Algirdas Sabaliauskas. „Lietuvių kalbos tyrinėjimo istorija. 1980–2010 m.“

ALDONA PAULAUSKIENĖ Vilnius University Research interests: grammatical theory, the history of grammatical scholarship, sociolinguistics. SARMA KĻAVIŅA University of Latvia Research interests: quantitative linguistics, general linguistics, the history of linguistics. Algirdas Sabaliauskas THE HISTORY OF LITHUANIAN LANGUAGE RESEARCH. 1980–2010 Vilnius: Lietuvių kalbos institutas, 2012, 766 p. ISBN 978-609-411-084-9 Sometimes a landscape, a work of art, or a scholarly work is so magnificent and so deeply moving that it is difficult to find the right opening words and begin to speak about it. In such a situation, we start with what we see after reading and closing the book—that is, with the author’s photograph. We do not know what occasion it was taken for, but it is wonderfully suited to celebrating the completion of a significant work. The highest peak has been reached, from which one can see so widely and far. The importance of the work undertaken has been understood; there was talent, diligence, perseverance, and the ability to pursue a goal. All this yielded a remarkable result. The author may—and should—have the right to be happy. Sarma Kļaviņa was interested in histories of linguistic research (p. 479). She also discovered the 672-page “History of Linguistics in the Nordic Countries,” written by four authors and published in Finland in 2000 (The History of Linguistics in the Nordic Countries). We are both struck by the uniqueness of Algirdas Sabaliauskas’s work. The total number of pages is 1,286 (Volume I—253 pages, II—267, III—766). The difference in the length of the third volume arose for two reasons: 1) over time, the number of Lithuanian language researchers grew and the study of language developed; 2) in occupied Lithuania, it was not possible to evaluate the work of linguists who had emigrated abroad. This gap was therefore filled in the third book. Sabaliauskas begins his trilogy with theories about the origin of the Lithuanian language and the first Lithuanian book and grammars. He provides a comprehensive overview of the first stage in the study of Lithuanian. Comparative historical linguistics, which is impossible without the Lithuanian language, emerged and flourished in Germany in the nineteenth century. Therefore, the discussion begins Recenzijos / Reviews 299 ALDONA PAULAUSKIENĖ, SARMA KŁAVIŅA from works of German linguistics. These are followed by accounts of the research conducted by Lithuanians themselves up to 1918 (Friedrich Kurschat, Alexander Kurschat, Jonas Juška, Antanas Juška, Antanas Baranauskas, Kazimieras Jaunius, Jonas Spudulis, and others). After 1918, the account begins with research into the Lithuanian language in Lithuania (Kazimieras Būga, Jonas Jablonskis, Eduardas Volteris, Pranas Skardžius, Antanas Salys, Petras Jonikas, and others), although the linguistic work of Kazimieras Būga and Jonas Jablonskis began well before 1918. The second volume covers the period from 1940 to 1980. It opens with the chapter “Research in Soviet Lithuania.” New topics appeared: “The Dictionary of the Lithuanian Language,” “Terminology Work,” “The Academic ‘Grammar of the Lithuanian Language,’” and “The Atlas of the Lithuanian Language.” The account then turns to research into Lithuanian in Lithuania and in other republics of the USSR, countries of people’s democracy, and around the world. The third volume covers ten years of Soviet Lithuania and twenty years of independent Lithuania. In recent decades, it has become much easier to obtain academic degrees and titles, since they are no longer conferred in Moscow. As a result, numerous doctoral dissertations in various fields of linguistics have been written and defended. What is impressive is that Sabaliauskas has not only catalogued and evaluated the dissertations, but also indicated the articles published on their topics. In addition, the volume describes bilingual and specialized terminology dictionaries, lists their authors and editors responsible for them, and discusses the cooperation of the Institute of the Lithuanian Language with specialists from the Multimedia Centre of the Institute of Mathematics and Informatics and the UNESCO Chair Informatics for the Humanities, among other things. Of course, as in the other volumes, it begins with the most important works in Lithuanian studies: the Dictionary of the Lithuanian Language, terminology work, academic grammars of Lithuanian, the Atlas of the Lithuanian Language, dialect texts, and dictionaries. After reading the third volume, we thought of two books by scholars of Lithuanian whose titles do not reflect their contents: Jonas Kazlauskas’s Historical Grammar of the Lithuanian Language, which contains much less than its title would lead one to expect (only the noun and the verb, with no frequentative past tense), and Algirdas Sabaliauskas’s History of the Study of the Lithuanian Language, which contains much more than its title suggests. It includes biographical facts about researchers, not only their most important linguistic works, but also memoirs and creative writing, reviews of scholarly works, conference papers, jubilee speeches, and obituaries. It describes research not only on Lithuanian but also on Prussian, as well as the use of Baltic-language evidence in other work (on mythology, cultural history, various humanities and related fields, for example child psychology). If linguists are ever again to be awarded orders and medals, Sabaliauskas should be the first to receive one for his scholarly work. He admits that he spent his whole life writing this extraordinary encyclopedia. But he had other work too: he studied the lexicons of Lithuanian and the Baltic languages, and wrote popular books on linguistics that everyone enjoyed reading. One of them (We Are Balts) is also read in English, Swedish, and Italian. The first two volumes of the History of the Lithuanian Language received the Lithuanian State Prize, while the third, in the opinion of both reviewers, deserves the Science Prize of the Republic of Lithuania. 300 Acta Linguistica Lithuanica LXIX Algirdas Sabaliauskas Lietuvių kalbos tyrinėjimo istorija. 1980–2010 m. If Sabaliauskas’s book presented only facts, without recounting and evaluating the contents of the more important works, we would have to end our essay here. But everyone has the right to evaluate. Having one’s own view of what has been written is perfectly normal. That view will differ when it comes from the heart of Lithuanian studies rather than a neighboring country. Therefore, the reviewers, wishing not to impose their individual opinions on one another, partly separate their voices: Paulauskienė writes in the first person, while where their opinions coincide they use the pronoun forms we. Perhaps the most sensible thing is to begin with myself. I read it and thought that the work had not been so bad after all; quite a lot had been accomplished. I paused only over the meaning of two words: do the words polemic and originality have positive or negative connotations? I did not want polemic; I wanted dialogue. In the preface to his Comparative Grammar of the Baltic Languages (Vergleichende Grammatik der baltischen Sprachen 1966), Christian S. Stang defines scholarship as dialogue through collaboration. Unfortunately, in Lithuanian studies, normal dialogue was difficult or even impossible to achieve in many cases: dialogue requires at least two participants and traditions, whereas in many fields of linguistics Lithuanian scholars