Marrism

Marrism, also known as the Japhetic theory or the New Theory of Language, is a set of theories from the Georgian-born linguist Nikolai Yakovlevich Marr (Russian: Никола́й Я́ковлевич Марр; Georgian: ნიკოლოზ იაკობის ძე მარი; 1864-1934). Marr's ideas arose from his grievances with the traditional "family tree" language model, that seemingly could not explain the relationships between the languages of the Caucasus, especially his mother tongue of Georgian. Over the course of its development, Marr started positioning his ideas on historical linguistics as the orthodox Marxist alternative to "bourgeois" linguistics. This led to them quickly becoming the dominant linguistic theory in the Soviet Union, but then just as quickly falling out of the government's favor and being denounced.

Today, Marr's ideas are often considered largely pseudoscientific and the humanities version of Lysenkoism. Nevertheless, some scholars evaluate the "New Theory" less harshly, finding positive and interesting sides in Nikolai Marr's output. His non-linguistic work in history and archaeology has largely fallen into complete obscurity, which makes it difficult to evaluate.

Components of the theory
Ivan Meshchaninov, one of Marr's former students, identified thirty-four theses underpinning Marr's ideas. Chief among these is the concept that all languages are monogenetic, i.e. come from a common ancestor, and share certain stable elements (“characteristics”) in common. These characteristics can unite and combine in different ways, under the influence of natural and historical conditions. Rather than referring to language "families" as in traditional historical linguistics, Meshchaninov refers to language "systems". The formation of new languages comes not from the divergence of a proto-language into a family, but rather from the hybridization ("crossing") of multiple languages into a single system. A system is characterized by the sum total of characteristics its languages share in common, and these new languages may bear little resemblance to their ancestors.

Among other theses that Meshchaninov identified in Marr's thinking were four primordial syllables (sal, roš, jon, ber) as the source of all vocabulary in the world's languages, as well as the concept that language is an element of the economic superstructure belonging to social class, rather than an element of the economic base belonging to nationality. Language was believed to have the same superstructural value as that of painting and other forms of artistic expression.

When outlining the tenets of the New Theory, Meshchaninov explicitly traces the "bourgeois" concept of heredity in languages ("the primal unchanging hereditary substance") to Romanticist notions of Volksgeist and racial theory, and by extension associates this concept with the Fascist ideology that took hold in Nazi Germany.

Boris Serebrennikov narrowed Meshchaninov's thirty-four theses down to four basic theses: all words having been derived from the four primordial syllables; the development of new languages by hybridization; language evolution as a stadial process; and "the semantic transformation of primitive totem-names".

Terminology and periodization
Marr referred to his own approach as "Japhetic theory" (яфети́ческая тео́рия; yafeticheskaya teoriya) or "Japhet(id)ology" (яфет(ид)оло́гия; yafet(id)ologiya). Other Russian texts of the time call it the "New Theory of Language" (Но́вое уче́ние о языке́; Novoye ucheniye o yazyke ). Marr and his followers generally did not use the term "Marrism" (марри́зм; marrizm), nor did Stalin in his 1950 rebuttal of the theory.

Kevin Tuite divides Marr's scholarship into four periods: the "Kartvelological period" (1908–1916) during which Marr theorized that Japhetic (i.e. Kartvelian) was part of a "Noetic" family alongside Semitic and Hamitic; the "Caucasological period" (1916–1920) during which he focused on the "layers" and mixed heritages of indigenous Caucasian languages; the "Mediterraneanist period" (1920–1923) during which he focused on Japhetic as a "third ethnic element" in the Mediterranean (i.e. Etruscan, Basque, Pelasgian); and finally "The New Theory of Language" (1923-1934), the most radical period commonly referred to as "Marrism" which Marr's students continued after his death.

Background


Nikolai Marr was born in western Georgia to an elderly Scottish father and a native Georgian mother, who (if Marr’s recollection is to be believed) did not even share a common language with each other.

Marr's native language was Georgian, and he was bothered by Georgian's apparent "orphan" status among the languages of Eurasia. He perceived the other Eurasian languages to be members of large "friendly families" with reconstructible ancestors and many siblings, whereas his own language apparently had no relatives aside from Megrelian, Lak, and Svan.

In the years leading up to World War I, Marr became interested in the concept of hybridity. He believed that the Georgian and Armenian languages were "mixed" with each other on multiple levels. He also became especially interested in the Svan language, and attributed many of its distinctive features to borrowing and mixing with other languages.

Marr also proposed a massive "Noetic" family containing all the languages in the world (named after the Biblical character Noah), with three sub-families: Hamitic, Semitic, and Japhetic (each named after one of Noah's sons from the Bible). Marr initially used the term Japhetic to refer to Kartvelian and other languages of the Caucasus, but he soon began to find Japhetic elements in diverse languages from many parts of the world. Marr's Japhetic theory rose in popularity after 1917.

