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A Couple of Real Gems from the "Harvey and Lee" Website


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5 hours ago, Thomas Graves said:

PPS  Pop Quiz.  Any idea why I put an apostrophe s ('s) on the word "verb," above?

Yep.  The Gerund Takes The Possessive

 

I actually recognized that as I read it. But remember, I'm the one who corrected my really smart friends who were on full scholarships and were at the tops of their classes. Somehow I picked up on that rule.

However... had I written the sentence myself, I'm sure I would have done so without the apostrophe, and would have been none the wiser for it.

BTW, has anybody seen my gerbil? I think he got away with my stuff. Cuz you know what they say... The Gerbil Takes the Possession!  :P

 

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3 hours ago, Sandy Larsen said:


Yeah, that's what I discovered when I skimmed through the Wikipedia article on gerunds. It gave me a headache... literally.

The rules for English are mind-numbingly complicated IMO. But I find that I just kinda pick it up by reading. If you read a lot of proper English, incorrect grammar starts sounding funny. I usually know how to correct it, but often don't know the reason for doing so. Other than it sounds funny.

I once took lessons in Farsi and lived in Iran for a year and a half. Now that is an easy language. It is said that there are only two exceptions to the grammatical rules. But I just see those exceptions as two additional rules. So really, the language has no exceptions. The rules are 100% consistent across the board.

And the rules are not hard to learn at all. In fact, I bought an advanced grammar book while in Iran and taught myself to say complicated sentences like, "I would have liked to have gone had I known there was still time to go." (I have no idea what you call that kind of stuff. Verb conjugation pops into my head.) Nobody in Iran talks like that and many don't understand it... it is used strictly for intellectual writings. Instead they will use simple grammar, but put it in context so that it can be properly understood. Instead of what I wrote above, they would say something like, "I would want to go at that time, if I knew there was still time to go." It's more likely, though, that they'd say something simpler like, "I wanted to go but I thought it was too late."

The hard parts about learning Farsi are 1) the huge vocabulary, 2) the Arabic alphabet, 3) which has four letters S, three letters Z, etc., thus making spelling tough, and 4) words that leave out most vowels, leaving it to the reader to figure out what vowels belongs where.

So with Farsi the grammar is a cinch and everything else is hard.

 

Sandy,

That's interesting about Farsi being a relatively easy language to learn.

Try learning Czech sometime.  LOL

Conversely, my Czech students seemed to have a hard time learning English grammar.

One of my students (not a 16 year-old, but a PhD. in biochemistry, actually) who became my girlfriend, accused me one day of practically single handedly making the English language so gosh-darned "tense-heavy" and "hung up about time" (English has something like eighteen tenses whereas Czech has either three or five, depending on how you define "tense," I suppose). 

--  Tommy :sun

PS  I know it's boring and perhaps difficult to get a "handle" on, but Oswald's writing (there I go again; notice the apostrophe "s"?):  "my losing" instead of "me losing" simply "set in concrete" my already-firm conviction that he was a very good speaker of the English language (and writer, too, if you're willing to ignore, as I am,the relatively unimportant -- when contrasted with his obvious proficiency with grammar, syntax, and vocabulary -- spelling and punctuation errors), and therefore it's very unlikely, IMHO, that, since he was born in Hungary to Hungarian parents, he first learned a non-Indo-European Turkic language (Hungarian), then learned and mastered a highly-inflected Indo-European language (Russian) as a child (?), and then (as an adolescent-juvenile???) virtually mastered a different Indo-European language that not only has a lot more tenses than Russian, but which also requires strict adherence to "correct" word order (e.g., subject - verb - object; object, verb, subject), mastery of lots of highly-idiomatic phrasal verbs (which are non-existent in Slavic languages, btw), etc, etc, etc. 

But I'm gonna stop now, because I know you really aren't gonna accept what I've been trying to tell you about your "Harvey's" English language skills -- quitey high indeed -- and you'll fixate on his absolutely horrible spelling and punctuation instead of his mastery of the much more challenging grammar, syntax, and vocabulary aspects of the English language.

Maybe it takes someone like me (or is it "I" ? -- LOL-- always had problems with that) -- someone who scored in the top 98th percentile in "Verbal Intelligence" on the 1965 or 1966 (can't remember if it was my sophomore or junior year) SAT -- someone who taught English in a Slavic country for seven years -- to realize just how good at English your "Harvey" really was.

