Abchazskij analitičeskij alfavit : (k voprosy o reformach pisʹma)

Nikolaj MarrIn kyrill. Schr., russ

Japhetic grammatology

Nikolai Marr has attracted scholarly attention, but largely in a cautionary manner. His work is read as an ideological incursion into the science of language. More charitable assessments contextualize him within oriental studies in the Russian Empire and, in turn, early Soviet nationality policy. Yet ever since his fall from official favour in 1950, scholars have been reluctant to assess his scholarly contributions on their own merit. This essay is an attempt to reconsider Marr by historicizing the mainstream school of thought against which he is compared and found wanting. The pivotal figure for linguistics as we know it today was Ferdinand de Saussure, whose rigorous separation of the systematic synchronic moment of language from its protean historical existence solved a problem which had confounded his contemporaries. It made it possible to treat language as systematic from moment to moment, despite being subject to unforeseeable factors when viewed through time. In drawing this distinction Saussure fatefully privileged speech over writing as the truest instantiation of language. This allowed existing scientific-racist assumptions about the determining influence of anatomy on speech to remain unchallenged. Marr’s early career paralleled that of Saussure’s, yet when it came to the philosophy of language he started from very different premises. Marr identified the origin of language with gesture and tool use. His understanding of evolution departed radically from the organicism common to his contemporaries. Marr’s empirical statements about language are fanciful and cannot easily be recuperated. However, his work represents a tantalizing path not taken in the history of linguistics. As such it is worth reading Marr in the light of Derrida’s reading of Saussure. By bringing Marr into dialogue with better-known thinkers, and historicizing Derrida’s inaugural act of deconstruction, we can sketch the contours of a counter-tradition in linguistics

“A People Forgotten by History”: Soviet Studies of the Kurds

The Russian/Soviet experience raises complex general questions concerning orientalism, conceptual hegemony, and the politics of (post-)colonial knowledge. Russia was not an empire in Said's sense, and drew much of its orientalist categories from non-imperialist German sources; the Soviet Union was explicitly anti-imperialist, and was dedicated to the emancipation of subaltern classes and nationalities. Yet Soviet orientalism in part reproduced hegemonic categories of "bourgeois" knowledge, notably concerning language and national identity. This becomes especially clear in the case of Soviet studies of Kurdish, a language subaltern with respect to Persian, Arabic, and, increasingly, Turkish. In the 1920s and early 1930s, native scholars like Erebê Shemo, Qanatê Kurdo, and Heciyê Cindî pioneered the creation of both an alphabet and a literature in Kurdish and of scholarly linguistic studies. Their work was shaped (and encouraged) by Nikolaj Marr's rejection of the idea of genetic links between Indo-Persian languages, and of the reification of "national characters." Marr's "japhetic" linguistics dovetailed with Stalin's nationality policies in the 1920s and 1930s; it is rightly rejected as unscientific, but it did have positive emancipatory effects. It criticized ethnocentric and racist assumptions in contemporary Indo-European linguistics, and emphasized the value of spoken subaltern vernaculars like Ossetian and Kurdish against hegemonic written languages like Sanskrit and Persian. It also had the paradoxical effect of both countering bourgeois nationalism and encouraging national consciousness. The article concludes with a discussion of how the Soviet experience may affect our view of the Gramscian concept of hegemony and of the linguistic turn in later postcolonial studies