Marr eventually rejected the notion of language families altogether, and emphasized his theory's ideological parallels with Marxism. He espoused that all languages were underlyingly Japhetic, and that the languages of the world were destined to merge into a single language (much like how the nations of the world were destined to unite into one global nation under Soviet provision). Naturally, this single language would resemble Russian.

At various points in his career, Marr managed the Department of Oriental Languages of St. Petersburg State University, the State Public Library, and the Caucasian Historical Archeological Institute. Marr also established the Academy for the History of Material Culture, and his own pet project, the Japhetic Institute. He established the latter in 1921, originally calling it the Institute of Japhetidological Research. Its stated goal was "to study the Japhetic languages of the original population of Europe in their relic pure nature and new formations in the types of speech and to develop language convergence theory”.

Russia
Marr explicitly tied his later theories to the then-current state ideology of Marxism. He referred to his own ideology as "Marxist linguistics" and contrasted it against the "bourgeois linguistics" of the West, which he portrayed as "incompatible with Marxism". The younger generation of Soviet students admired Marr's crusade, and joined him in his effort to establish a new Marxist linguistics. Leningrad University students called Marr's view "the new lever to unfix all established notions of bourgeois 'Indo-European linguistics'".

Marr's theories were especially attractive to young students from the provinces, who often didn't have access to prestige academic knowledge. According to his former student Iosif Orbeli, "it is difficult to imagine Nicholas Yakovlevich not to be surrounded by young people". By the end of the 1920s, Marr's students had become an academic and scientific community of their own. Notable members of this community include Valerian Aptekar, Fedot Filin, and Armen Bashindzhagyan.

Linguists who disagreed with Marr's theories formed a group called the "Language Front", but almost all leaders of this group were eventually repressed.

Georgia
Marr believed that his own Georgian compatriots had an unfair view of him and his theories. As early as the 1890s, Georgian intellectuals put him on "the list of deniers of Georgian culture, and indeed enemies of Georgian national identity".

The Ossetian linguist Vasily Abaev (Georgian by nationality) utilized some of Marr's anthropological theories (e.g. stadialist determinism), while simultaneously adhering to more traditional methodologies of linguistics and etymology. For example, Abaev referred to the Indo-European languages as a "system" rather than a family, and cited Marr's hypothesis that system may have originated from a "long process of gradual assimilation and consolidation of numerous small, splintered prehistoric tribal and linguistic formations".

Marr's views remained influential in 20th-century scholarship regarding the Svan language, even after Stalin had officially denounced Marrism. In a long-lasting academic debate over the origins of Svan morphology (and Svan ethnogenesis more broadly), all scholars involved in the debate from 1931 to 1955 agreed with two basic assumptions that Marr had postulated in 1911: (1) all indigenous languages of the Caucasus are related to each other; and (2) multiple speech varieties from both sides of the Caucasus had contributed to the origin of Svan.

Reception in the West
Unsurprisingly, Marr's ideas were met with a cold shoulder outside of the USSR and remained relatively obscure during his lifetime. Even his apparent ideological allies could not take the Japhetic theory seriously. For example, the French linguist Aurélien Sauvageot, while largely agreeing with Marr's criticisms of the neogrammarian approach, wrote that they "do not seem to be complete enough, nor do they seem to be really convincing" and that his original ideas are "in the realm of pure hypothesis, however ingenious, however tempting." He also dismissed Marr's claims to Marxism, saying that "one would be entitled to say that if Marr had been more authentically Marxist, he would not have committed the fundamental error that has distorted all the steps of his thought." Another notable contemporary review came from the American Slavist Clarence Manning, who did not seem particularly impressed with Marr's theoretical offerings, but still had some positive things to say about Japhetidology: "Thus the desire for logic, unity and dialectic gradually drives the theory further and further from the facts which it tries to explain, and the theory now that it is adapted to Marxism continues in this path. There are however aspects which stress other little known and little regarded sides of modern linguistics, and in this respect the views of Prof. Marr are often interesting and illuminating." Around the 1960s, long after the theory's "death", it became the target of renewed interest among Western scholars.

Decline
Despite the Soviet leadership's support and sponsorship of Marr's research (and the popularity of Marr's theories among the Soviet academic community), for a long time there was never any official government statement regarding the status or validity of Marr's theories within the state-decreed Soviet ideology. This changed in 1950, when Joseph Stalin officially denounced Marr's theories in an article titled "Marxism and Problems of Linguistics". Stalin specifically took issue with Marr's view of language being an element of the superstructure rather than the base, as well as his view that language is more closely related to social class than to nationality.

After Stalin's denouncement of Marrism, many of Marr's former supporters abruptly shifted course and began to criticize his theories. Tuite refers to 1951-53 as "the peak of officially sanctioned — and, to a degree, officially required — anti-Marrism".

It is possible that "Marxism and Problems of Linguistics" was not in fact written by Stalin himself, but rather by Marr's academic rival Arnold Chikabova. However, this has never been confirmed. In any case, Chikabova states that he personally met with Stalin before the article's publication.