I give up.

--  Tommy :sun

 

 

Edited by Thomas Graves
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11 hours ago, Thomas Graves said:

Jim,

You're either living in denial or are blinded by the fact that Oswald couldn't spell or punctuate properly.  His spoken English was excellent.

--  Tommy :sun

Wonder what happened to that Southern drawl the kids all noticed during LEE Oswald's brief stay in New York City?

But you're right about Harvey's spoken English.  It was certainly better than his English writing skills.  Sandy explained this well way back on the first page of this thread when he wrote:

My ex-wife came to America from South Korea when she was about 7 years old. She spoke flawless English when I first met her about three years later. No accent. I think kids pick up new languages quickly.

Sounds logical to me.

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56 minutes ago, Jim Hargrove said:

Wonder what happened to that Southern drawl the kids all noticed during LEE Oswald's brief stay in New York City?

But you're right about Harvey's spoken English.  It was certainly better than his English writing skills.  Sandy explained this well way back on the first page of this thread when he wrote:

My ex-wife came to America from South Korea when she was about 7 years old. She spoke flawless English when I first met her about three years later. No accent. I think kids pick up new languages quickly.

Sounds logical to me.

Jim,

I don't mean to sound overly rude or insulting, but it appears to me that you're simply never going to be able (or willing) to understand what I've been trying to convey on this thread to you and other members, i.e., how impressive a grasp of English syntax, grammar, and vocabulary (but obviously not spelling or punctuation, both of which are totally unimportant, as far as speaking is concerned) your "Hungarian-born, Hungarian-learning, then Russian-learning, and finally English-learning, HARVEY Oswald" had. LOL

Regarding your assertions that the different dialects the one-and-only Lee Harvey Oswald picked up while living in different parts of the country somehow suggest the existence of two Oswald boys who were confused for each other over the years by different witnesses, or that the one and only Lee Harvey Oswald's losing (By golly, there it is again! -- that unmistakable indicator of Tommy's superior English grammar skills -- his applying (OMG!, I can't believe it! Lightening strikes twice in the same sentence!) the rule "The Gerund Takes The Possessive Form Of The Pronoun"), LHO's losing, I say again, one of those dialects due to the smothering effects of a radically-different regional dialect that he naturally "picks up" while living in said different region, as well as the fact that many people become self conscious, and are even picked on, for having a strong regional dialect when the move to a different part of the country, and therefore make a conscious effort to "lose" said embarrassing-for-them dialect.

--  Tommy :sun  

PS  You never answered the question I asked you some time ago:  What foreign language did YOU learn in high school?  Or did you go to a trade school or some such place that didn't require you to learn a foreign language (or at least "give it a shot")?

FWIW, mine was Spanish.

Adios.

Edited by Thomas Graves
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Jim Hargrove has several problems trying to convince people that "Harvey" was a Hungarian-born individual who spoke perfect Russian from the start of his Soviet adventure. 

1. The entire premise is based on an anonymous phone call to Mrs. Jack Tippit. There is not a bit of other evidence for this idea.

https://reopenkennedycase.forumotion.net/t87-the-mrs-jack-d-tippit-phone-call

2. The evidence shows that the one and only LHO could not speak Russian well at all when he first arrived. Check out statements by Rima his Intourist guide and others.

3. Jim must exaggerate the statements of the Russian community members and others to make his case. While they thought LHO spoke very well nobody thought he was a "native" speaker.

Now Jim will probably explain some of this by saying that “Harvey” was acting when he first arrived in Russia and not revealing his true ability. Of course, Armstrong believes that “Harvey” spoke no Russian in the Soviet Union at all, or did at the time his book was published. The following article shows otherwise:

http://wtracyparnell.blogspot.com/2017/03/lho-spoke-no-russian-in-russia.html

So, the H&L gang have a high bar to clear without any evidence to work with. The available evidence shows that LHO spoke Russian poorly on his arrival in the Soviet Union and after nearly three years of conversing daily with his wife and others spoke fluently.

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Not well informed on the Harvey versus Lee issue but these last few postings have piqued my own English language skills and understanding interests as well as those of Oswald.

I'll say a few things about the Lee Oswald we saw interviewed in the halls of the Dallas PD building the evening of 11,22,1963.

