anything really important. If anyone is interested in the issues raised in the discussion, please leave a comment here and I will do my best to respond. Does anyone else want to hear about absolutive constructions, beside Justin?

Corpus of Old Slavic Texts from 11th century:
This is an interesting and much needed work (in progress). All the 19 MSS are listed, but only some links are clickable. It’s worth following the corpus as it develops.

A relatively small number of manuscripts has been preserved of the XIth c. Slavic Orthodox literary texts. On the whole, they represent codices written in Bulgaria or Kievan Rus’. The present corpus comprises texts copied by the Eastern Slavs in the XIth c. from Old Bulgarian manuscript books. It is namely texts from the XIth c. which are the oldest preserved East Slavic Christian manuscripts (Kievan Rus’ was officially baptised under Prince Vladimir in 988). […]

The Old Russian manuscripts from the XIth c. contain Old Bulgarian texts with quite small stratum of graphic and phonetic russifications. In this way they can serve for the extension of the scholarly conceptions about Old Bulgarian literature. On the other hand, the texts were current in the East-Slavic milieu and have
great significance for the study of the oldest literary culture of the Eastern Slavs. In a more general sense, they represent material for studying the Slavic culture of the initial literary period.

The manuscript texts were entered in electronic form accurately, the scholarly team copied the texts from the originals (based on microfilm and photocopy back-ups), thus guaranteeing precision and seeking to correct the misprints in various previous editions.

This is a long entry in two parts. First is about my personal experience with academic writing: to read it, go to pages 2 and 3 of the entry (page 2 has the mythological digression - maybe you’ve heard this already). Second part is about a possible usage of blogging capabilities in dissertation writing. To read it, go to page 4 of the entry. Of course, you also have the option of reading all, or none!