This is going to take us surprising places. Our guide will be the distinguished Slavist Wayles Browne, in (edited) excerpts from e-mail he sent me on 10/9:
I discovered your blog when [WB’s Cornell colleague] Michael Weiss wrote about early attestations of the term ruki rule [in Sanskrit and elsewhere: see the 4/22/24 posting “On the transmission of ideas: RUKI gets around”]. Since then I’ve been looking at older postings as well as your day-to-day ones. On 1/9/14 [in the posting “A recent birthday”, on the birthday of Nikolai Marr], you wrote, after quoting this from Wikipedia:
Marr earned a reputation as a maverick genius with his Japhetic theory, postulating the common origin of Caucasian, Semitic-Hamitic, and Basque languages. In 1924, he went even further and proclaimed that all the languages of the world descended from a single proto-language which had consisted of four “diffused exclamations”: sal, ber, yon, rosh.
that
Marr eventually fell out of favor with Stalin.
Quite true, and there’s more to the story than that. After Marr died, his follower Ivan Meščaninov and others managed to get Marrism accepted as the official Marxist approach to linguistics, but finally in 1950 a Georgian linguist went to his fellow-Georgian Stalin and persuaded him that it was all fatuous and bad for the whole science of linguistics. Stalin then published an article in Pravda with essentially common-sense views of language. The name of the Georgian linguist? He was a namesake of yours: Arnold Chikobava.
In Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian, the language(s) that I work on the most, ‘name’ is ime, ‘namesake’ is imenjak, ‘surname’ is prezime, and a person you share a surname with is, quite logically, prezimenjak. It would be nice to introduce surnamesake into English too.
So we start in Ithaca NY (with the Cornell Indo-Europeanist scholar Michael Weiss), pass through Ancient India (and the Sanskrit language, which was the topic of my PhD dissertation, back in the Cretaceous Period) on our way to the Soviet Union under Stalin, where we encounter the nutcase linguist Nikolai Marr, who takes us to Soviet Georgia (in the Caucasus) and the linguist Arnold Chikobava, whose name, coupled with mine, reminds WB that the Slavic language(s) BCS (in the Balkans) have the eminently useful term prezimenjak ‘surnamesake’. In this is concealed a good bit of complexity in the notion of namesake (which I have, in fact, posted on, so we’ll get to that eventually), plus a wonderfully sly choice of wording in WB’s reference to BCS as
the language(s) Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian
(which will require some explanation for readers who are not entirely up to date on the linguistic situation in the Balkans).
(more…)