In between his frenetic jostling to and fro by his police escorts and with his hands cuffed I was surprised that he still had a sense of Southern politeness when he spoke. At least twice he responded to reporters and their questions with "Sir" and in his televised New Orleans debut and radio interview he also displayed this respectful politeness.

I did catch some Southern ( maybe Black southern? ) slang when Oswald was asked by a reporter in the DPD Hallway interview if he had shot the president...and Oswald did seem to stumble a bit in reponding ( nervousness? ) and after a pause and a surprised glance back at the reporter he said ..." No, I have not been charged with that"...and " the first time I had heard that was when a reporter in the hall 'axed' me that question."

 

Edited by Joe Bauer
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Harvey Oswald’s ability to understand Russian, and his attempts to hide that fact, were noted by a Russian doctor during Oswald’s earliest days in the USSR. In October 1959 Harvey made a false suicide attempt hoping the act would help him complete his intel assignment in Russia.  One of the doctors at Botkinskay Hospital in Moscow who attended him wrote, "The patient apparently understands the questions asked in Russian. Sometimes he answers correctly, but immediately states that he does not understand what he was asked."

WH_Vol18_0242b.gif

 

Harvey Oswald’s Russian fluency was noted by many people before he even “defected to the Soviet Union, including Rosaleen Queen and a number of Marines.  This has been discussed many times before.

Tracy Parnell has a writeup claiming Oswald didn’t hide his Russian language abilities while in the Soviet Union. Parnell relies heavily on a Russian fellow named Ernst Titovets, a person many researchers don’t trust.  To see why, read the excellent article about him by researcher Milicent Cranor:

http://whowhatwhy.org/2013/08/27/is-us-effort-to-block-oswald-friend-and-his-revelations-itself-a-further-deception/

 

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15 minutes ago, Joe Bauer said:

Not well informed on the Harvey versus Lee issue but these last few postings have tickled my stunted English language skills and understanding interests.

I'll say a few things about the Lee Oswald we saw interviewed in the halls of the Dallas PD building the evening of 11,22,1963.

In between his frenetic jostling to and fro by his police escorts and with his hands cuffed I was surprised that he still had a sense of Southern politeness when he spoke. At least twice he responded to reporters and their questions with "Sir" and in his televised New Orleans debut and radio interview he also displayed this respectful politeness.

I did atch some Southern ( maybe Black southern? ) slang when Oswald was asked by a reporter in the DPD Hallway interview if he had shot the president...and Oswald did seem to stumble a bit in reponding ( nervousness? ) and after a pause and a surprised glance back at the reporter he said ..." No, I have not been charged with that"...and " the first time I had heard that was when a reporter in the hall "axed" me that question."

 

I hear a bit of Cajun drawl when he speaks.

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4 hours ago, Jim Hargrove said:

The patient apparently understands the questions asked in Russian. Sometimes he answers correctly, but immediately states that he does not understand what he was asked."

Any perceived deceptiveness on LHO's part can be explained by the fact that he correctly assumed the KGB was surveilling him and was distrustful of authority figures.

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2 hours ago, W. Tracy Parnell said:

Any perceived deceptiveness on LHO's part can be explained by the fact that he correctly assumed the KGB was surveilling him and was distrustful of authority figures.

Tracy,

That's a very reasonable explanation, IMHO.

--  Tommy :sun

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17 hours ago, Thomas Graves said:

Sandy,

That's interesting about Farsi being a relatively easy language to learn.

Try learning Czech sometime.  LOL

Conversely, my Czech students seemed to have a hard time learning English grammar.

One of my students (not a 16 year-old, but a PhD. in biochemistry, actually) who became my girlfriend, accused me one day of practically single handedly making the English language so gosh-darned "tense-heavy" and "hung up about time" (English has something like eighteen tenses whereas Czech has either three or five, depending on how you define "tense," I suppose). 

