swampiness

[lauradi7dw]

This is another in the series of "how Lauradi7's mind works" (sliding down tangents).
Recently nineweaving posted about her adventures in the Marais area of Paris, translating the name as "swamp."  I had other free-associations with stuff in her post, but something must have percolated overnight, because I woke up this morning thinking of gaseous gangrene, one of the plot points of a thin book called "домик на болоте"  ("Little House in the Swamp") that was used in one of my Russian courses in the 1970s.  It must still be used somewhere, because someone in 2010 made a set of flash cards for vocabulary words from the book http://www.flashcardmachine.com/610.html
After that, it occurred to me that an English  translation of the name of French composer/viol player Marin Marais
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marin_Marais ; would be "Marine Swamp."  That struck me as an odd name, but Marsh is a common enough surname in English, and nobody thinks anything of that.  A list of synonyms for swamp gave "morass" as one of the choices.  I'm not sure I've ever heard it used in any way other than metaphorically, but now I would like to see a morass in real life. Probably there is one conveniently available in nearby conservation land. My legs are already covered in mosquito bites - what's a few more?

Comments

[acw.livejournal.com]

Домик на болоте! I've still got it on a shelf somewhere, next to two-and-a-half volumes of Lipson. The following, I swear, is not copied from the page, but rather quoted from memory:

Своей матеры я совсем непомню.

I remember being quite bemused by the syntax. "Of self's mother I completely unremember." But I didn't get much farther. That was Russian III. I flunked.

[lauradi7.livejournal.com]

Ah, Alex Lipson. I went on one of his camping tours to the USSR in 1976. The textbook I used both at UNC and later at Harvard Extension was a rigid, bland, less than clear standard text. I was envious a couple of years later when a friend going to Brandeis started using Lipson's text. I know that he had an unusual system for dealing with verbs that didn't become popular, but what I remember from her discussion of the text is the chant/song бетон

[acw.livejournal.com]

Наш завод — бетонный завод! I think that's how it started. Have you leafed through Lipson? If you haven't, I should bring my copy to the next venue we are both at, because it's quite an experience.

Lipson's text was written just after some phonologist had finally managed to make sense of the possible stress patterns in a Russian verb. The bizarre X and arrow-shaped accent marks on Lipson's vocabulary listings of verb stems are a direct result. Most other accounts just tell you to memorize the stress shifts on a case-by-case basis, I think.

Lipson also liked to analyze words below the level of the spelling. In some accounts, there are two kinds of ё-verbs, the kind with third-person plural in -ут and the kind that has -ют. Lipson says that's just an unfortunate consequence of Russian spelling, that the ending is always /-ut/, and that we should analyze думают as /dumaj-/ + /-ut/.