Nicholas Marr
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Nicholas Marr (Russian: Николай Яковлевич Марр, Nikolay Yakovlevich Marr; Georgian: ნიკოლოზ იაკობის ძე მარი, Nikolos Iakobis dse Mari) (6 January 1865 [O.S. 25 December], Kutaisi – 20 December 1934, Leningrad) was a Georgia-born historian and linguist who gained a solid reputation as a prolific scholar of the Caucasus before embarking on his controversial monogenetic theory of language and the related speculative linguistic hypotheses which constituted the officially approved ideology of Soviet linguists until 1950, when Joseph Stalin personally discredited it as anti-scientific.
Marr was born in Kutaisi, Georgia (then part of Imperial Russia), in the family of the Scot James Marr (aged more than 80) who founded the botanical garden of the city and a young 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 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.
Under the Soviet government Marr developed his theory to claim that Japhetic languages had existed across Europe before the advent of the Indo-European languages. They could still be recognised as a substratum over which the Indo-European languages had imposed themselves. Using this model, Marr attempted to apply the Marxist theory of class struggle to linguistics, arguing that these different strata of language corresponded to different social classes. He even claimed that the same social classes in widely different countries spoke versions of their own languages that were linguistically closer to one another than to the speech of other classes who supposedly spoke "the same" language.
Obtaining recognition of his theory from Soviet officials, Marr was permitted to manage 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 during 1930.
During 1950, after Marr's death, a diatribe against him authored nominally by Stalin was published, entitled Marxism and Problems of Linguistics (1950) (it was inspired by the writings of Marr's most energetic opponent, Arnold Chikobava,[1]). The author 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."
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[edit] References
- ^ Smith, Graham (1998), Nation-building in the Post-Soviet Borderlands: The Politics of National Identities, p. 178. Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0521599687.
