I’ve started Kaverin’s 1928 Скандалист [The troublemaker], and I just got to a passage that made reading it worthwhile no matter what else it contains. The novel focuses on the academic world of 1920s Leningrad, and specifically on literary studies; what I hadn’t realized is that it also featured linguistics, and in this passage the character Dragomanov, based on Yevgeny Polivanov (who was eventually shot for opposing Marr) is lecturing on his theories of historical linguistics (the original can be found here — scroll down to “Уставившись на одного из слушателей”):
Fixing his indifferent gaze on one of his listeners, he began talking about the theory of a pan-European parent language. He had expounded it previously. Every “introduction to linguistics” culminated in that theory. From the time of Schlegel and Bopp, countless linguistic works had been built on the basis of that theory.
But he, Dragomanov, announced that day that, in all sincerity, he could not agree with it.
Suddenly starting to pronounce his r’s in the French way, he took chalk in hand and laid out his evidence.
The Indo-European theory was not capable, in his opinion, of explaining a number of facts which insistently demand their place in the science of language. On the basis of these facts he proposed to construct a new system, a pre-Indo-European condition of human speech close to the primary sources.
In the late-afternoon winter light of Auditorium 12 he seemed a gray spot spread out on the chalk-stained blackboard. He renounced Schlegel and Bopp as Luther had renounced Catholicism. Without a smile, he quoted his words: “Here I stand, I can do no other.”
With the clarity characteristic of French linguists, he reconstructed the forms of that primordial speech, reducing them to a small number of primary sound units. Daringly, he affirmed that existing types of languages should be looked on as the embodiment of the labor of humanity at each stage of its development. The root, agglutinative, and inflectional constructions of language were, in his view, three chronological stages on the path of the development of the linguistic consciousness of humanity. […]
He summed up his results. The results were a ruckus, a turmoil in science. He argued that there was no single language at the dawn of mankind, that the Indo-European family was only one of the stages along the path from the initial multitude of languages to a single language.
Overcoming the twilight, turning himself into a bat, he drew a pyramid on the blackboard. He explained that from a broad base containing countless embryonic languages, human speech, in passing through a series of typological transformations, is striving to reach the summit — the unity of all the languages of the world. Next to it he depicted the Indo-European theory with its single protolanguage in the form of an inverted pyramid.
Offhand, I can’t think of another novel with such a scene; it warmed my heart and reminded me of the book we read in my first linguistics class, Holger Pedersen’s The Discovery of Language: Linguistic Science in the Nineteenth Century (whose Danish original came out in 1924, not long before the novel was written), which introduced me to Schlegel and Bopp (as well as Pott, Rask, Fick, Grimm, and the rest of the monosyllabic philologists). Kaverin himself studied at the Leningrad Oriental Institute in the early 1920s, so he knew what he was talking about. But that primordial speech with its “small number of primary sound units” is alarmingly reminiscent of Marr’s sal, ber, yon, rosh (see this LH post). I wonder how much of that stuff is based on Polivanov’s actual ideas?
Update. I learn from E. Toddes and M. Chudakov’s very informative «Прототипы одного романа» (available in Toddes’s collection Избранные труды по русской литературе и филологии) that Polivanov wasn’t even in Petrograd/Leningrad after 1921, and the lecture actually represents the views of Marr! They also give prototypes for the other characters, and make the important point that the relationships between prototype and character differ in each case — only Nekrylov/Shklovsky is meant to be a near-identity.
Which French linguists? Schlegel is the earliest source for Voltaire’s alleged bon mot “Etymology is a science in which vowels signify nothing at all, and consonants very little.”
Antoine Meillet is the first that comes to mind: “Today Meillet is remembered as the mentor of an entire generation of linguists and philologists, who would become central to French linguistics in the twentieth century, such as Émile Benveniste, Georges Dumézil, and André Martinet.” Saussure comes to mind too, but of course he was Swiss. Baudouin de Courtenay sounds French, but he was Russian, “of distant French extraction.”
Lamarckism instead of Darwinism, belatedly!
