Marr and Materialism in Linguistics
Doctor of Philological Sciences
Lecture given for the All-Union Society for the Dissemination of Political and Scientific Knowledge. Moscow, April 1949
Soviet linguistics, closely linked with practical work in the development of written national languages and languages as a whole throughout the Soviet Union, are a militant sector of theoretical and scientific work in the USSR. It is here relevant to recall the brilliant work of Nikolai Yakovlevich Marr, founder of the Soviet school of philology. "The science of language can less than any other be treated as though it were not a primary necessity to the theoretical front of Socialist construction. In itself, language has always been, and is, a mighty weapon in the hands of the man who has a skillful mastery of it. Language is called upon to become an even mightier, one might almost say a miraculous weapon in the hands of the builders of a new world".
The successes of Soviet philology are very closely bound up with the work of Academician N. Y. Marr, outstanding scientist and communist. His name ranks with that of our outstanding scientists of recent decadesMendeleyev, Pavlov, Karpinsky, Michurin, Williams, Dokuchayev, Tsiolkovsky and others. Academician Marr rendered an outstanding service to Soviet science. He developed a new science of language based on dialectical and historical materialism. He worked out a general theory of philology diametrically opposed to bourgeois idealist philology. On this basis he fought consistently against bourgeois philology and firmly exposed the racial lndo-European theory of bourgeois linguistics. N. Y. Marr carefully and painstakingly studied the works of the founders of Marxism-Leninism and their teachings on society, even when he was already a leading Soviet and world scientist.
The mastery he achieved helped Marr, a product of the old philological school, to free himself from the "scientific milieu founded and formed by the bourgeoisie", which was hampering his progress. For nearly half a century, Academician Marr, working on innumerable linguistic facts, implacably demolished the world outlook current among bourgeois idealist philologists, on the basis of facts he himself had learnt.
It was only after the October Revolution, however, that he broke decisively with traditional philology. We recall N. Y. Marr's speech at the 16th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (B), in which Marr affirmed his standpoint. "In the conditions of complete freedom which Soviet power gives science, by helping the boldest and most audacious scientific research within the scope of a really materialist world outlook, I tried, with new scientific personnel (communists and non-Party co-workers), to develop and continue the theoretical study of language. Having realized apoliticalness to be a fiction . . I stand for the clear general line of proletarian scientific theory and for the general line of the Communist Party." This statement refutes the fanciful assertions that Marr was an "accidental" Marxist and that it was an "accidental" occurrence that Marr's methods coincided with dialectical materialism.
Since he himself was not neutral, Marr subjected all the fundamentals of the old philology to pointed and devastating criticism. He exposed its dependence on racist ideology and the colonial policy of bourgeois States.
He regarded the old and the Soviet viewpoints in science as irreconcilable. The expression of this viewpoint can be found in his creation of a new science of language.
As far back as 1925, Marr wrote, in an article on the origins of language: "There can be no talk of reconciliation in matters of principle between the old and the new theories unless the Indo-European gives up its fundamental principles." And he also added: "I regard the attempt made by some of my not very numerous pupils, and particularly of my followers, to bridge this gap as being more pernicious than the desire of the great majority of IndoEuropean linguists to ignore Japhetic philology entirely."• Without denying the considerable services ·rendered by the Indo-European philologists in the history of science, especially the factual material they accumulated, Academician Marr quite correctly asserted that "Indo-European linguistics are one flesh and blood with decaying bourgeois society, built on the enslavement by the European nations of the peoples of the East through their murderous colonial policy.
Knowing that his theories were a challenge to old scientific ideas, Marr at the same time asked himself a question : "What is the source of such a fantastic lack of understanding of the Japhetic theory?", and after careful thought, himself replied: "I knew that there were a good many reasons," he wrote in 1928 in his Summing-up of the Spring Expedition to Abkhazia, "but," he continued, "I was interested in the primary source. During my trip abroad thoughts about this primary source were very much in the forefront of my mind. I saw for myself that people from a different social world found it difficult wholly to comprehend our thoughts clearly. As clearly as under a microscope it became evident in fact, that all theoretical learning, even language study, is the child of a particular society."!
