Bidspirit auction | A short Russian grammar, published

A short Russian grammar, published by Nikolai Grech. - Tenth edition. St. Petersburg, 1847, 146 p. Hardcover, size 12 x 20 cm. Good condition, rare marginalia, scuffed binding. Today, N. I. Grech (1787-1867) is better known as a conservative journalist who ”sobered up from liberal ideas Willy-nilly”, editor of ”Son of the Fatherland” and ”Northern bee”, memoirist. Russian Russian Russian grammar (St. Petersburg, 1827) became the first ”systematic grammatical guide” (V. V. Vinogradov) in Russia, and ”brief Russian grammar” (the first name — ”Initial rules of Russian grammar”) — a stable textbook. Grammar Manuals by N. I. Grech were very Popular in Russia until the end of the 40s of the XIX century. Taking into account their main provisions, various school textbooks of the Russian language were compiled, which were used in teaching practice until the 60s of the XIX century, when they were already declared ”legends of antiquity”. Reference to the grammatical works of Grech allows us to establish what information about the language was received by Russian high school students in the first half of the XIX century. ”Since the fifteenth Year of my birth, ” recalled N. I. Grech, ” the idea of creating a new Russian grammar has been lurking in my soul.” ”I saw the insufficiency of our grammars in comparison with foreign ones, and their incongruity with the conclusions of universal grammar.” Grech turns to work on Russian grammar at the end of the first decade of the XIX century. In 1817, by the decision of the Minister of national education, philosophical grammar was excluded from the curriculum of high schools, which meant the return of traditional practical grammar. A study Committee set up in 1818 to review published textbooks found the grammars available at that time unsatisfactory. There was a need to create new grammar manuals. This Problem was solved by Ni. Grech, who already had a lot of experience teaching Russian literature in St. Petersburg schools and gymnasiums. The grammar of Greek is built as a normative guide, the purpose of which is ”to teach you to speak and write Russian correctly”. Grammar is based on observations of book speech, which was repeatedly emphasized by the Greek himself: ”If Russian grammar begins to set out the rules of a non-General, bookish language, it will have to change in each province according to the requirements of the local dialect.” The grammar of Greek consists of four parts: ”Word production”, which corresponds to modern morphology, ”Word Combinations”, ”pronunciation of words” and ”Spelling”. Russian Russian course structure is traditional for the first half of the XIX century, but Grech's innovation is shown in the fact that, motivating the sequence of sections, he connects it with the development of practical skills: the first part gives a General description of parts of speech and the formation of basic grammatical forms, the second sets out the rules for connecting ”parts and particles together to produce understandable speech”, the third ”suggests rules for speaking and reading Russian”, and finally, the fourth ”calculates the rules for writing correctly in Russian”. Greek, therefore, sees the purpose of its grammar in the gradual mastery of different types of speech activity: reading, speaking and writing. Describing parts of speech, Greek consistently distinguishes between significant and service words (speech particles). As part of the first, the noun, adjective, pronoun, verb, participle, adverb and adverb are distinguished; as part of speech particles, the preposition, conjunction and interjection are distinguished. The characteristic of participles in the Greek manual is contradictory: on the one hand, they are considered as an independent part of speech, on the other hand, they are included in adjectives as their special category — ”acting, which expresses not the quality found in the subject, but its action; for example: a green tree; flowing water; a student reading. Numerals in Greek grammar are not part of parts of speech (as an independent part of speech, numerals were first identified only in 1841 by G. P. Pavsky), but are distributed between nouns and adjectives. Nouns, for example, include: forty, one hundred, one thousand, twenty, fifty, etc., adjectives — one, two, both, one and a half, first, second, etc. The structure of describing parts of speech in Greek grammar is similar to modern textbooks: first, a definition is given indicating the meaning or function of a particular part of speech, then lexical and grammatical categories are marked. So, in the composition of nouns, proper, common, collective, real, diminutive and magnifying are distinguished, in the composition of adjectives, qualitative, circumstantial, possessive and active (= participles) are distinguished. The classification of pronouns developed by Grech is extremely close to the modern one. Over the course of two centuries,