How a non-native speaker perfected the Russian language

Russian was a “learned” language for Rosenthal, as he himself used to say. Despite this, he wrote about 400 scholarly articles, textbooks and manuals that enabled the broadest masses to learn and pay better attention to the rules of Russian speech, spelling and punctuation.

From Polish & German to Russian

Dietmar Rosenthal was born into a Jewish family in the Polish city of Łódź in 1900. Yiddish, Polish and German were the languages he heard and spoke from a very young age. His father worked in Germany and the family loved living there. 

The future famous linguist then went to study at Moscow University and, initially, focused on Polish and Italian and even defended his dissertation on the latter. He even taught Italian to officers at the Soviet intelligence school. It was only later that he turned his attention to Russian.

Rosenthal was one of the first to tackle the problems of teaching Russian as a foreign language.

“Rosenthal's influence was comprehensive, he was a member of many committees and organizations,” Gramota.ru (Грамота.ру) quotes Vladimir Slavkin, Rosenthal's colleague and head of the Department of Russian Language Stylistics at the Faculty of Journalism of Moscow State University. 

“But, at the same time, he was not just an academic scholar. He always had a genuine interest in working with people.”

The creator of practical stylistics of the Russian language

“Let's speak correctly!” was Rosenthal’s work and life motto. And he essentially created a new linguistic field that’s called ‘practical stylistics of the Russian language’.

“What is the value of this field? It is stylistics addressed to millions. It can be called the 'culture of speech.' <…> Essentially, it is the art of punctuationally and orthographically correct speech,” Slavkin believes.

Rosenthal's role in developing correct speech among journalists was especially great. He was a consultant for presenters and anchors on Soviet TV and All-Union Radio. He carefully monitored what was said on the air and then provided detailed, precise commentary to prevent slips of the tongue from recurring in the future.

Rosenthal also published several books aimed at media workers, such as ‘Dictionary of Difficulties of the Russian Language’, ‘Punctuation Guide’, ‘Handbook of Spelling and Literary Editing’ and ‘Capital or Lowercase’. These and many other works literally became desktop references for many journalists.

Intellectual without excessive seriousness

Rosenthal was a man of the highest intellect and refinement. This was noticeable even in small details. At the same time, Dietmar loved to joke and knew how to approach his own field with a sense of humor.

In the 1980s, applicants to the Faculty of Journalism at Moscow State University had to present their publications from various media outlets. One applicant's materials contained an error: ‘шотландское виски’, literally ‘Scottish whisky’, which was written in Russian in the neuter gender, although the textbook prescribed the use of this borrowed word in the masculine gender. 

The young lady said that the editorial office had corrected it this way, though she originally had written ‘шотландский’ (masculine).

“I dialed Dietmar Elyashevich's home number and explained the situation. He gave a slight chuckle: 'Let her write it like that, as long as it's not in the plural’,” Slavkin recalls.

Still popular & authoritative

Thirty years after Rosenthal's death, his textbooks still serve as desktop references for many. There are several reasons for this:

• Many of the things stated in them still hold true in modern reality. Rosenthal had a powerful intuition for changes in linguistic norms and for how people would actually speak.
• He tried to perceive the Russian language as a living organism and proposed changes. For example, before him, the stress in the word ‘фольга’ (‘foil’) was considered standard on the first syllable (‘фóльга’), but he proposed the variant ‘фольгá’ with the stress at the end, which is more natural to the Russian ear.
• Rosenthal also understood how to present material: not in an overly scientific manner (a sin many linguists commit), but in a way that is clear to the reader.

“Dietmar Elyashevich wanted those who speak and write to always understand what and how they are saying and writing, to be able to approach the language flexibly. And this approach, which Rosenthal laid down, we now try to adhere to both in studying and in teaching the language,” Slavkin says.

The full version of the article is available in Russian at the Gramota.ru (Грамота.ру) website.