Schlegel believed Sanskrit was PIE, and its discovery logically had to trigger another Renaissance in Europe that he was very much looking forward to. Bopp disabused the world of such notions (Hindutva/BJP excepted).
Voltaire’s alleged bon mot
I saw today similar essentialist definition by Yanis Varoufakis:
“Economics is a religion with equations”
Polivanov was “officially” shot for being a Japanese spy. Getting on the outs with Marr (who had died in ’34) probably hadn’t helped, but I imagine anyone in the USSR who had spent substantial time dealing with matters Japanese was at some risk of being shot as a Japanese spy in 1937 even if they had faithfully followed every twist and turn of the party line up until then. Polivanov is discussed at length in this interesting piece (which gives the name of the guy who denounced him although I haven’t googled that fellow yet):
https://www.rferl.org/a/russian-memorial-victims-and-perpetrators-of-stalin-s-purges-stand-side-by-side/29679174.html
Polivanov was “officially” shot for being a Japanese spy.
True, but it’s impossible to know what combination of present and past “sins” led to the signature on the death warrant. They could accuse anyone they wanted to kill of being an English/Polish/Japanese/Ruritanian spy in those days.
I note from that article (which is a great find — thanks!) that “Polivanov worked briefly under Trotsky at the Soviet foreign affairs commissariat”; they could just as easily have had him shot for that. There’s always a pretext.
Likely local “Mongols” (I mean people interested in it) know the most, because Buryat scholars were exterminated quite systematically (while Mongolia itself set the record for percentage of population killed). But as I understand, basically, they killed Orientalists here. I do not know what death rate was across sub-branches, though.
And still did when Stalin died and Beria was hurriedly “accused of being a British spy, arrested, and shot, not necessarily in that order”.
WP has an entry for the genre known as “Ruritanian Romance”. I had no idea.
@David Marjanović: After Stalin’s death, the Soviet leadership eventually settled on a policy of not executing people who hadn’t actually done anything and also cutting down on the number of people imprisoned on trumped up charges by several nepers. (The vast Stalinist gulag system was largely dismantled.) Actual spies would still be shot, and there were lots of trumped up accusations against dissidents that the organs had already decided to imprison. That could mean, for example, charging human rights activists with treason, and thus threatening them with the death penalty, but executions in such cases were very uncommon. A lot of this stemmed from the fact that so many Party leaders had been killed or imprisoned under Stalinism, and they wanted to establish a new system that ensured they would not themselves be at risk merely by virtue of having risen high enough to be noticed by the supreme leader.
However, it took some time for the new unwritten rules to be established, and Beria was a unique case anyway. As one of Stalin’s secret police chiefs in the 1930s, he had been instrumental in the purges, and the leaders in 1953 remembered that he had been a key actor in the rhe bloodbath that had claimed so many of their colleagues lives. It was atypical already that Beria himself had survived and remained free as long as he had. The other former secret police chiefs Stalin had named (Yagoda, Yezhov, and Abakumov) had all been purged, Beria perhaps having evaded that fate by playing up their shared Georgian heritage to Stalin. (That may have been how Beria’s lieutenant Merkulov, who is, thanks to the confusion of frequent reorganization among the chekist organs, sometimes counted as a full-fledged secret police chief himself, also managed to remain free up through the time of Stalin’s death.) After Stalin’s death, Beria and many of the other surviving senior chekists (including Merkulov and also Abakumov, who was in prison but alive), who were hated by most of the other party leaders, were executed. Sometimes this involved false accusations against them, but some of them were tried more or less truthfully for the atrocities they had actually perpetrated. The most notable exception to this pattern was Ignatyev, the last minister of state security under Stalin. He managed to portray Ryumin (who was executed soon thereafter) as the real power at the MGB.
Polivanov obviously wasn’t a Japanese spy, but there is a strong suspicion that he worked for the Russian military intelligence before the revolution.
Люди и судьбы. Биобиблиографический словарь востоковедов – жертв политического террора в советский период (1917-1991) link
Beria was hurriedly “accused of being a British spy, arrested, and shot, not necessarily in that order”.