were pioneers and stood alone. Although there are two of us writing, it is impossible to cover everything. For example, even after completing my scholarly work, I could not discuss matters with specialists in experimental phonetics, phonology, accentology, onomastics, etymology, or stylistics, or with researchers of the Prussian language; I am not familiar with all the dialects of Lithuania, and so on. I know the importance of the research fields listed, but I lack the expertise. I do not know the old monuments of the Lithuanian language as well as Jonas Palionis does. And there are many other fields about which I can speak only from the standpoint of general education. Normal dialogue was also impossible because of the personalities of the top students. In the period described by Sabaliauskas, it was the top students who chose to study Lithuanian. And they were aware of their distinctiveness. Let us open Justinus Marcinkevičius’s Diary Without Dates, read his essay about Jonas Kazlauskas, “A Friend’s Song,” and we will find that when Jonas was called on to answer in secondary school, he would walk to the blackboard in a somehow particularly distinctive way, as if emphasizing that he was going up to show that he knew the answer. Top students need room, and when gathered in one place, at first they jostle for space. That is what happened in the heart of Lithuanian studies too. On originality. How could it have been otherwise? Fate assigned a class of top students to a young lecturer. They were Lithuanian-studies students specializing in classical philology. You could not tell them just anything. A great deal of work was required. Many distinguished people emerged from among those students. Some of them are described in Sabaliauskas’s book. I am glad they made me keep learning and thinking about the subject I taught. From one small group (perhaps about eight people) came Professor and Academician Bonifacas Stundžia, the well-known folklorist Bronė Katil ev ičiūtė-Stundžienė, Gvido Michelinis’s wife Birutė Žindžiūtė, Professor Meilutė Ramonienė, and Associate Professor Audronė Kudulytė-Kairienė. And how many talented students there were in the other cohorts! I do not remember them all, but the talented students were— Recenzijos / Reviews 301 ALDONA PAULAUSKIENĖ, SARMA KĻAVIŅA …vo Sigitas Narbutas, Laimutė Anelauskaitė (Balodė), Rūta Šepetytė, Giedrė Vrubliauskaitė, Mindaugas Strockis, and others. It was certainly not Noam Chomsky who gave historical linguistics the “kiss of death” (p. 444). In Europe, it was given at the beginning of the twentieth century, but in Lithuania historical linguistics remained queen until the end of the twentieth century. Although work on the academic Lietuvių kalbos gramatika began in 1959, anything that was not history was always looked down upon. When it became difficult to work because of the contemptuous attitude toward traditional grammar (and perhaps toward a woman scholar), I would recall a quotation from Vaižgantas’s speech about his literary work: Had I had more, I would have given more. I gave what and how I could. As Bishop Motiejus said: I have no horses, so I plow with donkeys, and my field does not lie fallow. I have stored away so many such quotations from the biographies of famous people that I can lean on them like crutches when my spine can no longer withstand unjustified criticism. Here is another quotation, from August Schleicher: I have average abilities, but a strong will. With its help I achieve what I believe to be necessary. It is quite natural to ask why there was no historical syntax for so long. Zigmas Zinkevičius answered this question at the celebration of Pranas Gailiūnas’s eightieth birthday. He had been only the nominal supervisor of Gailiūnas’s dissertation, since Gailiūnas wrote about the meanings and use of the imperative mood, whereas Zinkevičius was interested only in forms. As long as scholars were concerned only with word forms, historical syntax could not even be conceived. It is therefore rightfully Vytautas Ambrazas who is credited with founding historical syntax in Lithuanian studies (pp. 123–131), since, relying not on “empty” word forms but on participial constructions, he turned to the history of word combinations. And it was only at the beginning of the twenty-first century (in 2006) that he wrote a work entitled Lietuvių kalbos istorinė sintaksė. It would be good if people emerged in the future who knew how to appreciate what has been done and wanted to continue the work already begun, so that historical linguistics would not disparage synchronic linguistics, since many hypotheses can be substantiated only through internal reconstruction. Sabaliauskas strives to be objective, but at times one can also detect subjective sympathies. For example, his sympathy for Algirdas Julius Greimas: in as many as three places (pp. 17, 79, 97), he recalls Greimas’s 1991 article published in Literatūroje ir mene, an article full of self-importance and contempt for Lithuanian linguists. For abroad, Greimas alone had stood at the cradle of semiotics, while in Lithuania many linguists had appeared after the war, but they had accomplished nothing worthwhile. True, they had written a dictionary as tall as a skyscraper, merely building it up with Russians; his more talented schoolmate Jonas Kabelka had not invented gunpowder, and the astonishingly industrious Zigmas Zinkevičius had laid the last brick in nineteenth-century linguistics. Sabaliauskas leaves out that last brick, and the criticism turns into praise. In another instance, the opposite was done: something that should not have been left unsaid was omitted. For example, we are merely told that Vincas Urbutis wrote a booklet, Lietuvių kalbos išdavystė (p. 128), and Vytautas Ambrazas wrote Svetimų tikrinių vardų rašymas (p. 130). After all, “Betrayal of the Lithuanian Language” is a dreadful title. From Sabaliauskas’s book, one gets the impression that nothing has been written about the language 302 Acta Linguistica Lithuanica LXIX Algirdas Sabaliauskas Lietuvių kalbos tyrinėjimo istorija. 1980–2010 m. betrayal. But of course, much has been written about it—not only by linguists, but also by other people in the cultural sphere. Lietuvių kalbos žodynas and Balčikonis should be beyond criticism. Once all the material of a language has been collected, it becomes possible to write grammars, dictionaries that can withstand scholarly criticism, and other kinds of works as well. Science must be built on facts of language. The first priority, then, is to have as many of them as possible. If a nation were ever to disappear, the world would at least have a fine monument to it. Significant works have been written even on the basis of the meager facts available for Prussian (by Vladimir Toporov, Vytautas Mažiulis, Grasilda Blažienė, Audronė Kaukienė, P. U. Dinis, and others). We should not expect a Dictionary written over a hundred years to embody the principles of some particular field of scholarship as well. Generations of writers changed, but the writing program maintained the Dictionary’s unity. It was in no way spoiled by moving examples from old texts to the ends of entries or by adding phraseology from the Soviet press, which showed what kind of life we had lived. The Dictionary was only improved by examples drawn from the works of writers such as Julius Janonis, Petras Cvirka, Salomėja Nėris, Juozas Baltušis, Kazys Boruta, Just. Marcinkevičius, and others. Marking the publication of volume 17, Kazys Bradūnas sincerely regretted that the language