Nikolay Yakovlevich Marr
Encyclopedia
Kutaisi
Kutaisi is Georgia's second largest city and the capital of the western region of Imereti. It is 221 km to the west of Tbilisi.-Geography:...
– 20 December 1934, Leningrad
Saint Petersburg
Saint Petersburg is a city and a federal subject of Russia located on the Neva River at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea...
) was a Georgia
Georgia (country)
Georgia is a sovereign state in the Caucasus region of Eurasia. Located at the crossroads of Western Asia and Eastern Europe, it is bounded to the west by the Black Sea, to the north by Russia, to the southwest by Turkey, to the south by Armenia, and to the southeast by Azerbaijan. The capital of...
-born historian and linguist who gained a reputation as a scholar of the Caucasus
Caucasus
The Caucasus, also Caucas or Caucasia , is a geopolitical region at the border of Europe and Asia, and situated between the Black and the Caspian sea...
during the 1910s before developing his linguistic "Japhetic theory"
Japhetic theory (linguistics)
Japhetic theory is a term used to describe a linguistic theory developed by the Soviet linguist Nikolay Yakovlevich Marr . In linguistics it was compared by critics to Lysenkoism in biology: a theory that was promoted and supported for ideological rather than scientific reasons, because it was...
on the origin of language
Origin of language
The origin of language is the emergence of language in the human species. This is a highly controversial topic. Empirical evidence is so limited that many regard it as unsuitable for serious scholars. In 1866, the Linguistic Society of Paris went so far as to ban debates on the subject...
(from 1924) and related speculative linguistic hypotheses.
Marr's hypotheses were used as a rationale for the campaign during the 1920s and '30s in the USSR
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
for introduction of Latin alphabet
Latin alphabet
The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most recognized alphabet used in the world today. It evolved from a western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, which was adopted and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome...
s for the smaller ethnicities of the country. In 1950, the "Japhetic theory" became disfavoured after Marr’s teachings were declared anti-Marxist in an article published in the Soviet newspaper Pravda
Pravda
Pravda was a leading newspaper of the Soviet Union and an official organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party between 1912 and 1991....
under the signature of Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
.
Biography
Kutaisi
Kutaisi is Georgia's second largest city and the capital of the western region of Imereti. It is 221 km to the west of Tbilisi.-Geography:...
, Georgia (then part of the Russian Empire
Russian Empire
The Russian Empire was a state that existed from 1721 until the Russian Revolution of 1917. It was the successor to the Tsardom of Russia and the predecessor of the Soviet Union...
), in the family of the Scot
Scot
A Scot is a member of an ethnic group indigenous to Scotland, derived from the Latin name of Irish raiders, the Scoti.Scot may also refer to:People with the given name Scot:* Scot Brantley , American football linebacker...
James Marr (aged more than 80 years) who initiated the botanical garden
Botanical garden
A botanical garden The terms botanic and botanical, and garden or gardens are used more-or-less interchangeably, although the word botanic is generally reserved for the earlier, more traditional gardens. is a well-tended area displaying a wide range of plants labelled with their botanical names...
of the city, and a young Georgian
Georgians
The Georgians are an ethnic group that have originated in Georgia, where they constitute a majority of the population. Large Georgian communities are also present throughout Russia, European Union, United States, and South America....
woman named Agrafina Magularia. His parents spoke different languages, and neither of them understood Russian
Russian language
Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...
.
Marr attended the gymnasium in Kutaisi, and became a student of the Department of Oriental Languages of St. Petersburg University in 1884. His student years were devoted to the study of the languages of the Caucasus and the Near East. He graduated with a silver medal in 1888, passed his Master’s examinations in 1891, and was appointed a Lecturer of Armenian Studies of St. Petersburg University the same year.
He became dean of the Oriental faculty in 1911, and member of the Russian Academy of Sciences
Russian Academy of Sciences
The Russian Academy of Sciences consists of the national academy of Russia and a network of scientific research institutes from across the Russian Federation as well as auxiliary scientific and social units like libraries, publishers and hospitals....
in 1912.
