Nikolai Yakovlevich Marr (1865-1934)
Nikolay Yakovlevich Marr (Никола́й Я́ковлевич Марр; 6 January 1865(O.S. 25 December 1864 {{{4}}}) in Kutaisi – 20 December 1934 inLeningrad) was a controversial Soviet scholar whose monogenetic theory of language constituted the officially approved ideology of Sovietlinguists 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 hisJaphetic 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 paleonthology 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 1930s 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
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
External link
Marxism and Problems of Linguistics, by Joseph Stalin
Results from FactBites:
Armenian Architecture - VirtualANI - Nikolai Marr and his excavations at Ani (4144 words)
Nikolai Yakovlevich Marr was born in the Georgian town of Kutaisi on the 6th of January 1865 (25th December 1864 according to the Julian calendar then in use in the Russian Empire).
Marr had already painted a similar picture in his essay published in 1921 in "Revue Des Études Arméniennes", pointing out the irony that the people who had destroyed the museums were probably the same Muslim villagers that he had employed as workers during the excavations.
Nikolai Marr's early academic career was devoted to the study of languages rather than archaeology or art history - and it was to his former discipline that he returned to for the remainder of his life.
Results from FactBites:
| Armenian Architecture - VirtualANI - Nikolai Marr and his excavations at Ani (4144 words) | |
|
| Nikolai Yakovlevich Marr was born in the Georgian town of Kutaisi on the 6th of January 1865 (25th December 1864 according to the Julian calendar then in use in the Russian Empire). |
|
| Marr had already painted a similar picture in his essay published in |
|
| Nikolai Marr's early academic career was devoted to the study of languages rather than archaeology or art history - and it was to his former discipline that he returned to for the remainder of his life. |
