Uncle Jazzbeau’s Gallimaufrey

japhetidology made easy

The other day, Mark Liberman wrote an entry in which he mentioned Stalinist linguistics with a link to an article by Uncle Joe himself. Today, his colleage, Bill Poser, brought up the Georgian linguist, N. Ja. Marr, who ran Soviet linguistics for almost 30 years. Posner cites a book on Marr for the uninitiated, but, if you don't have the Norwegian, you might want to take a look at the book that introduced yours truly to Marr and his works, Lawrence L. Thomas' 1956 dissertation The Linguistic Theories of N. Ja. Marr, which I found used at Powells years after reading the typescript in the NRLF reading room.

Japhetidology does not recognize abstractions in nature—theoretical primitive elements [primitivy] which never existed in reality—abstractly conceived and abstractly created; it searches for materially real primitive elements and finds their archaic traces in the transformed layers of the contents of mixed linguistic types, and it discovers in them deathless creative elements.

Marr, 1920, [Jafetičeskij Kavkaz i tretij ètničeskij èlement v sozidanii sredizemnomorskoj kul’tury, pp.106f.]

He posited a Noêetic superfamily of languages of which Japhetic included Georgian and pre-Aryan Armenian. On the development of grammatical gender:

Can it be that the natural sexual differece was not immediately perceived by mankind? I repeat that aboriginal humanity was not interested in sex as such during the formation of the world outlook. Grammatical gender is only the reflection of forms of the social structure. During primitive communism there was no gender. During the matriarchate—the oldest class organization—there was the hegemony of the woman-mother, and metals of that period (if not yet bronze, then at least copper) reveal (by their use of a part of the word as a class indicator) their appurtenance to a social group led by a woman. Moreover, the metal, still apprehended as a tool of production, had to share the ‘grammatical’ gender of the first tool—the hand. When the matriarchate was replaced by the patriarchate, formal class indicators of the transition period arose: the so-called neuter gender, connected with the results of production ... and hence with material. The former, general, nonclass type, on the other hand, became masculine—it became the indicator of the hegemony of a class organization headed by a man-father.

[]Marr, 1930, Rodnaja reč’—mogučij ručag kul’turnogo podema, p.419.