The early part of Marr’s career was dedicated to Armenian and Kartvelian [Georgian] studies. The most significant part of his scholarly legacy is his editions of Georgian, Armenian, and Arab manuscripts, some of which he discovered during expeditions to the monastery of Aphon (Mt. Athos) in 1898, and to Sinai and Jerusalem in 1902. Additionally, he directed archaeological excavations of the medieval Armenian capital Ani in 1892–93 and 1904–17, of the Armenian Hellenistic temple in Garni (1909–10), and of the Urartean fortress Toprakkale (1916). His linguistic works include grammars of the Old Armenian (1903), Laz (1910), and Old Georgian (1925) languages, as well as an Abkhazian–Russian dictionary. Most of Marr’s works were written in Russian, but some are in Georgian or Armenian.
Marr also contributed, directly or indirectly, to certain aspects of Iranian studies. In 1890, while still a student, he was able to discover the Georgian version of the “Legend of Varlaam and Ioasaf” (see BARLAAM AND YOSAPH), a Buddhist-derived text, which, as we now know, was transmitted to the Caucasus and then to the Byzantines through Middle Iranian mediation. Being well versed in Classical Persian and Avestan, as well as Sanskrit, he studied Iranian influence on medieval Georgian literature, and, in particular, was able to demonstrate the Persian origin of many proper names occurring in medieval Georgian courtly novels. Marr’s article about the Kurdish word čalabī “noble” and its Caucasian cognates (1911) is suspect methodologically, but includes abundant lexical and historical material. Finally, Marr contributed to the study of the Ossetic lexicon, especially in association with those of the neighboring languages (Ossetica-Yaphetica, 1918, 1919).
The work of N. J. Marr as a Caucasologist gained him widespread scholarly recognition. He was awarded an associate professorship in 1900, and his Habilitation in 1901; he became a full Professor of Armenian and Georgian literatures in 1902. In 1909, he was elected an adjunct of the Historical-Philological Division of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and only three years later, in 1912, he became a full member of the Academy. Between 1911 and 1917, Marr served as the Dean of the Department of Oriental Languages of St. Petersburg University. In 1915, he received the Uvarov Prize, the supreme award of the Russian Archeological Society.
Emboldened by his success, Marr gradually began to shift the emphasis of his research to comparative linguistics, a topic in which he had been interested since his student years, but never trained adequately. In 1908, he published "A Preliminary Report about the Genetic Relationship between Georgian and Semitic" (in Russian, IR I, pp. 23–38). Although this work was written with blatant disregard for the comparative method, the complacent attitude of Marr’s colleagues, both in and outside Russia, did not allow him to realize his mistakes. During subsequent years, Marr dedicated increasing efforts to proving the relationship of “Japhetic” (originally synonymous with Kartvelian) languages with Armenian (1910), Abkhazian (1912), Elamite (1914), Urartian (1915), Burushaski (1916), Basque (1920), Etruscan (1921), Pelasgian (1921), Sumerian (1921), Dravidian (1922), Chuvash (1924), and others. In a 1922 article, he tried to prove the “Japhetic” origin of the ethnonym “Scythian” (IR V, pp. 1–43).
Marr did not attempt to provide scholars with the refutation of the comparative method of historical linguistics, nor did he try to justify formally an alternative method. It is fair to say that by 1923 Marr stopped being a scientist and started being the creator of a myth. The official name of this myth was the “New Linguistic Doctrine,” which was translated into English as “New Linguistics” or “New Studies of Language.”
Japhetic theory
Marr earned a reputation as a maverick genius with his Japhetic theory, postulating the common origin of Caucasian, Semitic-Hamitic, and BasqueBasque language
Basque is the ancestral language of the Basque people, who inhabit the Basque Country, a region spanning an area in northeastern Spain and southwestern France. It is spoken by 25.7% of Basques in all territories...
languages. In 1924, he claimed that all the languages of the world descend from a single proto-language
Proto-language
A proto-language in the tree model of historical linguistics is the common ancestor of the languages that form a language family. Occasionally, the German term Ursprache is used instead.Often the proto-language is not known directly...
which had consisted of four "diffused exclamations": SAL, BER, YON, and ROŠ , combinations of which yielded all the words of attested human languages (e.g., IR III, p. 16).