What is Language?
MARR knew well the classic definitions of language, its inter-relationship with thought, the point made that language development has been determined by the development of the forces of production and production relations in the history of human society. His understanding can be judged by such works as Marx and Problems of Language; Language and Thought, The Udmurt Language and the Linguistic Approach of the Japhetic Theory; and other works.
Marr defined language in the following terms: "Language is a part of the superstructure of society, as socially valuable as painting and the arts in general." Expanding this further, Marr wrote in his work The Japhetic Theory; "Mankind created its language in the labour process, in definite social conditions and will re-create it with the coming of really new social forms of life and usage, in accordance with the new thought which will grow up in such conditions. . . The roots of inherited speech are not to be found in external nature, nor within us, in our physical nature, but in society. . Society inherits, preserves, or transforms its language into new forms, changes its aspect and absorbs it into the new social system".
Marr's characterization of language was "a socially important feature". His lecture on Language, read to students of the Eastern faculty of the Azerbaijan Lenin State University in May 1927, gives his opinions in concentrated form: "Language is a weapon of communication, which arose during the labour process, or, more correctly, during the creation of human culture. Language was created by the human collective in the same way as were the first monuments to human culture. . . and as, in the later stages of human society, the collective created the arts, the epos, the dance, singing and music. Language reflects in itself all the paths and stages of the development of material culture, part of the super-structure of society. . . ". •
The Origins of Language
UNLIKE various representatives of the "sociological" trend in bourgeois linguistics, N. Y. Marr not only took into account the social factor in the development of language, but also always put language in its right place from the materialist standpoint. He considered the question of the origin of language as one of the most important primary questions in philology. Bourgeois scientists are afraid to stand on the firm soil of history in solving the problem of the origin of language. To F'de Saussure, who headed the foreign "sociological" school, it seemed, for example, that "the interference of history only distracted the linguist from his path", whilst E. Sepir, the American linguist, who followed in de Saussure's footsteps, ironically left the solution of the problem of the origin of language to "philosophers and "belles-lettrists". In contradistinction to idealist philologists, Marr asserted that "without interest in the origin of language there can be no linguistics. All study of language presupposes some positive attitude to this question, some concept as to the rise of language, and only when this is so can specialist basic study of single languages become fruitful. He dated the rise of spoken language as relating to the epoch when man first made tools. He made this point in a number of articles on The Origin of Language; Why it is Difficult to Become a Theorist in Linguistics; and so on. The appearance and wide use in human intercourse of spoken language was preceded by sign language, kinetic speech, as a means of intercourse between people at the very earliest stage of their social-labour development.
At the same time Marr did not deny the existence, side by side with sign language, of single elements of spoken language which were not yet a system of language. Developing this viewpoint further, Marr noted that spoken language grew up in the period when there was a complex social system with a collective in process of organisation . . . when man was already at a high stage of mental development. Man had by that time mastered to perfection sign language, which entirely satisfied the needs of inter-communication both for the community and the individual within that community. Kinetic- language answered fully to the quality and level of mental development of mankind in early epochs both technically and ideologically." Spoken language marked a new stage in the development of social man.
In advancing this viewpoint Marr stressed that analysis of sound-speech and also the preservation, in various languages of the world, of traces of the most ancient forms of speech and rich and varied ethnographic and anthropological material, made it possible to assert that sound-speech had replaced sign language or kinetic speech. In the last years of his life N. Y. Marr inclined more and more to recognition of the considerable part played by sound even in the use of kinetic speech.
Thought and Language
IN CONTRADISTINCTION to bourgeois scientists, Marr considered that: "Thought and language are indissoluble" and that "when they arose, they arose simultaneously". "Thought and language are brother and sister, children of one and the same parents--of production and of the social structure," wrote Marr in the preface to the Russian translation of Levy-Brule's book Primitive Thought. He considered the problem of thought to be "one of the greatest, if not the greatest, theoretical problem in the world since the roots of thought are to be found not in thought itself and not in nature, but in the material basis, as dialectical materialism holds"; "the leap from the animal herd into human society is connected with the problem of thought." For this reason, the problem of thought and how thought arose is one very closely connected with the problem of language. Marr considered that it was a "specialised subject of study" not only for philosophers and psychologists but for philologists also. That is why the institute he founded is called the Institute of Language and Thought.
