American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages

Elementary Bulgarian 1, 2. Bulgarian Individualized Instruction by Charles Gribble;Lyubomira Parpulova-Gribble; Intermediate Bulgarian 1; Intermediate Bulgarian 2. BulgarianIndividualized Instruction by Charles Gribble; Lyubomira Parpulova-Gribble; Catherine Rudin;Advanced Bulgarian 1, 2. Bulgarian Individualized Instruction by Lyubomira Parpulova-Gribble; Charles GribbleReview by: Charles A. MoserThe Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 33, No. 4 (Winter, 1989), pp. 640-642Published by: American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European LanguagesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/308310 .

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640 Slavic and East European Journal

nations discussed. B vradx - varxdt may indeed be an instance of metathesis (unless the root is simply {vrx}). But there is no metathesis in U s'vec', inec', hrec', mrec' (:87) or Cz. S'vec, Inec (:111), which have the oblique-case stems svevc-, zenc-, etc. These nouns, as Anan'eva observes, are suffixed. Both the root and the suffix contain {(}. Therefore in U 3vvec' -s evcja we see two different {[}'s vocalizing as /e/, not a single {e} metathesizing with the adjacent consonant.

Anan'eva and Tolstaja offer phonetic-feature analyses of phonemes in their chapters. These efforts are worthwhile even if they do not quite succeed in accounting for palatal consonants. For Czech, Anan'eva (89) says /t'/ (as in tichd 'quiet') and /C/ (as in Yichd 'smells') are both compact, acute, noncontinuant, and voiceless but does not say what feature distinguishes them. For Serbo-Croatian, Tolstaja (170) distinguishes /6/ (as in sveca 'candle') from /U/ (as in svecan 'holiday') by specifying the first as nebnyj (palatal) and palatal'nyj and the second as nebnyj and nepalatal'nyj-a nonpalatal palatal. For Sorbian Ermakova posits a phoneme /V'/ which defies specification in phonetic features. One gets the impression phonology with pho- netic features is not a priority for Soviet morphophonologists. I think this is understandable. Popova and her colleagues may realize that if they stated their "alternation links" (e.g., d - d', t ~ t', z - z', s - s', 3 - 3', c - c', n - n', 1 - ', r - r' in Ukrainian [40]) in phonetic features and also assumed directionality (reading d - d' as d - d', etc.), their morphophonology would boil down to phonology with morphologically specified environments. Morris Halle started us down this road in Sound Pattern of Russian (Mouton & Co., 1959, p. 32) when he partially specified with phonetic features even the most characteristic Slavic morphophoneme {#}. But if morphophonology is to be distinct from phonology as the authors intend it to be, it must be distinctively synchronic. And a synchronic morphophonemic analysis stated in pho- netic features with directionality cannot be counted on to differ from a diachronic phonemic one.

It is odd that Nauka should attempt to produce a book in Slavic linguistics on a composing machine with only the standard letters of the cyrillic and latin alphabets, without so much as an acute accent-not even V! All accents and special characters were done by hand. I noticed three dozen misprints.

Frank Y Gladney, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Charles Gribble and Lyubomira Parpulova-Gribble, Elementary Bulgarian 1, 2. Bulgarian Indi- vidualized Instruction. 2 vols. OSU Slavic Papers, 12, 13. Columbus: Ohio State University, 1984. xii, 118 pp.; xii, 111 pp. (paper). 7 audio cassettes to accompany texts and two instructor's manuals (87 pp.; vii, 88 pp.) 12A, 13A.

Charles Gribble and Lyubomira Parpulova-Gribble, Intermediate Bulgarian 1; Lyubomira Parpulova-Gribble and Catherine Rudin, Intermediate Bulgarian 2. Bulgarian Individual- ized Instruction. 2 vols. OSU Slavic Papers, 14, 15. Columbus: Ohio State University, 1984, 1985. xii, 82 pp.; xv, 155 pp. (paper). 4 audio cassettes to accompany texts and two instructor's manuals (viii, 73 pp.; xi, 154 pp.) 14A, 15A.

Lyubomira Parpulova-Gribble and Charles Gribble, Advanced Bulgarian 1, 2. Bulgarian Indi- vidualized Instruction. 2 vols. vii, 196 pp., index; vii, 162 pp., index. OSU Slavic Papers, 47, 48. Columbus: Ohio State University, 1987. 2 audio cassettes to accompany text and corresponding instructor's manuals (165 pp.; iv, 162 pp.) 47A, 48A.