Since the existence of the new “Japhetic” macrofamily implied large-scale migrations for which Marr could not account, he decided to re-interpret the similarities of “Japhetic” languages in “typological” terms. According to the 1923 article “Indo-European languages of the Mediterranean" (in Russian, IR I, pp. 185–86), “Japhetic” and Indo-European languages are not related to genetically different families, but rather represent two subsequent stages of one glottogonic process. In a speech addressed to Soviet archeologists on 6 September 1926, he insisted that the originally “Japhetic” Scythian language acquired Iranian features by historical evolution (Mikhankova, 1949, pp. 383–84). Furthermore, according to Marr, the very notion of a developed proto-language is a fiction, and today’s national languages and language families came into being through convergence of numerous tribal dialects (IR I, pp. 185–86).
After the initiation of Communist government, Marr developed a Marxist basis for his theory. He claimed that Japhetic languages had existed across Europe before the advent of the Indo-European languages. They could be still 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.
The temporary success of Marr’s teachings in the USSR owes a great deal to his ability to present his doctrine as the only Marxist alternative to the “bourgeois” science of comparative linguistics. Thus he has directly, albeit inconsistently, associated his stages of glottogonic development with socio-economic formations, as described by Marx
Karl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement...
and Engels
Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels was a German industrialist, social scientist, author, political theorist, philosopher, and father of Marxist theory, alongside Karl Marx. In 1845 he published The Condition of the Working Class in England, based on personal observations and research...
. According to one of his students, A. A. Kholodovich (Yazyk, 1936, pp. 44–45) the “amorphous” (i.e., isolating or analytic) languages correspond to primitive communism, agglutinative languages are typical of clan communities, while inflected languages evolve in class societies. Marr prophesied that the eventual triumph of communism would cause the genesis of a new universal language “where supreme beauty will be combined with the supreme development of the mind” (IR III, pp. 111–12).
Marr’s use of Marxist phraseology helped him to advance his personal career in the USSR. At various periods of time during the 1920s he was director of the Academy of the History of Material Culture, the Leningrad Public Library, the Institute of the Study of Ethnic and National Cultures of the East, and the Section of Materialist Linguistics of the Communist Academy. He was permitted to manage the National Russian Library from 1926 until 1930, and the Japhetic Institute (later renamed the Institute of Language and Thought) of the Academy of Sciences from 1921 until his death. He was elected Vice-President of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1930. In January 1934, he was awarded the Order of Lenin
Order of Lenin
The Order of Lenin , named after the leader of the Russian October Revolution, was the highest decoration bestowed by the Soviet Union...
.
Marr died on 20 December 1934, and official mourning was declared in Leningrad.
Marr’s New Linguistic Doctrine remained a part of the official Soviet orthodoxy until the end of the 1940s, although some of his pupils, notably the Iranologist V. I. Abaev (q.v.), had already begun to tacitly dismantle many of its elements. On 20 July 1950, however, Marr’s teachings were declared anti-Marxist in an article published in the Soviet newspaper Pravda
Pravda
Pravda was a leading newspaper of the Soviet Union and an official organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party between 1912 and 1991....
, which was signed and possibly even written by Stalin. The article, named "Marxism and Problems of Linguistics", was apparently inspired by the writings of Marr's most energetic opponent, Arnold Chikobava
Arnold Chikobava
Arnold Stepanovich Chikobava was a Georgian linguist and philologist best known as for his contributions to the Caucasian studies as well as one of the most active critics of Nicholas Marr's controversial monogenetic "Japhetic" theory of language.Chikobava was born in the small village...
[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."
Among the possible motives that prompted the Stalin to interfere with a linguistic theory, one can mention Stalin’s desire, common to many autocrats of the past, to become an authority of the sciences, as well as the incompatibility of Marr’s cosmopolitan myth with the largely nationalist ideology of post-war Russia. Traditional historical linguistics was rehabilitated subsequently.
The late writings of N. J. Marr are now of interest mainly for Sovietologists and historians of linguistics. His earlier works, however, retain their scholarly value and should be of interest to anyone studying the cultures of the Caucasus.