of writers and poets who had created their works abroad had not made it into the Dictionary. The larger the dictionary, the greater the nation’s wealth. Using Lietuvių kalbos žodynas, dictionaries of synonyms, antonyms, and phraseology have already been written; Danutė Tarvydaitė and I also used it when writing our book Žodyno normos ir dabartinė vartosena. Much can be read in Lietuvių kalbos žodynas because, as Kazimieras Būga put it, “in language, a nation declares what it is.” It is more than sad when, after the entire Dictionary has been published, humanities scholars—including two professors—hold forth about the poverty of the Lithuanian language in the Christian-oriented journal Naujasis židinys. Aidai 5–6 (2010). It is hard to imagine Lithuanian linguistics without Balčikonis. Greimas’s thoughtless remark that Balčikonis was a man who loved work more than language. But work undertaken with the aim of creating something meaningful is sacred. No one understood his devotion to work and duty as well as Balčikonis did. Aldonas Pupkis has already studied Balčikonis’s role in the history of dictionary writing. But translations of literature and grammar remain to be addressed. Rūta Marcinkevičienė studied the translation of Guliverio kelionių. She, too, thinks that Balčikonis translated this work twice: from the original language into Lithuanian and from the written language into the spoken language (p. 344). Incidentally, Balčikonis used not only the original but also translations into several other languages. Everyone who criticized Balčikonis’s translations (including Rūta Marcinkevičienė) should have known that good translators translate not the form of the original but its content, and that standard Lithuanian is based not on written texts but on the living language of the people. Therefore, while other nations strive to raise the spoken language to the level of the written language, Lithuanians must do the reverse: refine the written language until it reaches the level of the spoken language. So that praise of spoken Lithuanian should not seem subjective, I quote here a passage from Juozas Pikčilingis’s Žodžio interviu. These are the words of the American Theodor S. Truston: “Being very old, the Lithuanian language is Recenzijos / Reviews 303 ALDONA PAULAUSKIENĖ, SARMA KŁAVIŅA of marvelous structure, more perfect even than Sanskrit and Ancient Greek, richer than Latin and far subtler than all three. Moreover, the Lithuanian language is more closely related to them than anything else created by nature, not only in the roots of its words but also in the forms of its grammatical structure [...]. There is no doubt that no other language in the world has attained such value as Lithuanian. The Lithuanian nation, which created, developed, and so perfected human speech with its marvelous and clear structure, deserves the diadem of great glory” (Pikčilingis 1982: 31–32). Thus, Balčikonis did not make a double translation; rather, he translated from one standard language into another. It would be very bad if the language of electronic media were to go from being a stepdaughter to becoming a daughter, or even a mother tongue (p. 344). We are responsible for ensuring that it develops, rather than dictating its norms to the standard language. In the age of new technologies and globalization, linguists and all people who work with the written word must feel a great responsibility for the loss of beauty and richness in the Lithuanian language. Balčikonis also translated Jan Otrębski’s grammar. It was a mistake not to publish the translation and to regard this grammar as merely historical, when in fact it is both synchronic and historical. It was only after Balčikonis’s intervention that Otrębski began writing the planned five-volume grammar with the third volume, starting with morphology as taught in schools. The aim of both the author and the translator was to ensure that Juozas Žiugžda’s grammar would not be the only one and would not educate pupils in the communist spirit. The added study of historical grammar would have harmed no one. According to Vytautas Vitkauskas, Balčikonis had three copies typed by the Institute’s best typist and distributed them to libraries. But apparently he also sent one to the author himself. In the memoir collection about Balčikonis Dėk žodį prie žodžio – turėsi žodyną there is an article by Aleksandras Žirgulis that includes excerpts from Otrębski’s letters to Balčikonis: “[...] we are delighted that you have completed the translation of volume III—there could be no better one than yours.” “The translation seems wonderfully accurate and beautiful to us. All your additions will, of course, be useful” (p. 215). In Žirgulis’s view, Balčikonis was already mature enough to write an original scholarly work, but “considering himself more a practitioner of language, he had no ambition to have his say in the science of grammar, and so deferred to the work of his friend, whose philological expertise he had always admired” (ibid.). Unless we examine Balčikonis’s translations, we will not understand who he truly was for our nation. The typescript of the translated grammar should be sought in the archives of the Central Library of the Academy of Sciences or the Martynas Mažvydas Library. It is not held at the Vilnius University Library. If it cannot be found in Lithuania, one should travel to Poland and search the Otrębski archive. A couple of remarks about terminological dictionaries. On p. 52 it says: “During the period covered by our book, three highly valuable terminological dictionaries were published.” Why only three? On what basis was the significance of terminological dictionaries determined? The Druskininkai Dialect Dictionary was also published in 1988. Perhaps it is considered insignificant because it is differential and does not run to several volumes? 304 Acta Linguistica Lithuanica LXIX Algirdas Sabaliauskas Lietuvių kalbos tyrinėjimo istorija. 1980–2010 m. It is understandable why the comprehensive dictionaries of the Zietela and Dieveniškės dialects are significant. But would it not have been more appropriate to publish a differential Dictionary of the Zanavykai Dialect? After all, most of this dialect’s vocabulary coincides with that of the standard language. In the second volume, Sabaliauskas rightly assessed the three-volume Grammar of the Lithuanian Language as a unique work, written by people who had defended or were still writing their dissertations and had gathered all the language material that could possibly be collected. Alongside the claim that it appears to have been written by one hand, it should be added that this appearance is only superficial, since its theory of grammar is contradictory. Although the first two volumes were assessed rather critically by some hotheads, Sabaliauskas then paid no attention to these not entirely well-founded assessments, and he was right. However, now, wishing to praise the editor-in-chief of the one-volume grammar as well, he writes of the three-volume grammar: “The grammar was rightly criticized for its fairly frequent disregard of strict synchrony. Because of its great length, the academic Grammar of the Lithuanian Language was not convenient for practical purposes of language standardization, especially for schools. Thus, the need arose to write a shorter, more systematic work that would better reflect the latest achievements in grammatical theory” (p. 38). What does this “strict synchrony” mean? In the three-volume grammar, the present-day standard language is distinguished