Slavic 671

Prof. C. Gribble. Office hours TuTh 12:40-2:15 and by appointment.

This course will teach you to read modern Bulgarian; it will not devote a lot of time to speaking, writing, or listening, although I will speak some Bulgarian in class so that you hear the oral version of the language. Flash! A visiting Bulgarian, Ms. Petya Atanasova, has volunteered to provide oral practice for those who want it. Stay tuned for details! Reading of texts will begin in the second week of classes. Grammar will be viewed as a help in reading, rather than a goal in itself.

Since Bulgarian and Russian have borrowed and lent vocabulary back and forth for one thousand years, there are a great many shared words, and a student who knows modern Russian reasonably well can learn Bulgarian quite rapidly. This course presumes a decent knowledge of modern Russian (equivalent to being at least in Russian 561, and preferably 609). It does not presume any knowledge of other Slavic languages (such as Old Church Slavonic), French, or German.

Texts in a wide variety of disciplines and subjects will be included. Readings will be real Bulgarian, written in Bulgaria. This course will be followed by Slavic 672 in the Spring quarter, which will consist of more extensive and intensive reading of Bulgarian texts, partially those individually chosen by the student in his or her field of special interest. I welcome any suggestions that you may have about the course or material that you would like to see included in either course.

There will be two hour exams and a final; the timing of the hour exams will be decided in consultation with the class, but the first will be approximately at the beginning of the fifth week, and the second will be approximately at the end of the eighth week. The final will be at the time specified in the registrar's listing (Tuesday, March 15, 9:30-11:18). In a small course such as this there is no curve for grades; you can all get A or all get E, depending upon how you do. If the class wishes, a project may be substituted for the final.

The textbook is Reading Bulgarian through Russian, by Charles Gribble. It will be available from Copēz at the Tuttle Park location. Not required, but strongly recommended, is Kjetil Rå Hauge, A Short Grammar of Contemporary Bulgarian, Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 1999. Dictionaries will be on reserve at the OSU Library. Since the textbook is designed to be mostly self-teaching, I will normally make an assignment for a given date; you will prepare it and then we will go over the exercises in class. In most cases I will not introduce topics before assigning them, since the basics of what I want to say about each topic are contained in the book. A tentative schedule follows, but it is subject to revision as needed, since it may be a bit over-ambitious, especially for the first two days. Additional material from various sources will be handed out during the quarter to supplement what is in the book. Some of the texts in the book are outdated and will be omitted from the course packet (pp. 106-115, 120-135, 137-172). I will be looking for better texts on the same topics. Some texts do not reflect the major political changes in Bulgaria since 1989, but they are of historical and pedagogical interest and so will be kept (59-64, 68-71, 78-81).

Assignments for:

Th Jan. 6: pages 11-26 (long, but give it a try!)

Tu Jan. 11: 27-33

Th Jan. 13: 34-first part of 38

Tu Jan. 18: 38-45

Th Jan. 20: 46-51

Tu Jan. 25: 52-59

Th Jan. 27: 60-64

Tu Feb. 1: first hour: 1 st hour exam; 2 nd hour: tba

Th Feb. 3: 65-69

Tu Feb. 8: 70-77

Th Feb. 10: 78-81

Tu Feb. 15: 82-89

Th Feb. 17: 90-93

Tu Feb. 22: 94-99

Th Feb. 24: 2nd hour exam

Tu March 1: 100-105

Th March 3: 116-119, 136, 173-74

Tu March 8: tba

Th March 10: tba