--  Tommy :sun

PS  I know it's boring and perhaps difficult to get a "handle" on, but Oswald's writing (there I go again; notice the apostrophe "s"?):  "my losing" instead of "me losing" simply "set in concrete" my already-firm conviction that he was a very good speaker of the English language (and writer, too, if you're willing to ignore, as I am,the relatively unimportant -- when contrasted with his obvious proficiency with grammar, syntax, and vocabulary -- spelling and punctuation errors), and therefore it's very unlikely, IMHO, that, since he was born in Hungary to Hungarian parents, he first learned a non-Indo-European Turkic language (Hungarian), then learned and mastered a highly-inflected Indo-European language (Russian) as a child (?), and then (as an adolescent-juvenile???) virtually mastered a different Indo-European language that not only has a lot more tenses than Russian, but which also requires strict adherence to "correct" word order (e.g., subject - verb - object; object, verb, subject), mastery of lots of highly-idiomatic phrasal verbs (which are non-existent in Slavic languages, btw), etc, etc, etc. 

But I'm gonna stop now, because I know you really aren't gonna accept what I've been trying to tell you about your "Harvey's" English language skills -- quitey high indeed -- and you'll fixate on his absolutely horrible spelling and punctuation instead of his mastery of the much more challenging grammar, syntax, and vocabulary aspects of the English language.

Maybe it takes someone like me (or is it "I" ? -- LOL-- always had problems with that) -- someone who scored in the top 98th percentile in "Verbal Intelligence" on the 1965 or 1966 (can't remember if it was my sophomore or junior year) SAT -- someone who taught English in a Slavic country for seven years -- to realize just how good at English your "Harvey" really was.

I give up.

--  Tommy :sun


Tommy,

That's hilarious, what you said about your girlfriend blaming you for English being overly time-centric. I'd forgotten that key word, "tense." But the way time/tense is incorporated into English as compared to Farsi is precisely what I was trying to get at. (It's funny how you recognized that more than I did. Probably due to your greater understanding of grammatical elements.)

As for Oswald, I agree that he was an excellent speaker of English. The fact that he was a poor writer can be attributed to the different skill set required for writing.

 

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Jim Hargrove writes:

Quote

Harvey Oswald's Russian fluency was noted by many people before he even "defected" to the Soviet Union, including Rosaleen Queen [sic] and a number of Marines.
 

Firstly, 'Harvey' is not a real person but a fictional character in an internally contradictory book whose main premise was debunked two decades before the book was even published.

Secondly, there is scope for debate about the standard of the real, historical Lee Harvey Oswald's spoken Russian in 1959 when he arrived in the Soviet Union, and then in 1962 when he returned to the USA. What is not open to debate is the fact that Oswald's spoken Russian, even at its best, was nowhere near as good as his spoken English.

The evidence for this is overwhelming. As Tracy points out, "Jim must exaggerate the statements of the Russian community members and others to make his case. While they thought LHO spoke [Russian] very well nobody thought he was a 'native' speaker". Now listen to any of the surviving recordings of Oswald speaking English. His English is indistinguishable from that of a native speaker.

There are only two possible conclusions:

- Oswald was a native Russian speaker who learned English to such a high level that he could be mistaken for a native speaker and who, consistently for several years, severely disguised his ability to speak his own native language from every Russian speaker he met, including his own wife, by deliberately making mistakes typical of those a non-native speaker might make.
- Alternatively, Oswald was a native English speaker who learned Russian to a reasonable level but made mistakes typical of those a non-native speaker of Russian might make.

It isn't difficult to see which of those two conclusions is the more likely to be correct. Unless Jim is now claiming that Oswald deliberately disguised a perfect command of Russian during the entirety of the time he knew Marina, he must admit that Russian was not Oswald's native language, and that 'Harvey' is indeed a fictional character.

In the past, Jim has attempted to avoid this problem by claiming that the poor standard of Oswald's written English shows that English was not Oswald's first language. Of course, this does not follow at all. It is not uncommon for people to speak their native language perfectly while having a poor command of the written form of that language. But it is surely next to impossible for anyone to speak a foreign language perfectly, as Jim claims Oswald did with English, while only being able to speak their native language very imperfectly after spending nearly three years surrounded by other native speakers of that language, as Jim claims Oswald did with Russian. There is ample evidence for the common-sense conclusion that Oswald's native language was English, and that he learned Russian in his teens.

<digression>

Joe Bauer brought up an interesting aspect of Oswald's English:

Quote

the first time I had heard that was when a reporter in the hall "axed" me that question
 

The swapping around of consonants, as in 'ask' > 'aks', is a common linguistic feature known as metathesis. As it happens, the modern English verb 'ask' is derived from the Anglo-Saxon verb 'aksian'. A few hundred years ago, one linguistic community in England swapped the consonants around in pronunciation to turn 'aks' into 'ask', and it caught on so well that 'ask' became the standard form of the verb. Now a modern linguistic community in America has swapped the consonants again to produce 'aks'. How far this one will catch on, we'll have to wait and see.