graphically from dialects and older written texts: anything that does not belong to the present-day language is printed in brevier type. This is highly significant both for scholarship and for practical purposes. The grammar was criticized because its illustrative examples were collected from the time of Kristijonas Donelaitis up to the time when the grammar was written. But the critics forgot that every person carries a synchronic, not a historical, grammar with the language as a whole. Therefore, the grammar’s authors were entitled to collect examples from everywhere and, after filtering them through the sieve of their own language, assign them to the present day. It is another matter that some archaic grammatical forms (like that historical neuter gender) were traditionally passed from one grammar to another. No one came forward to evaluate the third volume, devoted to syntax. There were specialists in syntax, but even now there seems to be no one capable of combining universal syntax with the specific morphology of the Lithuanian language and drawing original conclusions. Most often, native examples are forced to fit theories based on facts from foreign languages. The one-volume grammars were assessed quite favorably by foreign friends. The grammar published in Russian was reviewed by Tatjana Bulygina and Jurijus Stepanovas, while the one published in English was reviewed by Wilimas R. Schmalst iegas. Stepanovas confessed to the author of these lines that he never wrote negative reviews: he looked only for positive aspects in the works he reviewed, and if he could find none, he did not undertake to review them. Schmalst iegas himself wrote A Lithuanian Historical Syntax (A Lithuanian historical syntax), drawing extensively on Vytautas Ambrazas’s Historical Syntax of Lithuanian Participles. The first edition of the one-volume grammar in Lithuanian was also reviewed, but Sabaliauskas had not seen that review. I can also report the opinion of the eminent Bulgarian linguist Ivan Duridanov on the academic grammars of the Lithuanian language (pp. 567–568). Circumstances had developed in such a way Recenzijos / Reviews 305 ALDONA PAULAUSKIENĖ, SARMA KĻAVIŅA …that in the second half of the twentieth century there was great interest in verb-related problems in Europe, and quite a few young scholars from abroad were sent to Vilnius University for internships. They were assigned to a so-called “verb specialist” for supervision. That is how Ivan Duridanov’s doctoral student Katina Bončeva came into my care. Her supervisor was an ambitious scholar. He wanted to investigate the paradigm of tenses in the Bulgarian verb by comparing it with verb tenses in the Baltic languages. Bulgarian differs from the other Slavic languages in having analytical verb tenses. In general, it is more analytical. Of the three languages Duridanov had planned to compare, Latvian would have been closer to Bulgarian, while Lithuanian would have occupied an intermediate position; unfortunately, however, his doctoral student knew neither Lithuanian nor Latvian. Moreover, there were as yet no assistants in Latvia for such a project. So we made do with comparison only with Lithuanian. Bončeva defended her dissertation in Sofia in 1986 (a copy is also held in the VU research library). I was invited to serve as her opponent and had the opportunity to spend a longer time there, visiting and speaking with Bulgarian professors and lecturers. Duridanov saw her off as she left and asked me to send him Lietuvių kalbos gramatiką. I had never heard him speak Lithuanian, so I asked which grammar he wanted—the three-volume or the one-volume edition (by 1985 we already had a grammar in Russian). He wanted the three-volume edition. In Duridanov’s opinion, it was a very valuable grammar because it contained a wealth of language examples, while he could devise the theory himself. Sabaliauskas’s book is exceptional, and so our review is unusual too. Just as Sabaliauskas, in his history of the study of the Lithuanian language, writes about linguists’ poetic talents or more curious biographical details—for example, Oleg Poliakov’s work as a concrete worker or Alyvdas Butkus’s work as a builder—we too are about to tell some tangential stories, though ones quite significant for Lithuanian linguistics and the fates of its researchers. Drawing on an impressive body of foreign literature he had read and on facts about the Lithuanian language, Vincas Urbutis was the first in Lithuanian studies to develop a theory of word formation. Yet Lithuanianists first encountered the section on noun formation in the three-volume Lietuvių kalbos gramatikos (1965), and only much later (1978) the Žodžių darybos teoriją. The authors of the three-volume grammar wrote about the suffixal formation of adjectives and verbs independently of Urbutis’s account of noun suffixation, drawing on language data and tradition. The outcome was therefore very good: each part of speech has its own meaning, its own characteristics of word formation and inflection, and its own distinctive usage. Once the grammar appeared, Urbutis’s account of noun formation was highly praised: it seemed that no one else could understand this subject as well as, or better than, Urbutis. The grammar written in Russian has no section on word formation, but the section reappears in the Lithuanian version of the one-volume grammar, published in 1994. In that time, one can not only read the Žodžių darybos teoriją, but also learn it like a multiplication table. And if not, at least gain a solid understanding of what derivational categories are and where they are manifested—especially if, following Urbutis’s example of noun formation, you are already 306 Acta Linguistica Lithuanica LXIX Algirdas Sabaliauskas Lietuvių kalbos tyrinėjimo istorija. 1980–2010 m. preparing to revise what has been written about the treatment of adjectives or verbs in the three-volume grammar. In the Žodžių darybos teorijoje, Urbutis writes very cautiously about derivational categories: “Derivational categories apparently manifest themselves most clearly in the formation of nouns—not all nouns, to be sure, but primarily those derived by suffixes and endings” (p. 280). He himself does not describe prefixed nouns in terms of derivational categories, since there are few prefixes and they are not unambiguous. Adjectival and verbal suffixes are also few in number and polysemous. And the prefixal formation of verbs differs fundamentally from that of nouns or adjectives. Therefore, not everything can be forced into the same last, however elegant it may be. This does not make a later grammar theoretically better than an earlier one. Sabaliauskas mentions that I take an original approach to the prefixal formation of nouns (p. 133). What is original about it? Urbutis pointed out only a formal difference between the prefixal formation of nouns and verbs: a verb prefix does not change the ending, whereas a noun prefix does. That is why it is worth asking what role endings play in prefixed nouns. After all, the distinct function of endings is clear when we compare stalius (: stalas) and pastalė (: stalas). Why can a prefix be added to almost every verb (and often more than one), while only some nouns have prefixes? For example, a mushroom grows under a birch, and is therefore called a paberžis; there is a room by the entrance, and so it is called a prieangis; there is a time before lunch, that is, priešpiečiai, and so on. Then one thinks of nouns denoting a bee, a fly, a flower, a stone, bread, and many other