Nikolay Yakovlevich Marr
Nikolay Yakovlevich Marr (Никола́й Я́ковлевич Марр; 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."
See also
*
Origin of language*
Japhetic theory (linguistics)External links
*
Marxism and Problems of Linguistics, by Joseph Stalin*
Nikoli Marr and his excavations at Ani
