Word as a tool of a journalist

Today is the anniversary of the Russian philologist Ditmar Elyashevich Rosenthal (1900-1994), familiar to everyone who has studied and is studying the Russian language, thanks to the millions of copies of his dictionaries and reference books.

Russian is not Ditmar Rosenthal's native language. The Rosenthal family spoke Polish, German, and Yiddish. As a graduate student, D.E. Rosenthal completed his internship in Italy. He achieved his first successes in linguistics by teaching Italian to students at the NKVD Higher School. At the same time, he prepared the first Italian textbook for higher education in the Soviet Union (1949), as well as Russian-Italian and Italian-Russian dictionaries.

The RUDN library has all three editions of his Russian-Italian educational dictionary (1966, 1977, 1990) for foreigners, with a volume of 13,500 words. Here you will also be given the first edition of his textbook on practical stylistics of the Russian language (1965): a young discipline based on the linguistic material of the media.

Our library collections also contain all the first editions of his “Culture of Speech” (1959, 1960, 1964), “Questions of Russian Orthography” (1962, 1965, 1970), as well as the first edition of the “Punctuation Handbook” (1984) and the first dictionary-reference book on writing with a capital or lowercase letter (1984).

D.E. Rosenthal is still among the pioneers in advertising stylistics. He and his colleague N.N. Kokhtev (1934-1998) provide many amusing examples of “correct” and “incorrect” advertising in their manual “The Language of Advertising Texts” (1981), contrasting socialist advertising with capitalist advertising.