things, with which prepositional constructions are impossible. Prefixed derivatives are likewise impossible for them. This establishes the connection between a prepositional construction and a prefixed noun, and shows that the ending’s function is not to give the word a new meaning, but to formalize the construction as a single inflected word. The ending of a compound does exactly the same thing: it turns two words into one. Thus, the concept of compounding can be broadened: two-root compounds arise by contraction from two independent words, while prefixed compounds arise from one function word and one independent word. In both cases the ending plays the same role. Thus, prefixed nouns are not prefixal derivatives, but compounds. Whoever is without a head is begalvis, whoever is without brains is beprotis, whoever is without freedom is belaisvis, and so forth. This characterizes a person; the word “person” is usually omitted, and the adjective expressing the quality becomes a noun. It is different with an adjective of the same formation used with nouns denoting things, for example, beakuočiai miežiai. The adjective beakuočiai cannot become a noun because the word miežiai cannot be omitted. But the adjective, too, is based not on a single word, but on a prepositional construction. In trying to explain the problems, one can end up writing not a review, but an entire grammar. And how can one avoid that when Sabaliauskas’s book is more than mere encyclopedic information? Grammars should contain only what belongs to grammar. Treating Aktionsart as a non-grammatical category, yet writing about it in a grammar, obscures the conception both of Aktionsart and of the prefixal formation of verbs. Recenzijos / Reviews 307 ALDONA PAULAUSKIENĖ, SARMA KŁAVIŅA Having established in his candidate-of-sciences dissertation the harmony between the grammatical (aspectual) and lexical (word-formation) functions of prefixes, and published the entire dissertation in the third volume of Literatūros ir kalbos in 1958, Jonas Paulauskas, a perceptive man more interested in writing the Dictionary than in grammar, agreed not to mention the grammatical function of the prefix in the Grammar. He only said at the outset that all prefixes delimit the duration of an action, and went on to write about them as Elena Valiulytė had about prepositions, that is, treating separately the system of meanings of each prefix. Such a description of prefixal word formation is entirely possible. However, when the derivatives of verb prefixes are divided into some groups of generalized meanings (perhaps word-formation categories?) in the one-volume Dabartinės lietuvių kalbos gramatikoje, it is hard to comment. It is fortunate that word formation is not included in the grammars published in Russian and English. Once, when Urbutis was asked why he had not advised his female colleagues against applying to other parts of speech what applies only to derivatives formed with noun suffixes and endings, he answered in his thoroughly Urbutis-like way: “Why interfere with other people’s work? Let them show what they know.” On p. 181, Sabaliauskas presents Aleksas Girdenis’s skeptical view of the school of dichotomous phonology developed by Roman Jakobson and his followers. We are not as deeply versed in phonology as Girdenis, but we know that Jakobson applied the principle of privative opposition quite successfully to the many-member case category of Russian. While still at school, he studied the use of Russian cases, collected examples in a card index, and investigated cases throughout his life, alongside his other important linguistic works. Having separated cases from prepositional constructions, he described their paradigm according to the principle of privative oppositions. And so began a scholarly dialogue among powerful minds: some argued that cases cannot be separated from prepositions, since prepositions often even form part of a word’s morphology (cf. the locative in Russian or the instrumental in Latvian); others explained that the principle of oppositions is nevertheless significant, but that many-member categories may also contain non-oppositional members. These are most often cases expressing circumstances that tend to be aspectually anterior. Applying the principle of oppositions also keeps the Lithuanian vocative within the case system, and makes it possible to explain why other languages have no vocative and why others use the nominative in address. Experience in general linguistics shows that there are no isolated morphological forms in a system of systems, and that one must answer the question: if the vocative is not a case, then what is it? The principle of privative opposition is remarkably well suited to binary and ternary categories. Jonas Jablonskis was the first to identify the oppositions among Lithuanian past tenses and moods. One may suppose that Janis Endzelynas, with his remarkable work “Latvian Prepositions” (Латышские предлоги. 1905–1906), helped Jablonskis understand Lithuanian aspect and the tenses that developed on its basis. In the heyday of historical linguistics, only Endzelynas’s talent and courage to distinguish himself from everyone else enabled him to show that not only word forms, but also prepositions and context have grammatical meaning. At the age of 32, he planned to defend the first part of this work for a master’s degree, 308 Acta Linguistica Lithuanica LXIX Algirdas Sabaliauskas Lietuvių kalbos tyrinėjimo istorija. 1980–2010 m. and the second for a doctorate. But the scholar, an original thinker, suffered: he defended his master’s thesis over two days, with an interruption, and did not receive a doctorate for the second part. Endzelynas became a doctor only five years later, after defending a new work, “Slavic-Baltic Studies” (Славяно-балтийские этюды). See S. Klaviņa’s article “Little-known pages of Janis Endzelynas’s academic biography up to 1940” (Jāņa Endzelīna akadēmiskās biogrāfijas mazzināmas lappuses līdz 1940. gadam). Jablonskis established the opposition between the past tenses with regard to aspect and the relation of the action to the moment of speaking. The imperfective verb ėjo ‘went’ can mean either once or many times (the unmarked member of the opposition), whereas the perfective nuėjo ‘went away’ (the marked member, with the prefix indicating a single occurrence). Jablonskis did not formulate such a grammatical theory, but it is evident from the many examples of language he provided. He perceived the opposition of the simple past to the frequentative past not only in terms of repeated action, but also temporally. That is why Balčikonis was surprised that Jablonskis had written a grammar for secondary schools, yet it turned out to be suitable for higher education. In 1922 Kazys Ulvydas called Jablonskis’s grammar a scientific grammar (Mūsų kalba, 1975, no. 3). The simple tenses of Lithuanian verbs are described excellently in the second volume of Zelma Dumašiūtė’s three-volume Lietuvių kalbos gramatikos. One need only read it carefully to see how the past tenses relate to the moment of speaking and how their meanings are connected with aspect. On the basis of numerous examples of language, she succeeded in demonstrating the opposition between the simple past and the frequentative past. Without any basis, the one-volume grammar, following Girdenis and Žulys’s review, reformulated the definition of the past tenses, returning their conception roughly to the time of Kazimieras Jaunius, even though Dumašiūtė had shown that it is impossible to express