Japhetic Theory: Linguistics with Uncle Joe Stalin
It is probably worse than redundant to post something about linguistics so long as Tristn, Raynor, Simen, and others I admire are discussing the subject, but “like a child who wanders into the middle of a conversation” I had to share this:
Yesterday I followed a link from Gospel of Moll to a spectacularly deranged Rapture web site which, among other things, repeatedly referred to a forthcoming War of Gog and Magog. I was curious about Gog’s lineage -who wouldn’t be- and learned that he was a son of Japheth, who was a son of Noah, who built a floating zoo.
While reading about Japheth, I came across Japhetic Theory:
Japhetic theory is…a linguistic theory developed by the Soviet linguist Nikolay Yakovlevich Marr (1864–1934). In linguistics it is consideredto be the equivalent of Lysenkoism in biology: a theory that was promoted and supported for ideological rather than scientific reasons, because it was thought to represent “proletarian science” as opposed to “bourgeois science.”
Error fascinates me most when it is driven by ideology, and Marr’s desperate attempts to apply Marxist ideas to linguistics exemplify academic derangement in a way I find delightful:
“He even claimed that the same social classes in widely different countries spoke versions of their own languages that were linguistically closer to one another than to the speech of other classes who supposedly spoke “the same” language.”
And:
“Marr also insisted that the notion that a people are united by common language was nothing more than false consciousness created by “bourgeois nationalism”.
To paraphrase Jackie Treehorn: Of course he did. But what is most amazing about Japhetic theory is not its stupidity, its pitiful role as lackey to Marxist ideology (however clearly that illustrates that Marxism and its associated theories were never “scientific,” despite their claims, as their teleological imperatives make testable hypotheses too dangerous), or even its name.
It is that it was rebutted, and thereby officially discredited, by Joseph Stalin, an academic event comparable to having one’s racist ideas about genetics contested by Adolf Hitler.
Stalin’s paper -probably ghostwritten- appeared in Pravda and can be read here. Linguists: watch your backs!
