Quote Originally Posted by Throbert McGee View Post
Out of curiosity, were any other English speakers taught (by your professors or textbooks) that читая and написав are Russian "gerunds"?

Logically, it makes no sense at all to call these forms "gerunds", at least in a Russian-grammar textbook written in English for English speakers!

Because in English grammar, a gerund is a "verbal noun," as in "I like reading". The word gerund itself comes from Latin, and in Latin grammar, gerunds are also "verbal nouns" (spes vincendi, "hope of winning").

But Russian verb forms like читая and написав are not in any sense "nouns", and instead have a clearly adverbial function.

Nonetheless, my college Russian textbooks insisted that they were "gerunds"!
I think that's because the Russians often use gerunds when translating such constructions into English. Like "он заскучал читая книгу" - he got bored while reading a book. Or "написав письмо, он бросил его в почтовый ящик" - having written the letter, he dropped it in a mailbox.