Prokosch Eduard. Elementary Russian Grammar

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1920. — 133 p.About a year ago the University of Chicago Press invited me to write a brief elementary grammar of Russian with the prime object of introducing the students in a reasonably short time to the reading of simple texts, such as are accessible, for instance, through Harper's adaptation of Boyer-Speranski's Russian Reader. While I undertook the interesting task with some eagerness, I was well aware of its difficulty. It would have been easy indeed to compile a satisfactory tabulation of rules and paradigms for cursory study and systematic reference, and such a booklet might have proven fairly useful for the needs of traditional ''reading" by means of translation. But my ingrained conviction of the limitations of such a study of a modern foreign language turned me from that line of least resistance and made it incumbent upon me to embody even in this modest booklet the most essential features of what is generally termed the "direct method," representing both my theoretical views and the results of twenty years' experience in the teaching of several foreign languages, Russian among them. This implied a number of peculiar complications. The first requirement consisted in an exposition of Russian pronunciation on a phonetic basis, unavoidably connected with phonetic transliteration. The elusive elasticity of Russian articulation on the one hand, and the need of the greatest simplicity attainable on the other hand, involved many embarrassing problems and demanded considerable deviations from the standard of the Association phonetique, which I should have preferred to adopt in its entirety.