In exposing the formalist nature of Indo-European philology, Marr wrote, "The old science of language rightly excluded thought as being outside its competence, since language was being studied apart from thought. This teaching used phonetic laws (the development of sound) but no laws of semantics (the laws of the development of one meaning or another, the laws for comprehending speech and words). The study of the meanings of words had no ideological basis."• He justly condemned specialists of the old school for studying language from the phonic side alone, ignoring ideological aspects.
In accordance with Marxist-Leninist teaching on the unity of language and thought, Marr stressed their close inter-relationship, their dialectical unity throughout the history of the development of human speech. The unity of language and thought, as a unity of form and content, permeates all human speech and its individual elements. He categorically objected to the assertion that the relationship between sound and meaning is arbitrary. Even a phoneme [a spoken-language speech-sound unit] is a "socially-matured sound".
Semantics; Morphology; Syntax
IN WORKING OUT problems of the history of language, Marr worked out most important laws in the development of the meaning of words and, in particular, the law of functional semantics and the law by which a given meaning changed into its opposite (the polarization of meaning). He cited numerous examples to show these laws in operation. He pointed out that, in different historical periods, the substitution of a new implement for an old one in the same production process led to new meanings being given to the original words in use, e.g., the name of the stone axe passed to the iron axe, the name of the acorn as a foodstuff was passed on to bread and so on.
In his brilliant works Language and Thought and An Approach to Semantic Paleontology in the Languages of the non-Japhetic Systems, Marr cites a number of outstanding examples showing how the fundamental law of dialectics, the unity of opposites, is to be seen in the development of word-meanings. He studied first and foremost the history of meaning, semantics, linking it with the history of material culture and the history of social forms through the intermediary of the history of human thought. "In its primary stage thought is the collective comprehension of collective production with collective weapons and production-relations: language is the collective expression of collective comprehension, depending on the technique of thought and the world outlook for its formulation and scope."!
Marr checked his language material against all the historical sources available to science, using in the main monuments of material culture. He analysed the development of meaning in language in indissoluble connection with the development of the formal side of language, its structure (syntax and morphology) and physiological sound formation. "Formal morphology," he wrote, "is preceded by ideological morphology, the building not only of phrases, associated with a definite order in the distribution of one meaning or another, but also the building of words. In the building of words, one element is either used by other elements for clearer understanding or the element is made more complex, acting as a definer for greater accuracy in understanding."•
Marr set himself the important and interesting task of solving the problem of the historical development of the formal side of language and linking it with "society and production". He studied the birth of varied grammatical categories from that ancient epoch when human spoken language was just beginning. He united in one neat whole the various aspects of language which had been artificially separated one from another-phonetics, morphology, syntax, lexicography, and semantics (the science of the meaning of words), He bridged the gulf between historical and contemporary grammar, a gulf which found its fullest expression in the works of the reactionary "sociological" school of the Swiss French linguist de Saussure.
Starting at the very birth of sound language and concluding with the highly-developed national languages, Marr established the decisive role of syntax, the most essential aspect of sound-language, in relation to which morphology was only the technique, as phonetics are the technique for morphology. "Syntax stands out precisely because in its ideology and technique are as yet indissoluble". The most recent works by Academician Meshchaninov, Clauses and Parts of Speech, and The Verb, develop this idea further.
Stadial Development of Language
EVALUATING not only the evolutionary processes in the development of the languages of the world, but also dealing with the radical changes that occurred, Marr worked out his theory of the stadia! (stage) development of languages; he understood this to mean a qualitative change in the whole structure of a language, depending on fundamental advances in the development of the productive forces and production relations in the history of mankind.
Marr considered the question of the closeness of the connections between the development of a language and social and economic factors to have been incontrovertibly settled. He strove to examine over an extended historical period "the dynamics of sound-speech" and the historical development of grammatical lexical forms of language as a whole.