an action in the recent past with the frequentative past tense, that the frequentative past... ALDONA PAULAUSKIENĖ, SARMA KĻAVIŅA If person, mood, and tense are categories characteristic of predication in general, then one cannot claim that declinable participles are linked to finite verbs by the category of tense, because finite verbs can function only as pure predicates, whereas participles of all tenses, like adjectives, can be both attributive modifiers and nominal parts of the predicate; when the copula is omitted, a participle can take on the functions of a pure predicate. Thus, even after devoting one’s whole life to the study of participles, it turns out that defining them perfectly is not so easy. Antanas Klimas predicts the disappearance of Lithuanian participles (p. 439). This prediction is unfounded. Participles used as attributive modifiers and as nominal parts of the predicate will never disappear from neutral language. But if we are indifferent to our language, their specific uses will disappear or decline: a) reported participial speech (modus relativus), b) participles after conjunctions, c) compound forms of the simple past with perfect meaning, d) the compound conditional form (būčiau ėjęs), e) participles after reflexive verbs (sakosi sirgęs). Quite a lot, isn’t it? Next, the problems of pronouns. Sabaliauskas’s book says that, together with Girdenis, one may marvel at the exhaustive studies and conclusions of Alberto Rosinas on pronouns: “But the future will show what is acceptable and what raises doubts in Rosinas’s own classification [of pronouns – A. P.]” (p. 257). We can now already say something about this: it would be entirely reasonable to include adverbs of pronominal origin among pronouns, since Rosinas himself demonstrated that they perform the same deictic function as pronouns. Their being indeclinable is a weak argument. Pronouns that indicate properties of things inflect like adjectives, so those that indicate circumstances of an action may likewise be uninflected, like adverbs. If person of the verb is recognized as a sentence category, aš ir mes ‘I and we’ cannot be treated as separate pronouns, because they are not separate words but forms of the predicative person category. Vladas Žulys’s theory that there is no third person because it has no ending in the Baltic languages also falls away. Nor is there any need to quibble with him by arguing that there is nevertheless a third person, because “the characteristic of a person form with respect to number can easily be taken over by a personal pronoun” (Kazlauskas 1968: 294). Finally, the Russian past tense shows, without any special investigation, that verbs are inflected for person even without personal endings (я делал, ты делал, он делал – мы делали, вы делали, они делали). Thus, aš ir mes are, in all languages, not separate words but the singular and plural forms of verb person. Grammar is such a thing that sometimes even very talented scholars cannot grasp all of it. In the grammar written in Russian, the category of definiteness / indefiniteness appears without justification (good – the good one). It is not entirely clear why in the grammars written in Lithuanian and English there is already only the category of definiteness (definiteness), although the explanation itself does not change. If a property is definite, it should also be unchangeable, whereas pronominal adjectives are inflected for degree. Suffixal and compound adjectives are not included in the category of definiteness (wooden, woolen, blackcurrant, bittersweet; rather good, 310 Acta Linguistica Lithuanica LXIX Algirdas Sabaliauskas Lietuvių kalbos tyrinėjimo istorija. 1980–2010 m. sweetish, very soft), although because they express a definite quality, they are not gradable and have no pronominal forms. Here things have become quite confused. Incorrect conclusions are reached when the terms marked and unmarked member of an opposition are used without knowing what they mean. The best example of this claim is the argument by Dalija Tekorienė, cited by Sabaliauskas, for why adjectives (and participles) have not two but three genders. She reasoned that masculine and feminine forms semantically constitute the marked member, “because they indicate the presence of gender meaning, while the third is unmarked because it indicates the absence of gender meaning” (p. 247). But the marked member is not semantically marked; rather, its external form indicates gender. Masculine and feminine agreeing words can be distinguished by their endings: geras – gera, gražus – graži, mylimas – mylima, lauktas – laukta; the forms gera, gražu, mylima now lack agreeing endings. They could be regarded as the unmarked member only if they were used both as agreeing and as non-agreeing forms, but they are not used that way and therefore do not belong to the paradigm of gender forms of agreeing words. A comparison can be made with the third person of the verb, which has no ending but is used in both personal and impersonal sentences. Sabaliauskas’s book describes a great many talented people and their significant works. We admire the work of Jonas Palionis, Audronė Kaukienė, Bonifacas Stundžia, Danguolė Mikulėnienė, Regina Koženiauskienė, Ema Geniušienė, Vytautas Vitkauskas, and others, but is it really possible to write even a sentence about each of them in a review, however long it may be? Incidentally, Koženiauskienė did no administrative work; because of unfavorable circumstances, she was forced to edit other people’s work at the VU Press and could pursue what her heart was drawn to only in her free time. Devoted to scholarship, she works very productively and has significant publications from after 2010 as well. On p. 120 it says: “As a substantial contribution by Urbutis to Lithuanian linguistics, one should mention that, on his initiative, a vast card index for a Lithuanian etymological dictionary was assembled at Vilnius University, without which the preparation of this work, so important to our linguistics, cannot be imagined in the future” (p. 120). But is this work being prepared? If not, what has become of the card index? Searching for the origins of words is probably an interesting creative pursuit. A long, long time ago, on a sunny summer day, Paulauskas and I went for a walk along the Neris toward the second Valakupiai beach, and from afar we saw Sabaliauskas approaching, smiling to himself, his jacket slung over his shoulder. When we met, we asked him why he was so cheerful. He replied: I’ve figured out the etymology of the word for ‘louse’. I have long since forgotten the explanation, but my memory retains the image of a man smiling to himself against a forest backdrop. More than one explanation of the origin of Lithuania has been published. Sali’s proposal to connect it with the root of the verb lieti ‘to pour’ seems the most convincing (p. 416), while derivation from a military escort is not very credible (p. 172). Lithuanian army detachments rode far and wide not through Iceland but through Slavic lands: one prince watered his horses in the Black Sea, Recenzijos / Reviews 311 ALDONA PAULAUSKIENĖ, SARMA KĻAVIŅA another promised not to attack Moscow if its prince would bow at his feet on a hill near the city (hence the name Поклон гора there). In Uglich, guides explain to tourists how terrible the Lithuanian raiders were, how long they besieged the town and ravaged its surroundings. While there, one wonders in amazement how they could have ridden thousands of kilometers, and realizes that the name of Lithuania