March 11 in Russian history. Armed neutrality. Barsov's grammar

1780

(28 February Old Style)

In 1775, when British colonies in America began their war for independence, France and Spain supported the separatists and Great Britain had to look for allies. In June 1775, King George III asked Russian empress Catherine the Great to send troops to America to suppress the rebellion. For Russia, free trade was way more important than the alliance with the old rival, who attempted to blockade Spanish and French ports. American privateers also interfered with Russian-English sea trade, but the losses they caused were tiny compared with the consequences of the British blockade. Catherine II refused to join the war against American separatists. Instead, in 1780, she launched an international campaign for free maritime trade. From Encyclopedia of American Foreign Policy:

[Empress Catherine II of Russia] under pressure from Great Britain on the one hand to enter an alliance and from the northern powers on the other to help protect their neutrality, found her own shipping becoming more subject to interference from the belligerents. The result was the declaration of 1780, identifying the principles by which Catherine proposed to act and the means—commissioning a substantial portion of her fleet to go "wherever honour, interest, and necessity compelled"—by which she proposed to enforce those principles. Broadly, these principles were that neutral shipping might navigate freely from port to port and on the coasts of nations at war; that the property of subjects of belligerent states on neutral ships should be free except when it was classed as contraband within the meaning of the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1766; and that a port was assumed to be blockaded only when the attacking power had rendered its ships stationary and made entry a clear danger.

(read more)

More about the League of Armed Neutrality from the POV of Russian history in The History of Russian Navy:

Although the Declaration was enforced for only three years, it was, nonetheless, an original doctrine of major significance. It contributed to the understanding among nations of the inviolability of peaceful merchant vessels, their right to be free from the threat of piracy and harassment, and that wanton disregard of such rights would not be tolerated by Russia and its allies. Enforcement of the Declaration by the Russian Navy confirmed that a powerful naval fleet commanded international respect and that Russia had become a maritime power that was able to support its policies and punish offenders. In effect, the Declaration of Armed Neutrality served to elevate the reputation of the Russian Navy. The Baltic Fleet gradually strengthened. As early as 1777 Admiral Greig had suggested a new table of ship's proportions and the refurbishing of ship armaments. The 54-gun vessels vanished from use, replaced by more powerful ones; 66- and 74-gun vessels with larger-calibre cannon became the base of the fleet. The strength of the Baltic Fleet was additionally reinforced by eight 100-gun, three-decked ships of the line, the first of which was the handsome Rostislav. In the year 1784 the Rostislav's dimensions were impressive-55 metres in length and a displacement of 3,500 tons. The next ships to be built were the Saratov, the Three Saints and the Saint Ioann Chrestitel, which proved their worth against the best-equipped vessels in the British and Swedish fleets.

In 1761 the weaponry of the Russian fleet was updated. More powerful shell-firing guns were installed on the lower decks, and in 1788 effective short-range cannon (carronades) were placed on the quarterdeck and forecastle of larger vessels. New copper sheathing protected ships' hulls and increased their speed. The fleet was regularly provided with officers from the Naval Cadet Corps (Naval Academy), which graduated a hundred such officers annually.

Inasmuch as war against Sweden loomed on the horizon, Russia was well-advised to refurbish its Baltic Fleet. The Swedes were hesitant to concede their dominant position in the Baltic to Russia. Friedrick Chapman, considered one of the foremost shipwrights of his day, was commissioned by Sweden to build 64-gun ships of the line and 40-gun frigates with heavy 24- and 36-pound artillery on the lower-deck batteries. In addition, the Swedish rowing fleet was reinforced by well-armed smaller vessels-hemmems, turums, udems and light, maneuverable gun-boats. The King of Sweden, Gustav III, awaited an excuse to begin hostilities against Russia.

Encyclopedia of Russian History adds an interesting conclusion to the article about the League of Armed Neutrality:

The league was remembered in the United States, somewhat erroneously, as a mark of Russian friendship and sympathy, and bolstered Anglophobia in the two countries. More generally, it affirmed a cardinal principle of maritime law that continues in effect in the early twenty-first century. Indirectly, it also led to a considerable expansion of Russian-American trade from the 1780s through the first half of the nineteenth century.

1783

The Commission of Peoples Schools entrusted Anton Barsov, professor of the Moscow University, with the task of writing a course of Russian grammar.