Marr raised the question of the stadial development of language in 1923 in his book The Inda-European Languages of the Mediterranean. He asserted that "the Inda-European languages of the Mediterranean never and nowhere appeared with any sort of particular language-material which might stem from some racially-specific family of languages and even less from some racially specific archetypal language''.! In the same discussion he pointed out that "the Indo-European languages belong to a specific family, but not to a racial one. Rather are they the product of a particular stage, more complex and crossbred, produced by an upheaval in society resulting from new forms of production manifestly connected with the discovery of metals and their extensive use in economy . . . The Indo-European family of languages is the typical creation of new economic and social conditions".
Sometime later Marr connected the various systems of building sound language with changes in social thought, changes which arose with changed economic systems and the social structures corresponding to them. He put forward the idea of an inter-relationship of changes which linked social and economic formations with the different structures of thought and sound-language.
On October 27th, 1928, N. Y. Marr lectured at the Communist Academy, in Moscow on Current Problems and Tasks of the Japhetic Theory. He devoted a considerable part of this lecture to the theory of the stadial development of the languages of the world. In this lecture he also set out the main lines of development of sound-language, although he did not consider the problem finally settled, and insisted on its being checked and re-checked. "Changes in thought," he pointed out, "tally with three systems in the building of sound-language arising from different economic systems and the corresponding social structures :
1. Primitive Communism, with a synthetic speech structure, the multisemanticism of words and no distinctions between basic and extended meanings;
2. A social structure based on the merging of differing types of economy, with social division of labour, i.e., the division of society into crafts, the stratification of a unified society into production and technological groups, constituting primal factory forms. Language-structure becomes concomitant with these new groups and begins to develop parts of speech. A sentence begins to consist of different clauses, and clauses are composed of different parts. Other developments lead to the growth of various functional words which later are transformed into morphological elements. The basic meanings of words begin to vary, and extended meanings grow up side by side with the basic meanings ;
3. Hierarchic or class society, with technological division of labour, and with an inflected morphology."
Marr objected strongly to the traditional concept of the development of sound-languages as "a biological process". "The very process of the development of sound -language does not itself constitute a multiplication but a unification of languages, increasing with every stage of the economic development of mankind." Marr drew attention to the fact that the existence of hundreds of languages, over a thousand, leads even scientists to prostrate themselves, but as he rightly pointed out, this multiplicity is itself the result of unification. Earlier there had been an even greater number of languages, less complete and less adapted to the accurate use of words. "In the same way as mankind is moving from multiplicity towards a common world economy and a single common social order, along the line of the creative efforts of the labouring masses, so language is moving in gigantic strides from multiplicity towards a single world language ... "!
Marr did not complete his formulations on the stadial development of languages but, as has been rightly noted by Academician Meshchaninov, this formulation sharply differentiates Soviet linguistics from foreign linguistics, in which attention is mainly paid to the evolutionary changes in languages and primarily to changes in phonetics and morphology. In formulating his concept of stadial development, Marr demolished the bourgeois philologists' un-historical and metaphysical concept of the development of language. This concept is founded upon the assumption of the past existence of archetypal languages. The gradual evolutionary changes in these languages are said to have resulted in the development of the different languages and their "families" existing to-day, these languages being sharply isolated one from the other, as were their archetypal ancestors, and reflecting in their structure the biological and psychical peculiarities of one race or another.
The Value of Different Languages
THE DEVELOPMENT of all the languages in the world, according to Marr, reflects one and the same set of social laws, determined by the unity of the social-historical process. As a result of this concept, Marr requires that both highly developed and backward languages be taken into account when a theory of world philology is being formulated. Objecting strongly to the assertions of the old Indo-European school of philology on the existence of racially-isolated "pure" and homogeneous tribal languages, he stressed that the crossing and fusing of tribal languages and dialects, reflecting the actual course of human history, has played an outstanding role in language creation.