could not have come from the word лимба; rather, the name Lithuania could itself have given rise to a swearword, whose usage was studied by Vladimir Toporov (p. 491). There is a land in Russia, Oryol, a Plain, a vast plain. From afar I saw a village there, for some reason named Litva. (Eduardas Mieželaitis. Quoted from memory) Kazys Ulvydas was a gifted linguist. Sabaliauskas described the value of his work exceptionally well in the second and third volumes of this study and in the Encyclopedia of the Lithuanian Language. But who could understand and reveal what was distinctive about Ulvydas’s talent and character? In brief, his scholarship was confined to the study of adverbs and language culture, but through these he looked into the very depths of language with immense talent. Ulvydas went about his work without haste, delving into the essence of the phenomenon under study. Uninflected Parts of Speech in the First Lithuanian Grammars emerged not as a separate work, but as a prehistory of the study of adverbs. Having an excellent command of Latin, he studied everything that had been written about uninflected parts of speech from the very beginning. If other linguists had done the same, their scholarly work would have been much more fruitful. For example, there would have been no need to defend two habilitation dissertations and still leave the historical neuter gender of agreeing words in present-day Lithuanian. They would inevitably have encountered Danielius Kleinas’s statement: “An adjective has as many genders as a noun has.” Ulvydas tried to read everything and wanted to have a comprehensive card index of adverbs. When it became difficult to compile it on his own, in 1959 he invited his former student Elena Valiulytė to the Institute and assigned her to collect adverbs from the card index of the Dictionary of the Lithuanian Language. She spent an entire year collecting examples for Ulvydas. It is hard to imagine how those examples had to be classified, but they were classified and the work was completed; a dissertation was defended, and many articles were published on the adverbialization of case and prepositional constructions, but it all could not fit into the three-volume grammar. The full scope of Ulvydas’s studies of adverbs can be seen only in the collection compiled by Valiulytė, Lithuanian Adverbs (2000). A volume no smaller could also be compiled from his published texts on language culture, many of which he read on the radio over the years. The Institute of the Lithuanian Language should include the preparation of such a volume in its plans, since it would reveal an even broader panorama of Ulvydas’s scholarly interests. 312 Acta Linguistica Lithuanica LXIX Algirdas Sabaliauskas Lietuvių kalbos tyrinėjimo istorija. 1980–2010 m. Ulvydas was not only talented but also unusual: yesterday he might say one thing and today be unable to remember it. I have experienced this firsthand. Enticed by Juozas Pikčilingis, I chose to write my diploma thesis on verbal aspect. Perhaps, by assigning me this topic, Pikčilingis wanted to test whether I would copy from Paulauskas, since he knew that Paulauskas was writing a dissertation on the prefixal derivation of verbs. As I had never copied anything in my life, I used only Paulauskas’s bibliography, selecting from it the works of those authors who were concerned solely with verbal aspect as a grammatical category. I realized that Skardžius (pp. 397–410) was not satisfied with Jablonskis’s account of verbal aspect from his article “Aspects and Their Use” (Skardžius 1936). He had brought back new ideas from Germany. I had heard only the surname of Leonardas Dambriūnas (pp. 429–435). I organized my diploma thesis according to the methodology proposed by Jan Safarewicz, because only a specialist in Latin could understand how closely aspect is related to tense. He, too, was interested in how what is expressed by Latin tense forms could be conveyed in Lithuanian by means of word-formation (see Safarewicz 1938). I did not deny the grammatical function of the prefix, did not interfere with its role in word-formation, and described verbal aspect in terms of tense. Galnaitytė, invited to review the thesis, criticized it mercilessly, but I defended it and pleased Balčikonis, who determined that my diploma thesis receive a very good grade. After graduating, I was left unemployed, since my husband had eight years of work experience at the Institute of the Lithuanian Language and Literature. When a temporary position became available, I was hired to work in the Grammar Section headed by Ulvydas. He welcomed me very warmly: he praised my excellent diploma thesis and promised to look after my future as well. Paulauskas never praised himself, so he could not praise his wife either. Apparently he had spoken with Pikčilingis, for how else would Ulvydas have known that I had written my diploma thesis on verbal aspect? Ulvydas told me to write on the same topic at the Institute, too. I did not start from scratch, so I knew how to go about the work. I also read Dambriūnas’s article, published in English, which he called the theses of a forthcoming larger work: “Verbal Aspects in Lithuanian” (Lingua Posnaniensis, 1959, no. 7). Since the article was written in English, the terminology raised no doubts and caused no confusion: Jablonskis used veikslu for what German calls Aspekt und Aktionsart, “aspect and manner of action.” Jablonskis first divided all verbs into eigos ir įvykio veikslo, and then subdivided them further: the imperfective into kartiniai and kartotiniai, and the perfective into “1) akimirkos aspect, 2) pradžios aspect, 3) galo (ending) aspect, 4) mažybės aspect” (Jablonskis 1957: 292–293). Skardžius was concerned with improving Jablonskis’s conception of verbal aspect. He argued that Jablonskis’s definition “does not yet specify the concept of aspect—it is much broader. In fact, verbal aspect (German Aktionsart, French aspect, Russian вид) is that manner [emphasis mine—A. P.] in which a process unfolds or an action is affected” (Skardžius 1936: 51). But Jablonskis’s term veikslas is not the German Aktionsart, but Aspekt. Himself Recenzijos / Reviews 313 ALDONA PAULAUSKIENĖ, SARMA KĻAVIŅA Skardžius did not pursue the study of verbal aspect further, but encouraged Dambriūnas to do so. The latter, being uncritical, replaced Jablonskis’s Lithuanian term veikslai with the international term aspektai in his more substantial work, and called German Aktionsart by Jablonskis’s term veikslai. And in 1960, the Lithuanian Encyclopedia publishing house in Boston published Leonardas Dambriūnas’s 160-page booklet, including all appendices, Lietuvių kalbos veiksmažodžių aspektai. It compares Lithuanian aspects with those of Polish and uses Safarewicz’s method of describing aspect in terms of tense. To tell the truth, it is not so easy to surpass Jablonskis. Even after these works, his account remained unimproved, only somewhat damaged: an aspectual meaning was assigned to the past frequentative tense. One person encouraged him, another wrote the work; he received an excellent assessment from Skardžius and an award from the journal Aidų, boasted about it in the preface, and Sabaliauskas copied it into his own book as well (pp. 431–432). That is how judgments and praise sometimes turn out. During those years at the Institute, I learned a great deal. I saw that grammar is an endlessly fascinating field of work, and that through verbal aspect one can delve into the grammatical semantics of the verb (transitivity), the meanings of