Transcript The History of a Myth: Marr and Marrism Alpatov

The History of a Myth: Marr
and Marrism
Notes from a book by V. M.
Alpatov
Biographical background
• Born 1864 in Georgia, son of a Scottish father
(81 years old!) and a Georgian mother
• Showed high linguistic aptitude from early on:
studied (in addition to Georgian) Russian,
German, French, English, Latin, Greek and
Turkish in Gymnasium
• At Petersburg U, was first student ever to study
simultaneously all languages in all four depts
devoted to Near Eastern studies: Armenian,
Georgian, Persian, Turkish, Tatar, Sanskrit,
Arabic, Hebrew, Syrian.
Fast rise to fame
• Graduated 1888, began teaching in 1891,
by 1911 had title “Akademik”
• Discovered valuable monuments of
Georgian and Armenian language on
expeditions to Sinai and Palestine
• Authored grammars and dictionaries of
Georgian, Armenian, Abkhaz, etc.
But did he have linguistic training?
• He never took a single course in linguistics
• Near Eastern studies at Petersburg U did not
include courses in linguistics
• His main contributions are in archeology,
philology, and literary studies
• “In one of his later works, Marr wrote that the
IndoEuropeanists had gone too far in their
research and it was hard for them to turn back
without having to demolish their idols. Marr
didn’t have such a problem.”
In a class of his own…
• Already as a student, Marr criticized the
work of qualified linguists, who were
forced to move to other work, and
ultimately there were no specialists in
Caucasian/Near Eastern languages with
enough linguistic training to judge his
work, and also no linguists with enough
knowledge of Caucasian/Near Eastern
languages to judge his work
Marr, Marr so contraire…
• “I have a habit of listening to everyone who has
given me advice (and there have been so many)
in order to be that much more sharp in often
doing the exact opposite.” – from Marr’s
autobiography
• Marr completely rejected Western scholarship
• Antoine Meillet (famous linguist Marr met in
Paris in 1894): Marr has “a striking imagination
which is totally lacking in linguistic content”
An axe to grind…
• Marr’s work shows a consistent focus on
proving the importance of Georgian in
particular and Caucasian languages as a
whole. He felt that the scholarly world had
unjustly ignored them.
• He felt it was unfair that the Georgian
language was considered an “isolate”, and
he was determined to find some
relationship to other languages
The third son of Noah…
• “Japhetic theory” -- 1908 Marr tries to prove that
Georgian is related to the Semitic languages,
despite his lack of skill with
comparative/historical linguistics
• “Language Hybridization theory” -- He was also
convinced that some Armenian dialects were
related to Georgian – he didn’t understand that
apparent similarities were more likely the result
of recent contact
Where these ideas lead…
• This went beyond anything acceptable as a theory of
“substrates” in language and ultimately led to hypothesis
that hybridization is relevant to many, and later to all
languages. This of course meant that ALL languages
were related to the Caucasian (Georgian) languages…
• This especially applied to languages that had not been
identified as belonging to any other families, which were
immediately dubbed “Japhetic”, inlcuding the Basques
(thus giving Georgian a foothold in Europe) – Also:
Etruscan, Hittite, Dravidian, Chuvash, Hottentot…
• Some of his ideas were clearly ridiculous, but others had
some basis in fact – the problem is that fact and fantasy
were all mixed together
Ultimately Marr saw
two kinds of languages:
• The “Japhetic” ones that, for the most part, had
not been assigned to other families
• Those in other families he designated as
“hybrids”, with a “superficial” layer (which was IE, Semitic, etc.), and a deeper layer (which was
“Japhetic”). The superficial layer is associated
with the conquering elite, whereas the Japhetic
layer is that of the original nation – this idea
played out harmoniously with the communist
revolutionary ideology of the Bolsheviks…
Today we know that…
• No one takes the “Japhetic” theory
seriously
• In fact, no one even believes that the
Kartvelian languages are related to the
other Caucasian languages
• And of course Armenian and Hittite are I-E
Along comes the Revolution…
• Marr decided to side with the new gov’t
• Even before the revolution and civil war, Marr
had drifted away from his original group of
students, and now he was cut off from them and
from going on expeditions to the Caucasus.
• This meant he had no new factual material, and
he turned his attention to linguistics (his weakest
field)
• Meshchanin becomes his new student and later
leads the “new theory of language”
Post-revolution
• Marr tries to establish international Basque
institute, but fails and turns from Western
science
• 1921 In SSSR he founds
– State Academy of History and Material
Culture
– Japhetic Institute (the only linguistic institute
in Academy of Sciences at the time)
The New Teaching about Language
• The Japhetic theory grew into a theory of
“world proportions”
• Premiered Nov 21, 1923 – there are/is no
protolanguage
• A definitive break with real science, and a
tragedy both for Marr and for Soviet
science…
The new Soviet dogma
• The New Teaching about Language is full of
contradictions of facts, unproved claims, bad
logic, divergence from accepted scientific
practice… so why was it the accepted Soviet
dogma of linguistics for two decades?