While bourgeois theories on language derived from the study of a not very large group of Indo-European languages, Marr embraced written and unwritten languages, languages with little writing, the languages of great and small peoples, dead and living languages, the richly-developed languages of nations and the patois of intra-national groupings and of tribes backward in development and considered all of them valuable sources in the building of the Soviet science of language. A resolute enemy of cosmopolitanism, he stressed the need for taking into account the peculiarities of each of the languages of the world, and for thorough and profound study of the actual system of each language. "The only teaching that can be considered the science of language is that which takes into account the peculiarities of all the languages in the world, and which not only designates to each its place among them all, but also delineates the paths and limits along and within which specialised work on every language should be carried out ... " Thus, Marr stands resolutely against traditional bourgeois comparativism, which, failing to take into account the peculiarities of the languages and literature of the world, has become the best-loved method of the "cosmopolitan comparativists".
Marr did not deny the role and importance of the comparative-historical method in the study of languages. In his opinion, however, there was a big difference between his concept of this method and the usual method used in old comparative philology. In 1929-1930, in Leningrad University, Marr himself gave a series of lectures devoted to the similarities and differences between the Armenian and Georgian languages. He himself compiled a comparative grammar of the Japhetic and Semitic languages. But his approach was always a historical-materialist one. He sharply criticized the formal comparative Indo-European approach. In his Chuvash-Japhetics on the Volga, Marr wrote, " ... The comparative method is thoroughly deceptive and the existing Indo-European method is merely formal; it overlooks the fact that, as mankind changed the forms and types of language, not only did the meaning of words alter, but so did the foundations of the changes in meaning ... "t
Marr did not consider it sufficient to study language only in so far as it became possible to determine stadial types, connected with the development of thought and depending, in the last resort, on the general line of development of human society.
New Languages in the USSR
A POWERFUL supporter of nationality-development in the USSR, a true Soviet patriot, N. Y. Marr considered it necessary always to link science with the practical reality of Socialist construction. At the first All-Union conference of Marxist historians in Moscow, Marr delivered a speech on The Use of the Historical Process in Throwing Light on the Japhetic Theory. He stressed in this speech the indissoluble ties between science and life, and his words are equally important to-day. "To speak in the 20th century of science as divorced from life," he said, "is either a hypocritical assertion or a relic of the monasticism of the Middle Ages. A science which is not bound up with the economy and social structure of a country building Socialism, is a science without a future, without method".
"A fighter on the scientific and cultural front," as he called himself, and an outstanding scientist, Marr carried out monumental work in helping to develop the nationality-language culture of the USSR peoples. On the one hand, he established the scientific and theoretical bases for large-scale work in the creation and development of written and literary languages for peoples with only spoken languages, a work achieved for the first time in history in the Soviet Union. On the other hand, he himself participated actively in all the State measures connected with the upsurge and flourishing of the nationality-language culture of the many USSR peoples. He considered active participation in language-construction work in the national Republics and Regions of the USSR an essential for all his pupils and followers.
He attached great importance to the construction of new alphabets and to the improvements of archaically-contructed alphabets based on Arabic, Lamaist and similar sources. He himself worked on problems of terminology and orthography, and on the study of dialects. His frequent visits to Transcaucasia, and to the Northern Caucasus, to Abkhazia, Daghestan, to the Volga and Kama River areas, to Izhevsky, Cheboksari, Perm, Ulyanovsk, Alatyr, and also to Sukhumi, Makhach-Kaln, Rostov, Nalchik and other nationality areas of the country, were combined with a painstaking study of the languages he continuously used in scientific studies. He desired to render direct practical assistance to the Japhetic, Turkic, Iranian, Ugro-Finnish and other nationalities of the USSR, who had won self-determination within the Soviet Union.
Considering the study of the living languages of the USSR, and the training of scientific workers from among the newly-freed nationalities, to be a task of great State importance, Marr organised post-graduate studies attached to Academy Institutions in Leningrad and set up in Moscow a Committee for the Study of the Caucasian peoples, which later became the Committee for the Study of the Ethnic and National Culture of the Soviet East, finally becoming the USSR Nationalities Institute. He himself headed these organisations. The living unwritten and newly-written languages of the USSR peoples were a rich and irreplaceable source, which Marr used extensively in his development of the new science of language.