Beria was a unique case anyway.
I particularly remember the ‘arrest’ and ‘trial’ of Beria in the movie ‘Death of Stalin’. The ensemble acting was superb, with Simon Beale as Beria catching just the right tone of desperation/self-justification/terror and threats to bring down the whole Party leadership as all equally implicated in ‘approving’ the prior executions.
Buscemi as Khrushchev was an extreme and blatant miscasting, and he was wonderful.
It is very likely that the entire trial of Beria was falsified.
Even Stalinist justice had some procedures and all of them were broken in Beria’s case.
According to the popular theory, Beria was assassinated during Khruschev’s coup on June 26 1953.
His arrest, trial, conviction and execution were all fake. He was already dead for six months at the time of his official “execution”.
It is very likely that the entire trial of Beria was falsified.
Hausa proverb:
Wanzami ba ya son jarfa.
“The barber doesn’t like to be tattooed [himself.]”
I particularly remember the ‘arrest’ and ‘trial’ of Beria in the movie ‘Death of Stalin’.
First thing I thought of. That was a glorious and unforgettable movie.
What would the “Suddenly starting to pronounce his r’s in the French way” detail have signaled or conveyed to the median Russian reader of 1928 about the character? Would it have been subsequently treated by the NKVD as evidence of something disloyal and un-Soviet and if so what?
No, there’s nothing about French in the original; it’s notoriously hard to translate the verb грассировать, which is borrowed from French grasseyer and means the same thing: “to pronounce uvularly” (in the inelegant words of Wiktionary), in other words the opposite of “rolling” your r’s (which is what you’re supposed to do in Russian). In Russian, it’s a perfectly normal verb; people (stereotypically Jews, but lots of others as well) are described that way much as we might say “he rasped” or “she fluted” in English. But there’s no way to translate it without its sticking out like a sore thumb.
Wanzami ba ya son jarfa.
“The barber doesn’t like to be tattooed [himself.]”
I was wondering how exactly Arabic حَجّام ḥajjām “cupper, scarifier, bloodletter” with ḥ- became Songhay wanzam, Hausa wànzāmī̀, etc., with w- (the -nz- from -jj- being understandable). Is it (more or less proximately) from Berber *waḥaǧǧam, *waḥažžam, vel sim., “barber, cupper”, annexed state of an *aḥaǧǧam, *aḥažžam (seen in Tamazight aḥajjam “barber”, for instance), from Arabic حَجّام ḥajjām “cupper, scarifier, bloodletter”? The masculine annexed state with an element w(a)- is found in Kabyle and Tashelhiyt, for instance, but I couldn’t find it in Heath’s grammar of Tamasheq, the Berber language which seems like the most likely proximate source. (Heath just describes vowel reduction of the independent state prefixes in the formation of the annexed state, as far as I can tell.) Maybe the West African loans preserve an earlier form in Berber, or other Tuareg varieties have w(a)-?
Okay, then what, if anything, would it signal or convey when a character who (by implication) usually doesn’t grassirovate suddenly starts grassirovating? Excitement? Stress? Jocular affectation? Something else?
Central Alaskan Yup’ik has a verb pikagte- for “not pronouncing uvularly” (a feature of baby talk, apparently, where velars replace uvulars.)
Okay, then what, if anything, would it signal or convey when a character who (by implication) usually doesn’t grassirovate suddenly starts grassirovating? Excitement? Stress? Jocular affectation? Something else?
Your guess is as good as mine. Maybe the effect of those French linguists he seems to have studied with?
OK, well that my guess is as good as yours I guess at least confirms that this is not a stock plot-twist with conventionally-understood implications in the Russian writing of the day, in which you are marinated and I am not.
It may be one of those “you had to be there and know these people” things, as so often with a roman à clef.
Non, rien de rien! Non, je ne rrregrrrette rrrien …
Cesse faire des gargarismes, quoi !
No idea about the origin of wanzami, but Lameen (of course) will know, if anybody does.