On the subject of catching on, I'd guess that the inversion of the final consonants in 'caught' and 'catch' is another example of metathesis. I'd better stop now, before everyone falls asleep.

</digression>
 

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According to H&L critics, we're supposed to believe their opinions over the opinion of Yale University Slavic Language Department head Vladimir Petrov, who wrote that a letter supposedly written by Harvey Oswald was actually "written by a Russian with an imperfect knowledge of English."

 

Petrov.jpg?dl=0

 

And, of course, we're supposed to believe that, while reading Russian magazines with a Russian-English dictionary in his spare time in the Marine Corps, and while working full time in a factory in Minsk and taking no known language courses, Harvey Oswald learned to write Russian like this:

 

oswald.png?dl=0

 

And, of course, we're supposed to assume that the H&L critics know more about Harvey Oswald's Russian abilities than his friend George De Mohrenschildt, a Russian immigrant who wrote the following in his manuscript entitled "I AM A PATSY! I AM A PATSY":

Incidentally I never saw him interested in anything else except Russian
books and magazines . He said he didn't want to forget the language -
but it amazed me that he read such difficult writers like Gorki, Dostoevski,
Gogol, Tolstoi and Turgenieff - in Russian. As everyone knows Russian is
a complex language and he was supposed to have stayed in the Soviet Union
only a little over two years. He must have had some previous training and
that point had never been brought up by the Warren Committee - and it is
still puzzling to me. In my opinion Lee was a very bright person but not
a genius. He never mastered the English language yet he learned such a dif-
icult language! I taught Russian at all level in a large University, and
I never saw such a profficiency in the best senior students who constantly
listened to  Russian tapes and spoke to Russian friends . As a matter of
fact American-born instructors never mastered Russian spoken language as
well as Lee did.

 

DeMohren_Russian.jpg?dl=0

No doubt we're also supposed to believe the opinions of H&L critics over the opinions of other Russian immigrants around Dallas who met Harvey Oswald and shared their thoughts:


Natalie Ray was asked by Commission attorney Wesley Liebeler, "Did he (Oswald) speak to you in Russian?" Mrs. Ray replied, "Yes; just perfect; re­ally surprised me ... it's just too good speaking Russian for be such a short time, you know.... I said, 'How come you speak so good Russian? I been here so long and still don't speak very well English."

Mrs. Teofil (Anna) Meller was asked by Liebeler, "Do you think that his com­mand of the Russian language was better than you would expect for the period of time that he had spent in Russia?" Mrs. Meller replied, "Yes; absolutely better than I would expect."

Peter Gregory told Warren Commission Representative Gerald Ford, "I thought that Lee Oswald spoke (Russian) with a Polish accent, that is why I asked him if he was of Polish decent."

And on and on.  No doubt H&L critics want us to believe that Harvey Oswald's Russian fluency was a natural result of his self-study in the Marines and his two and a half years in the USSR, but I don't believe it, and I think a whole lot of people without an axe to grind in this debate won't believe it either.  And I haven't even mentioned above Harvey Oswald's obvious familiarity with the Russian language before he even "defected" to the Soviet Union.
 

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1 hour ago, Jim Hargrove said:

Incidentally I never saw him interested in anything else except Russian
books and magazines . He said he didn't want to forget the language -

Jim's own source sinks his ship here. LHO had to work on Russian to keep up with the language. He did this by reading Russian literature and conversing with Marina who he discouraged from learning English. Would a "native" Russian speaker need to do this?

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Excuse me for not doing the digging right now, but what were Marina Oswald's responses to questions regarding Lee's ability to speak Russian?

The copied document of Oswald's Russian writing sure is intriguing.  What do the Russian language experts have to say about Oswald's Russian writing skills?

 

 

And if Oswald did secretly attend the DLI  ( Defense Language Institute ) here in my home town of Monterey, California, that would have accelerated his skills tremendously. 

I find this topic of Oswald's Russian speaking, reading and writing skills very interesting and even intriguing.

 

Edited by Joe Bauer
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