Marr was always interested in the problem of a future single world-language. By his philological material he confirmed J. V. Stalin's statement at the Sixteenth Communist Party Congress that a single world-language only becomes possible in a classless socialist society. He regarded language as an important weapon in the cultural revolution. "It is clear," he wrote, "that to produce the cultural revolution it is important not only to know language as it is, but also to know how it became what it is (however incomplete it may be), so that it may become what it should be socially".
Marr pointed out that one's native language, whichever it may be, should hold as important a place in the school curriculum as had the classical dead languages-Latin and Greek-in the past. He also stressed the importance of knowing the history of language so as to be able to use and develop the weapon of language to the full. Nationality-languages had to be used in the Socialist reconstruction of the lives of the USSR nationalities.
Marr was a very self-critical person and demanded constant checks on his own theories and teaching, pointing out the importance of understanding and improving his Japhetic theory, among other teachings. He called on his pupils and co-workers to use criticism and self-criticism to the full.
New Developments After the Death of N. Y. Marr
HIS DEATH did not put an end to the development of his teaching on language. Extremely valuable material has been gathered since his death (1934), in the study of unwritten languages, as well as of languages with many centuries of literary tradition behind them. This material has not only enriched philological theory but has also helped the development of the languages of the peoples of the USSR. It is only in recent years that dozens of grammars and dictionaries have been compiled for languages studied little or not at all in the past : for instance-Slavonic: Ukrainian, Byelorussian. Northern peoples: Nenets, Nanai, Gilyak, Karyak, and others. Ugro-Finnish: Komi, Udmurt, Mordvinian, Mari, Karelian, and others. Caucasus: Georgian, Armenian, Abkhaz, Adigei, Kabardino-Cherkess, and others. Turkic: Kumi, Bashkir, Oirot (Altai), Azerbaidjanian, Uzbek, Kazakh, Tatar,Turkmen, Kara-Kalpal, Yakut, and others . Mongol: Buryat, Khalkha-Mongol.Iranian: Ossetian, Tadjik and others.
Dialectics and Literary Language.
Much valuable work has been done in studying inter-relations between the dialects and the literary language, not only of long-established nations, but also of peoples who began to develop nationally only under Soviet power. Study of the languages and dialects of Daghestan, the Northern Caucasus, Central Asia, the Far East, and so on, is included in this work. Study of these dialects and languages is carried out not only in a narrow theoretical manner, but also so that the peoples speaking them can be served by the nearest written language to their own and sometimes so that the wealth of words and phrases of separate dialects can be used in the creation and development of literary languages among national groupings who won them only under Soviet power.
Comparative Grammars
We Soviet philologists are the first in the history of philology to be working on comparative grammars of languages which have different systems and different stadial developments.
Shortcomings in Our Work
We have as yet given insufficient study to the problems of lexicography, semantics and material culture, language and nation, language, and class, all posed by Marr. Despite the fact that Marr always linked the history of words and their meaning with the history of material culture and of social forms, a number of studies on the history of Russsian lexicography recently published, such as the work of Academician Vinogradov, are merely methodological, totally lacking in the historical-materialist approach. Shortcomings in some of the work of Professors Yakubinsky, Zhirmansky and others, all of whom wrongly seek the source of national language in "official and Chancellery circles" instead of in living "popular-speech" sources, have been insufficiently criticised. The problem of language and class has of late been left severely alone by Soviet philologists. The problem of the development of orthography and terminology, and the theoretical formulation of all the tremendous advances which may be noted in languages which not so long ago were without or almost without written forms, must also be resolved.
Objectivism and willingness to compromise, a lack of real Bolshevik criticism and self-criticism, are unfortunately to be found even among supporters and followers of the Marr school. Further successful work and development in the Soviet materialist science of language can only be accomplished if Soviet philologists imbue their work with a deep partisan spirit and carry out the Bolshevik principle of criticism and self-criticism, thus following in the footsteps of Nikolai Y akovlevich Marr, founder of the new materialist science of language.
Abstracted and translated by ELEANOR FOX.
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