Our Notes & References

An early, pre-revolutionary exposition of Marr’s infamous “Japhetic theory” which sought to unify all the languages of Europe under one banner, and later became the underpinning of all Soviet linguistics.

First edition of this impressive work focusing on the Georgian language.

Nikolai Iakovlevich Marr (1865-1934) was a prominent Russian orientalist, Caucasian scholar, philologist, historian, archaeologist, ethnographer. Born to a Scottish father and a Georgian mother, Marr was before the revolution already a Caucasian “internationalist” and had run afoul of the Prince Chavchadze, who criticised him for concluding that the Georgian Bible had been translated from the Armenian and that Rustaveli’s famous Knight in the Panther Skin in fact had a Persian origin (see Matthews).

Marr is most famous for his “Japhetic theory”. In its original form, this was the relatively simple idea that the Kartvelian languages (Georgian and its sisters) are related to the Semitic languages of the Middle East. Following the revolution, Marr became a member of the Central Executive Committee (VTsiK) and made increasingly bold claims, declaring that the Japhetic languages were in fact the original language of all of Europe and preceded the modern “Indo-European” languages. The Japhetic theory became canonical in Soviet linguistics, infused with a Marxist component, as Marr claimed that languages evolved with socio-economic changes (e.g. Indo-European separated from Japhetic after the discovery of metallurgy and agriculture). Marr and his theories enjoyed popularity for decades after his death in 1934, until finally being declared ideologically unsound by Stalin in his notorious article “Marxism and Problems of Linguistics” (1950).

This first edition of Marr’s Tables sets out an early version of the original, relatively conservative form of Japhetic theory, linking Georgian and Arabic by virtue of the fact that both heavily feature a system of two- or three-consonant roots (and less convincingly, that they both feature “guttural sounds”) (p.2).

Regardless of the soundness of his theory, one must admire Marr’s scholarship: here he offers an extremely detailed breakdown of the grammar of Old Georgian (pre-11th century), with over 20 fold-out tables explaining the declension patterns of Georgian verbs in every screeve (form) – a feat which is rarely performed even in modern day grammars of Georgian.

Unfortunately, Marr’s philological techniques have not stood the test of time. Like many colleagues, Marr often assumed that two superficially similar words must share an ancient root — therefore he conflated the Georgian word “mukha” (oak) with the Chinese “mu” (tree, wood). Despite these spurious etymologies, Marr was of critical importance to early Soviet linguistics, and did come up with interesting and original theories such as that of “primitive polysemanticism”, the idea that “primordial” words had broad meanings and could represent both a thing and its opposite — i.e. that “heaven”, “earth” and “sea” all originally shared one word, the traces of which process could be preserved in modern languages.

Very rare outside Russia, with no copies traced at auction in recent decades and only two in US institutions (Harvard and Cornell). Apparently no copies at auction within Russia either.

Bibliography

Kornilov, N.V., ‘Akademikl N. Ia. Marr (k 150-letniu so dnia rozhdeniia)’, in ‘Aktualnye Problemy Gum. i Estestv. Nauk’, n. 10, 2014, pp. 271-83; Matthews, W. K. 1948. ‘The Japhetic Theory’. The Slavonic and East European Review 27 (68): 172–92; Tuite, Kevin. 2008. ‘The Rise and Fall and Revival of the Ibero-Caucasian Hypothesis’. Historiographia Linguistica 35 (1–2): 23–82.