Apropos of nothing, idly reprising Jaggar’s paper
https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/11138/3/JAGGAR_HAUSA_SAINS-FINAL.pdf
… I noticed (p10) that Hausa ragama “halter” is ultimately from Latin ligamen via Berber. That sort of thing always makes me happy. (Takarda “paper” is also Latin-via-Berber, but I knew that one, and it doesn’t seem quite as surprising, somehow.)
Wow, that’s great. That’s the kind of thing that makes me love historical linguistics.
Поняв, что ложь о пожертвованном кольце разоблачена, Варя не теряется. «Я хотела отдать, но еще не отдала. Я вечером отдам, непременно», — говорит она и, желая сменить тему, начинает петь:
«Марш вперед, Россия ждет
Счастья и отрады.
Марш вперед. Трубят в поход.
Красным нет пощады!»
Разумеется, актриса Раневская не была бы сама собой, если бы просто пропела белогвардейский марш. Нет! Фаина вскакивала на ноги и, торжественно чеканя шаг, маршировала через сцену, держа в руках воображаемую винтовку. При этом она держала равнение на зал, совершенно не смотрела под ноги, спотыкалась, картинно падала и лежа стонала, томно грассируя:
— Я умир-р-р-р-раю за цар-р-р-р-р-я и отечество!
— Полегче, Фаина, — говорил Изольдов. — Варя — дворянка, белая кость, а не циркачка.
Источник: http://f-ranevskaya.ru/publikacii/molodaya-ranevskaya-eto-ya-fanechka19.html
FWIW, I think Dragomanov’s grasseyer is just the result of his excitement. Trill “r” is a difficult trick and some people slip in a less controlled situation.
@do
I liked the anecdote about the actress and it is clear the producer was objecting more to the volume and general coarse excitedness of her singing, of which, as you say, the r-r-r would be a symptom ????.
Hat: No, there’s nothing about French in the original; it’s notoriously hard to translate the verb грассировать, which is borrowed from French grasseyer and means the same thing: “to pronounce uvularly” (in the inelegant words of Wiktionary), in other words the opposite of “rolling” your r’s (which is what you’re supposed to do in Russian). In Russian, it’s a perfectly normal verb; people (stereotypically Jews, but lots of others as well) are described that way much as we might say “he rasped” or “she fluted” in English. But there’s no way to translate it without its sticking out like a sore thumb.
A very unassuming verb in Norwegian: skarre, which can be extended to skarre på r-ene, not because it’s necessary but because the opposite, rulle på r-ene, needs it.
By the way, Russian has another verb, картавить, that means almost the same thing but isn’t applied only to r’s; I’ve never been able to make out exactly how it’s used or what the difference is between that and грассировать.
PlasticPaddy, for R Rreferrr to Vysotsky.
Турецкий паша нож сломал пополам, когдя я сказал ему “Паша, سلام!”
GT on the above passage:
Note that in the tradition of bad translators everywhere, it has simply omitted the critical sentence, but somehow its terminal punctuation (bolded above) as remained intact.
Турецкий паша́ нож сломал пополам, когд[а] я сказал ему “Па́ша, سلام!”
FTFY. I personally usually assumed that the pashá (final stress) was mostly surprised at being referred to so familiarly (note that Pásha, with initial stress, is the familiar form of Pavel = Paul).
I used to know two forum members (on different forums) nicknamed Pasha in different meanings – one as the title, one as the name. (I hadn’t been on either forum lately.)
Is there a conveniet way to type in Cyrillic with accents (on Windows)?
I am thinking about toying with AutoHotkey, but a bit lazy. And I can create a new layout (and a bit lazy too).
@jc
If you delete the r-r-r you have
Я умираю за царя и отечество!
GT: I am dying for the king and the fatherland!
Tsar would be better than king and here for once Russian “no article” is better, i.e to die for king and country, not for the king and the country.
GT on the above passage
You should see what a pig’s ear it makes of the following (the subject is the scutching, hackling, and other steps of flax processing).