Customer Reviews

Chuvash Manual (Uralic and Altaic)

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John R. Krueger's CHUVASH MANUAL is the only English-language introductory handbook of this most exotic of Turkic languages. It was originally published by Indiana University and Mouton in 1961 as volume 7 of the Uralic and Altaic Series. Routledge has reissued it (ISBN 0700708073), but it is obscenely overpriced. Luckily, Indiana University Bloomington sells affordable reprints with corrections, so contact them.

Many of Indiana University's Uralic and Altaic linguistic publications were written with funding from the U.S. military to further Russian areal studies. Consequently, the first 50 pages of the book cover general geographical, social, economic and cultural facts about Chuvashia. These are all quite out of date, as Chuvashia has changed massively over the last several decades. Furthermore, Krueger had just finished working for an "alphabet agency" before writing the book, and was under pressure to depict life in Soviet Chuvashia as negatively as possible. One finds, for example, the following description of living standards: "The general living standard in Chuvashia is quite low, and comparison with life in the United States is hardly possible. Incomes are low, people are poorly dressed in rough materials with little style, and streets are mostly dirt ... Production of consumer goods has always been low, and what is produced seems to be ... dismally low in quality. Housing conditions ar enot good, and this is in general one of the worst features of Soviet life. Bits like this led to the so-called "Krueger Affair", where the scholar was denounced on the floor of the Supreme Soviet, an interesting aside of Turkic scholarship history.

An introduction to the Chuvash language takes up the rest of the book, and it is excellent indeed. Krueger actually had no access to Chuvash speakers, he had to piece together a view of the language from earlier publications. He nonetheless succeeded in writing a course that can prepare a linguist to successfully join into the life of a Chuvash village. There are 16 units, each of which treat some general grammatical category, such as nominal morphology, verbs, personal possession, converbs, or numerals. This is not a textbook, and one will find no exercises or lists of vocabulary to learn. The book rather teaches you to tackle Chuvash texts with the aid of a dictionary. The last part of the book is a selection of Chuvash texts, from folkloristic literature such as the Chuvash national poem "Narspi" to then-contemporary newspaper articles.

For the student of Chuvash who speaks Russian--and good luck doing anything with the language if you don't--the best main textbook to use is I. A. Andreev's CHUVASHKIJ JAZYK: Nachalnyj kurs (Cheboksary: Chuvashkoe knizhnoe izdatel'stvo, 1996). That's almost impossible to find for purchase, but you could photocopy it from e.g. the university library in Cheboksary. It has plenty of exercises to make what you learn stick. Still, Krueger's book is great for presenting another perspective on Chuvash grammar, and the reading selections with English translation help you make sure you're understanding things correctly.