Roots of the Russian Language: An Elementary Guide to Wordbuilding (NTC Russian Series) (English and Russian Edition)

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• ISBN13: 9780844242675
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Product details:

Item number (ASIN): 0844242675
Author: George Z. Patrick
Dewey Decimal Number: 491.72
ISBN: 0844242675
Manufacturer: National Textbook Company
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 239
Package Dimensions: 60 x 580 x 860 (hundredths-inches)
Publication Date: January 11, 1989
Publisher: National Textbook Company
Binding: Paperback

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Rating: - A complete waste, I sent my copy back
The book is very poorly printed. It appears to be a 3rd or 4th generation photocopy, making it painful to read. I didn't find the book to be at all useful for learning Russian in any case. I would not suggest this book for anyone but the most enthusiastic collector of language learning books. Unless you have an unlimited budget and a need to have a lot of books on your shelf that you will seldom open, there are a lot of other books that will be more useful to your study.

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Rating: - Learning Tool -- Somewhat, But More So, Purusing Roots Can Just Be Fun -- in any language
The reviewer who claimed Russian has more roots than any other language -- no, not really. English has roots (morphemes) for almost all our words too; it's just that English morphemes can have come to our language from so many sources (French for the fancier, German for the more pedestrian; but also Latin, Greek and even Sanskrit and Hebrew can be sources for English roots). Also English morphemes themselves transform (allomorph) due to spelling contingencies due to where the morpheme finds itself in our words. The important thing to realize about roots is that some are obvious to you (all the medicalese ones for example: hypo = too-little, hyper = too-much, myo = muscle, olisis = dissolving, itis = inflamation, etcetera; [hypoxic sounds fancy, especially just hearing it on TV, but then you realize it's totally well-duh: too little oxygen!]), but other roots are far less obvious. Perhaps what the other reviewer meant is that, in Russian, the roots are more obvious. But let's just do one or two English ones first. First, a morphemic analysis of the word 'morpheme' (and thus the fun "the medium is the message" thing), then on to the book and Russian roots. 'morpheme' = 'morph' + 'eme' ; morph = form (think our new word "to morph" or think the car that used to turn into a tiger in the old Exxon commercials, or, for the scientist, just think "morphology"); eme = unit; so morph + eme = form unit; 'morpheme' = the smallest unit of a language that bestows any kind of meaning; can be a whole word or a word part or even an affix; s is a morpheme that means plural in English for example. One more English one to go: "Eucerin" as in Eucerin creme (for dry skin) -- a morphemic analysis of an excellently named commercial product: the eu is pretty obvious (think eulogy, euphemism, or euphonic [for the audiophiles, though they mean, ironically enough, "euphonic" to be slightly pejorative, "good sound" but really the audiophile means it sounds pleasantly pretty but is not "accurate"]); anyway eu is "good"; cerin is obscure, but means "wax-like substance" -- so Eucerin = good wax-like substance. The opposite morpheme to eu is mal (think malevolent, malfeseance, maladapted, petite-mal seizure, grand-mal, maladjusted). Now on to Russian. Let's take sahm (trasliterating, the h just means a short vowel -- like most Russian vowels ultimately end up being). sahm = self as in by one's self. So what do you think a samovar is? var = boil verb vahreet = to boil. So samovar = self-boil. A samovar always has hot water for one's tea to the ready due to the coals inside. Older Russian word for airplane was sahmolyoht = sahm + allomorph of lyeteet (to fly), so sahmolyoht = self-fly. But yes, Russian has oodles of afixes -- prefixes especially as well as some suffixes. Morphemes definitely can be prefixes and suffixes. Guess what the English pre means in 'prefix' -- before. I gave the cutest kinds of morphemic analyses for both English and Russian. But if you already know some Russian -- and all the better the bigger your vocabulary (two years of highschool Russian class should suffice), then you'll get a kick out of seeing how the words derived from the same root all pile together -- IN EXACTLY THE SAME WAY AS YOU GET THIS KICK FROM ENGLISH MORPHEMIC ANALYSIS. The one thing I would caution you about is that Russian gets its meanings from subtleties of its verbs and special choices of prepositions and word orders (surprised about this latter aren't you?) and a little bit of extra meaning from its cases. So while Russian roots may be very logical, more obvious, and not deriving from a plethora of sources like in English, this stiuation doesn't mean knowledge of Russian roots is going to help you master the language as much as you think. In fact, morphemic analysis will help you more in English and German. I have such books for English -- and German too! So a bit of irony is that morphemic analysis in Russian is more logical and overt than in English -- but less helpful: the subtleties of the verbs, the subtleties conveyed by the cases and, more so, the word choices and word orders -- these things are out of the purview of morphemic analysis. But to have fun with vocabulary, enjoy the book; it IS a lot of fun. Nice layout too. Just don't think of it to help you to learn Russian as much as a similar book would help you to learn German. But the book itself is perfect for its subject. The subject is just less of a shortcut to learning than you'd think for all the morphemic neatness to be found in Russian.

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Rating: - A book for word addicts
This is a pretty rare kind of book. It helps you to understand how Russian words are built. The more you study it, the more the internal meanings and relations within Russian words will stand out to you. It's an intermediate book. You need a bit of Russian in your head to make sense of it and you have to know Cyrillic even to read it. It starts with a bunch of little general bits that end or add to words. Then it has a long (400+) list of roots with examples. The examples are translated as well. It's a pretty great book. I give it four instead of five stars because the groupings and examples don't always make sense. Now either they _don't_ make sense and should have been left out or they _do_ make sense and could have been explicated. So four stars instead of five. I said this was a rare kind of book because the only similar book I know of is Chinese Characters: A Genealogy and Dictionary. I wish someone would do a similarly excellent book for Arabic.

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Rating: - Very Comprehensive
This book is great, but I'm a total nerd. The layout is very easy and the flow is great. You might think it looks boring but it's all kinds of party on the inside. If you're interested in -casually- learning Russian, this probably isn't for you because you might want pictures and a less daunting interface.

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Rating: - Speed Up Your Russian Learning!
Russian is such a hard language to learn you need all the help you can get! This book assists with how Russian uses compound words and the more you understand suffixes and prefixes the more you can begin to understand the language.

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