• It was scientifically weak, but ideologically
powerful, especially for the Stalinist cult of
personality.
• The ideas and the person were also very
attractive, thus forming a myth
A work in progress…
• There is no definitive characterization of
“the New Teaching about Language”
because Marr himself kept changing it,
though always in one direction, but with
contradictions…
New Teaching…
• Language is a superstructure of society,
like art
• Language developed independently in
various societies, but there is just one path
of cultural development
• Language was at first gestural, and then
there was a revolution with invention of
spoken language, and those that had it
had advantage of power
New Teaching…
• Spoken language starts not with sounds
and words, but with an ideology of
structure: syntax
• The original spoken language consisted of
only four elements: SAL, BER, JON,
ROSh (based on the tribal names of
Mediterranean peoples)
New Teaching…
• Next comes the stage of phonetic and semantic
differentiation, when the four elements were
broken down into sounds and given meanings,
but ALL words go back to those tribal names.
• For example: ‘Arm’ and ‘leg’ were not coined as
parts of the body, but as connected with magical
function, in dancing and playing…The lexicon
was built up by hybridization and phonetic
differentiation of the four basic elements.
New Teaching…
• Grammar also developed in stages, going
from isolating (most primitive – Chinese) >
agglutinative (Turkish) > Inflectional (most
developed and perfect)
• Only the languages with complex inflection
were fully developed – Romance and
Germanic languages lagged behind,
showed some of their Japhetic origins
New Teaching…
• Parts of speech developed in this order: nouns >
pronouns > verbs
• Plural came before singular
• There is no such thing as protolanguages
because all languages are hybrids
• Shared vocabulary does not come from genetic
relationships, nor does it come from borrowings
– it comes from hybridization and the single path
of linguistic development
New Teaching…
• Russian and French are closer to Georgian than
they are to other Slavic and Romance
languages…
• Japhetites were the bearers of “the creative
origins of the exploited social strata of such
ancient times that they cannot be assigned a
historical name”
• All languages must go through a Japhetic stage
• The development of languages is conditioned by
social causes, reflecting social structure
New Teaching…
• Personal pronouns and singular are connected
to more developed understanding of the
individual
• Superlative adjectives were a property of most
developed languages
• Revolutionary shifts in language were motivated
by changes in technology and material culture,
which yielded new ways of thinking and talking,
and this is why there are different “systems” of
languages
New Teaching…
• All languages, and all thinking, is classbased
• Languages of the same class are more the
same than languages of the same nation
or country
Language types and society types
Language types:
Society types:
isolating
primordial communism
agglutinating
clan system
inflectional
class-based society
local dialects
feudal society
national language
capitalism
struggle in a language with national transition from capitalism to
form and proletarian content
communism
an international language, probably classless society
isolating
On our way to one world
language…
• Language is preparing for its revolution, to
create a “new and unified language where
lofty beauty comingles with the highest
development of reason. Where?
Comrades, only in our communist
classless society.” --Marr
Problems with the bright futures…
• The correlations between language types and
classes mixes together typological and
sociolinguistic types
• Japhetic studies are anchored in only two points
– a past so distant we have no written records,
and a future that we cannot reach – but this also
made them impossible to disprove…
• Marr claimed to solve the unsolvable by
postulating how language came into being
The one global language
• Marr didn’t give many details, except to
say it wouldn’t be a spoken language
• 1926 -- a group was formed at the
Japhetic institute to establish the
“theoretical norms of the future common
language of mankind”, but their work never
got off the ground…
No checks and balances
• According to Marr, all sounds could
become all other sounds, unlike his
enemies, the “indo-europeanists”, he didn’t
follow regularities of sound change, and
his correspondences were never limited,
except by ideological motives (causing him
to claim there was no connection between
Russian rab ‘slave’ and rabota ‘work’)
Language planning
• In 20s and 30s the new Soviet Union had to
create alphabets for unwritten languages and for
languages with Arabic script, etc. -- somehow
Marr and marrism got the credit for making this
happen…
• His only real contribution to these practical
problems was his analytical alphabet of
Abkhazian, which was supposed to prefigure the
one world language, which was devised before
the revolution and adopted in 1924
So much for that one…
• But his alphabet was designed to capture
all possible sounds and, with 62 symbols,
was too complicated to be practical, so it
was replaced in 1926…
Leadership?
• Marr’s works contain an abundance of ultrarevolutionary phrases, but very little practical
information, and what directives there are, are
usually impractical. For example, he said that
one should not use a given dialect as the basis
for constructing a literary language, but instead
create something equally comprehensible to all
dialects – this and other guidelines caused
problems in language planning
Jakovlev, Polivanov
• Fortunately there were other, more
talented people who actually did the
work…
• They had to do battle with Marr and his
analytical alphabet
Ardent supporters
• Marr had many admirers, even including
the famous poet Brjusov, who saluted
Japhetic theory on a poem, as well as
many officials in the Communist party and
Soviet gov’t
• People in related fields (philosophy,
literature, archeology) just took him at his
word, for they desired a “key” to prehistory