Among earlier works of Barsov were a chronology of Russian history, "Collection of 4291 Ancient Russian proverb", translations of French, Greek and Latin works on politics and philology, including "Cellarii Orthographia Latina", a method of Russia stenography "De Brachygraphia" and other works. He participated in the writing of the dictionary of Russian language. He finished work on the first volume of the dictionary when the new job made him to send all materials he had collected for the dictionary to the Academy and concentrate on the grammar course.

He was writing the course since 1783 till 1788, but the Commission of Peoples Schools decided not to publish it. It was lost and we can only use incomplete copies. Members of the Commission concluded that the course was overloaded with details and unsuitable for schools. Another possible cause was, probably, Barsov's ideas about the reform of the orthography. Some of those proposals were implemented in the 20th century, during the 1918 reform. So, he proposed to eliminate the hard sign "ъ" at the ultimate position after consonants, to exclude redundant letters "θ" and "И", in favor of their duplicates "Ф" and "I", correspondingly, and to replace "ъ" with an apostroph or the soft sign "ь" in the middle of words. He also offered to introduce a new ligature, "io", to denote the sound for which Karamzin later invented a new letter "ё", which is stil used in Russian alphabet.

His grammar was not published at that time, but now it is still in print, both in Russian and in English. Moreover, you can download the full text in Russian (1981 edition) as a PDF file for free (23.2Mb).

From the preface to The Comprehensive Russian Grammar of A.A.Barsov by Lawrence W. Newman:

This volume contains the first publication of the Comprehensive Russian Grammar of Anton Barsov (1730-1791). Written between 1783 and 1788 for use in schools, it would have needed to be shortened and simplified to fulfill its original purpose. Its publication helps fill an important lacuna in the history of the Russian grammatical tradition, as well as providing new information about eighteenth-century Russian. Barsov was professor of rhetoric at Moscow University for thirty years, including the period when he was writing the grammar. The influence of his university work was apparently great, to judge, for example, from Karamzin's testimony (cited here from V.V. Vinogradov, Iz istorii izučenija russkogo sintaksisa, Moscow: Moscow University, 1958, page 49): if, says Karamzin, he "knows how sometimes to pause over a word, how to be cautious, then he owes this advantage to this one extremely learned man." It is likely that the grammar, or at least lectures from which it was derived, was not completely lost, but played a minor role in the education of a generation of Russian intellectuals.

January 6 in Russian history

1865

(25 December 1864 Old Style)

Birthday of Nikolay Yakovlevich Marr. An extravagant and a bit frightening figure in the Soviet science. Wikipedia writes:

Marr earned a reputation of the 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 descend from a single proto-language which had consisted of four "diffused exclamations": sal, ber, yon, rosh. Although the languages undergo certain stages of development, the linguistic paleontology makes it possible to discern elements of primordial exclamations in any given language. To draw support for his speculative doctrine, Marr elaborated a Marxist footing for it. He hypothesized that modern languages tend to fuse into a single language of communist society. This theory was a base of the mass campaign in 1920-30s in the Soviet Union of introduction of Latin alphabets for smaller ethnicities of the country, including replacement of the existing Cyrillic alphabets, e.g., for the Moldovan language.

His father, James Montague-Marr, was a Scot and his mother, Agafya Magulariya, was Georgian. Nikolay was one of the most strange pupils in the Kutaisi gymnasium. After a disease, when he couldn't attend the lessons for half a year, he decided to leave the school and become a telegraphist. His mother hardly managed to convince him to continue his studies. He was spending so much time studyihg foreign languages that he rarely visited the school, but his grades were always good. He was so interested in ancient Greek that he asked the principal for permission to stay in the eighth form for the second year, but the principal decided that Marr was mentally ill and almost sent him down. Marr was the editor of the school newspaper. He wrote revolutionary verses, welcoming the assassination of Alexander II and calling to the arms to "liberate" Georgia from Russians. However, he was not a revolutionary. During elections to the university council he always associated with the far right candidates.

