Nikolay Yakovlevich Marr
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Nikolay Yakovlevich Marr (Никола́й Я́ковлевич Марр; 6 January 1865 [O.S. 25 December] in Kutaisi – 20 December 1934 in Leningrad) was a controversial Soviet scholar whose monogenetic theory of language constituted the officially approved ideology of Soviet linguists until 1950, when Joseph Stalin personally slammed it as anti-scientific.
Marr was born in Kutaisi, Georgia, in the family of the Scottish gardener James Marr (aged more than 80) and a Georgian woman. His parents spoke different languages, and neither of them understood Russian. Having graduated from the St Petersburg University, he taught there since 1891, becoming dean of the Oriental faculty in 1911 and member of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1912. During those years, he excavated the ancient Armenian capital Ani, and brought to light numerous monuments of old Armenian and Georgian literature.
Marr earned a fabulous reputation of the maverick genius with his Japhetic theory, postulating the common origin of Caucasian, Semitic-Hamitic, and Basque languages. In 1924, he went even further and proclaimed that all the languages of the world descend from a single proto-language which had consisted of four "diffused exclamations": sal, ber, yon, rosh. Although the languages undergo certain stages of development, the linguistic paleontology makes it possible to discern elements of primordial exclamations in any given language.
To draw support for his speculative doctrine, Marr elaborated a Marxist footing for it. He hypothesized that modern languages tend to fuse into a single language of communist society. This theory was a base of the mass campaign in 1920-30s in the Soviet Union of introduction of Latin alphabets for smaller ethnicities of the country, including replacement of the existing Cyrillic alphabets, e.g., for the Moldovan language.
Obtaining recognition of his theory from Soviet officials, Marr was permitted to run the National Russian Library from 1926 until 1930 and the Japhetic Institute of the Academy of Sciences from 1921 until his death. He was elected Vice-President of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1930.
In his notorious philippic against Marr, Marxism and Problems of Linguistics (1950), Stalin wrote that "N. Y. Marr introduced into linguistics incorrect and non-Marxist formula, regarding the "class character" of language, and got himself into a muddle and put linguistics into a muddle. Soviet linguistics cannot be advanced on the basis of an incorrect formula which is contrary to the whole course of the history of peoples and languages."