Those teachers of Bulgarian language to be found in the United States have not been abun- dantly blessed with teaching materials. One of the few textbooks designed for college-level courses-Albert Bates Lord's Beginning Bulgarian-appeared in 1962 and is now out of print; very recently James Augerot of the University of Washington and Nikolai Popov have produced another meant for use in this country; but in between there was for all practical

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Reviews 641

purposes only A Course in Modern Bulgarian (vol. 1 by Milka Hubenova, Ana Dzhumadanova, and Milka Marinova; vol. 2 by Hubenova and Dzhumadanova only). Even this text, though brought out by Slavica Publishers only in 1983, had been in existence since the early 1960s. It is this textbook-the repository of a great deal of densely printed information to begin with- around which the Gribbles have chosen to build their individualized Bulgarian language course.

The fundamental design of the project is the same as that of all the individualized language courses produced by Ohio State. Though it is intended to be used with an instructor, the course takes the student along at his own pace while allowing him to advance only when by examination he has demonstrated a thorough mastery of the material already covered. Also, he receives academic credit only upon the completion of stipulated units into which the course is broken down. The Bulgarian course is divided into three major segments: Elementary, Intermediate, and Advanced, with each of these subdivided further into two volumes. Thus the student who has all the materials ends up with six books in addition to the two volumes of Hubenova upon which they are based. Furthermore, the materials include teacher's manuals corresponding to each of the six books, as well as a set of audiocassettes to go with the lessons in Hubenova.

At the beginning the authors say they have emphasized teaching primarily reading and listening comprehension, while paying less attention to writing and speaking. Certainly the course by its nature can do little to develop active speaking habits, since it is designed for a student who will have little contact with an instructor with whom he could converse. But the course does require a considerable amount of writing: in particular, the tests rely heavily upon translation in both directions, and to render an English text into Bulgarian well-unless the text is specifically designed to go into Bulgarian easily, in which case it is likely to be sub- standard English-is to my mind at once more difficult and less useful than to compose an independent essay in Bulgarian at the early stages of study. But composition cannot be easily incorporated into an individualized course of this sort. In like manner the tapes-well and clearly, though sometimes rather slowly, voiced by native speakers-are based upon texts provided in Hubenova or the supplementary materials which the student can have before his eyes as he listens. The tests-especially at the advanced level-do include work in listening comprehension, and especially dictations, but in this area the testing is unfairly divorced from the everyday work of the course.

Thus the individualized Bulgarian course, since it is intended to function for the most part without an instructor, necessarily emphasizes reading, and perhaps even reading specifically for translation, more than it does gaining an active command of Bulgarian without shuttling back and forth between English and Bulgarian. Listening comprehension, a pre-requisite for carrying on intelligent conversations in any language, is slighted in the course materials.

If, however, the Bulgarian Individualized Course has defects attributable either to the text- book around which it is structured, or else to the very concept of individualized instruction (which in my limited experience can be quite effective, but only with highly motivated students), it also has virtues attributable to its authors. All of the authors are dedicated language teachers. Charles Gribble, an American who has learned Bulgarian in an academic setting, is a linguist with a thorough grasp of the language's niceties, while Lyubomira Parpulova-Gribble is a native speaker who can elucidate many subtleties which can evade even an excellent foreign student of the language and can authoritatively correct the relatively frequent errors to be found in the Hubenova textbook (the individualized materials in effect provide a proofread version of Hubenova). Even though Hubenova's grammatical explanations are fairly extensive anyway, the Gribbles provide emendations and additional elucidations written without linguis- tic jargon, always eminently sensible, and conversational, even sometimes a bit chatty, in tone. In effect through the supplementary materials the authors provide nearly everything in the way of grammatical explanation which a good instructor using Hubenova might be expected to give in class. In addition-and especially in the two volumes for Advanced Bulgarian-they have composed entire series of essays on cultural points of difference between Bulgarian and

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642 Slavic and East European Journal

American societies which are extremely interesting and instructive, and written in an effective style. One would almost like to see them expanded and modified as separate essays on the Bulgarian mind and culture from an American perspective.

In sum, then, given the framework within which they had to work, the Gribbles have done a first-rate job in attaining the goals of the OSU individualized series for Bulgarian. But in the process they have created so many supplementary materials as to make Hubenova itself even less suitable for classroom use than it was before, for they leave the instructor no leeway to teach. I for one hope that the Gribbles may in the near future undertake the production of a textbook suitable for university classroom instruction which would fall appropriately between the skimpy Lord textbook and this bulky set of volumes for individualized instruction in Bulgarian.

Charles A. Moser, The George Washington University

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