When Marr entered the St.Petersburg university, he chose the faculty of Oriental languages. Students had to choose the languages they planned to learn and join the corresponding groups. Marr joined ALL groups that studied the languages of Near East and Caucasus! And he did learn all these languages. He became a great polyglot and could have become a great linguist, had it not been for the passion and obsession with his own unsubstantiated theories. He never even completed a single course in theoretical linguistics. He was a brilliant dilettante, a bit like Schliemann in archaeology. Unlike Schliemann, though, Marr was not successful. He was so deeply fascinated with his home Caucasus that he maniacally exaggerated the role of the peoples of Caucasus in history. Still a student, Marr introduced the term "Japhetic languages" — first to denote the unity of Georgian, Svan, Mingrelian and some other languages of Georgia and Semitic and Hamitic languages. This was an arguable, but more or less scientific theory. Later Marr began to include all dead languages of Mediterranean and Near East into this Japhetic group. His method is exemplified by his hypothesis that the Greeks originated in Caucasus. One of the earliest tribes of ancient Greece is called Pelasgians. This name is so similar to the name of Lezgins (an ethnic group in Northern Caucasus, Dagestan), Marr said, that these must be the same people. So, Pelasgians are from Caucasus. Or another example: we know of the two groups of Romans, the plebs and the patricians. In Marr's opinion, the sounds -eb- in plebs which remind the plural ending in Georgian language, prove that the plebs belonged to the Japhetic peoples who were conquered by Indo-European patricians.

However, Marr was also an archaeologist, and a good one. He began the explorations of Ani, the ancient Armenian capital, founded the Ani museum and published a number of works in Armenian history. The Armenians then even called all archaeologists "marrs". He found an ancient Georgian Christian treatise. His ideas about the close ties between the languages and the material culture are still interesting.

In 1917, Marr heartily welcomed the October revolution. He organized the Academy of the history of the material culture, participated in the foundation of many linguistic institutions, wrote the grammars for many languages of the USSR which hadn't had writing systems, including the Veps and the Karelian languages. In 1933 he opposed the the attempts to replace the Georgian and Armenian alphabets with Cyrillic. Instead, he spent many years developing the overcomplicated Latin-based "analytic alphabet" that would be suitable for all languages. He proposed to use it for the Abkhazian language, one of the most complicated languages from the phonetic point of view, but was not successful. Some people told that Marr saved them from Cheka.

On the other hand, Marr very rude and impudent. When he read lectures in Armenia and explained some features in the Armenian language, and Armenian raised his hand and said that he, as a native Armenian speaker, cannot agree with the Marr's examples. Marr immediately replied: "A fish wants to become and ichtyologist!" He often called his opponents fascists or compared them to Chamberlaine, Poincare and other "bourgeois politicians".

In 1921 or 1922 Marr, the only member of the Imperial Academy of Sciences who joined the Communist party, founded the Japhetic Institute. His outstanding personality, which reminded of the recent scientific revolution of Einstein, Roentgen and Bohr, attracted many scientists to the institute. Marr continues to enhance his theories. It was then when he deduced the four syllables of his "proto-language". Any word of any language may be reconstructed to these four syllables, he argued. "There are things which need not be proven, they can only be demonstrated," replied Marr when his opponents asked for proofs. Since 1928, Marr used the Marxist demagoguery to make his theory the official Marxist linguistics. When his opponents shrugged: "I don't understand you," Marr replied: "You'll never understand me till you change your class thinking!"

To be just, we have to note that the worst persecutions of the Marr's opponents began only after his death in 1934. He became the icon of the "proletarian linguistics". And then, suddenly, in 1950, Pravda published a whole page of criticism of Marr by A.S. Chikobava, who accused Marr of "misinterpretation of the national". For two months, Pravda continued the discussion of the Japhetic theory till finally, on 20 June, the article titled "Marxism and problems of linguistics" was published: "N. Y. Marr introduced into linguistics incorrect and non-Marxist formula, regarding the "class character" of language, and got himself into a muddle and put linguistics into a muddle. Soviet linguistics cannot be advanced on the basis of an incorrect formula which is contrary to the whole course of the history of peoples and languages.". The author was someone "J.Stalin". Marr, like modern linguists, told that there are no primitive languages, that the complexity of languages has nothing to do with the maturity of the civilization. Stalin, on the other hand, argued that more complicated languages are signs of a more mature society. Academic Vinogradov supported Stalin: "Josef Vissarionovich, Pushkin's vocabulary contains 21,000 words and the Shakespeare's vocabulary is only 20,000 words!" Basically, Stalin proclaimed the national minorities of the USSR the people of the second class. As the result, a huge number of national, non-Russian, schools and newspapers were closed.

After this article, all Marr's achievements, both mythical and real, became non-science. Two weeks later Marr's disciples wrote: "We see the fallaciousness of the theoretical way we used to follow."

A good article about Nikolay Marr in Russian by V. Alpatov: Marr, Marrism and Stalinism.