tenses, and the whole science of grammar in general. I wrote four author’s sheets, with more than two hundred bibliographic entries, because the theoretical literature was truly immense. (No wonder Maslov proposed that aspectology be considered a separate branch of linguistics.) The work, typed up by typists, was submitted for consideration. It attracted no substantial objections. Only after the discussion did Vytautas Ambrazas ask: “What happens now? The Grammar Section’s plans assign this topic to Galnaitytė.” And this is where Ulvydas’s startling unusualness showed itself: he was not at all fazed and suggested that I coordinate with Galnaitytė, since she had already defended her dissertation. No way! It was a poor argument that she was older and had already defended her dissertation. But how could the head of the Grammar Section, and even the entire senior staff, fail to see the plan and allow me to spend a whole year writing on a topic assigned to another author? I left the Institute without a single page of my work remaining there, and no one missed it. Never mind: what was is gone. But it was not entirely lost. After spending two years editing scholarly and technical literature, I submitted the work I had written at the Institute as a research paper to the postgraduate studies department at Vilnius University. Its head said he had never seen anything like it during his entire career. The reviewer, Vytautas Mažiulis, also rated it “very good.” After I was admitted, the topic had to be approved. The department was then highly skeptical about verbal aspect. But Kazlauskas uttered the decisive words: “If there is someone to supervise it, let her write.” And Pikčilingis, the head of the department, said: “There will be a formal supervisor, but she’ll write it without one anyway.” As I review Sabaliauskas’s book, I find myself recounting facts from my academic biography because many of the individuals and works Sabaliauskas describes can be strung along that thread. No one in Lithuania even knew that studies of verbal aspect were highly topical in other countries in the mid- and late twentieth century. Only later did people realize this, as visiting scholars began arriving from abroad to study aspect in the Baltic languages. The first was Professor Viktor Holttum of the University of Glasgow. It is strange, but pleasant, when you, 314 Acta Linguistica Lithuanica LXIX Algirdas Sabaliauskas Lietuvių kalbos tyrinėjimo istorija. 1980–2010 m. Although she was still only an assistant, she appointed me to supervise a professor’s internship. For a whole month we sat together in the VU Professors’ Reading Room. He studied Lithuanian and worked through my recently defended candidate’s dissertation, and as he was leaving he said, “If it hadn’t been for your work, my internship would have been pointless.” In 1980 I met an extraordinary scholar and person, Jurijus Stepanovas (pp. 510–513). Later, through my interactions with him, I understood why Vilnius University awarded him an honorary doctorate only in 2003, even though Stepanovas had deserved it earlier. He loved Lithuania and its people very much; after the events of January 13, he left the Party. In 1968, Stepanovas was the opponent for Jonas Kazlauskas’s doctoral dissertation, the first to be defended in Lithuania. After Kazlauskas’s death, he felt that he had lost more than a friend; he became estranged, and perhaps was even somewhat distanced from Vilnius University, but he continued to nurture young scholars for Lithuania and spent his holidays at rural homesteads. In 1979, two important books appeared, in his view: Ambrazas’s Lietuvių kalbos dalyvių istorinė sintaksė and Paulauskienė’s Gramatinės lietuvių kalbos veiksmažodžių kategorijos. Therefore, when Regina Venckutė asked him, he agreed to be the opponent for my dissertation. The most interesting thing was that, during the department’s discussion, people objected: “Paulauskienė used to pick on Galnaitytė, and now she has dared to take on Žulys too; the chapter on the category of person should be removed” (Girdenis, Žulys’s closest friend, did not utter a word). But I am not one of the obedient. So I won, because Stepanovas took the opposite view: “The section on the category of person is the best written in world linguistics.” Stepanovas also surprised me by this: when Regina Venckutė met him at the station early one morning, instead of going to a hotel to rest, he came to our home and, without even taking off his coat, suggested that I write a paper with him for the upcoming conference of Balticists in Riga. We wrote the paper (Пауляускене, Степанов 1985: 17–24). When asked what kind of thanks he would like for the trouble of serving as an opponent and for the journey from Moscow, Stepanovas asked me to arrange a holiday in the countryside. I put him up in Švendubrė, right beside the Raigardas Valley, at a splendid homestead where Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis had once taken shelter from the rain before the war, where the composer Balys Dvarionas had visited more than once, where Balčikonis had lived while collecting Druskininkai songs, where I too had stayed during expeditions, and where I had also accommodated Jochen Range (pp. 602–607). When I visited the Stepanovs halfway through their holiday, he and his wife Lilija were both delighted, saying they had never had such a wonderful holiday: they had two excellent rooms and meals prepared by a skilled hostess; they had walked through the forest and along the riverbank to Druskininkai, attended concerts held at Čiurlionis’s house, and Vytautas Bazys, the principal of Druskininkai Secondary School No. 1, had driven them around southern Lithuania. We still had time to walk the Čiurlionis Trail and have a heartfelt conversation. Most importantly, those famous people I had the chance to meet remained friends for life. In the collection dedicated to Stepanovas’s jubilee Kalba ir kultūra: Faktai Recenzijos / Reviews 315 ALDONA PAULAUSKIENĖ, SARMA KĻAVIŅA ir vertybės, only commissioned articles on the issues he had studied. I was happy to be invited into his circle of friends. The study of verb aspect also brought the Japanese scholar Eiko Sakurai to me. Sabaliauskas knows that she attended Bonifacas Stundžia’s lectures on the Old Prussian language (p. 724). But can anyone know everything? How would you learn that, after receiving Paulauskienė’s book, her professor sent his student to study aspect? Perhaps one can only guess from the publications. Yet it is not so easy to learn that, even after completing her studies, Sakurai traveled to Lithuania many times, leaving her small children with their grandmothers; she stayed not in a hotel but at the Paulauskas family home; that Paulauskienė could wear a kimono if she wished; and that no one in Japan speaks and writes Lithuanian as wonderfully as Sakurai. When asked why she was still only an assistant and not a professor, she answered very quietly: “Men won’t let me. A Japanese woman must be humble and obedient; she must not go through the door first.” Her children are now older: her son Naoto is eleven, her daughter Akane is eight, and her son Kento is four, and Sakurai still intends to visit Lithuania many more times. Once again, I would like to speak in the first person about two outstanding Lithuanian linguists—Zigmas Zinkevičius and Aleksas Girdenis. My generation remembers Zigmas Zinkevičius as an excellent lecturer. Now we are proud to have been Balčikonis’s students, but at the time we considered Zinkevičius the best lecturer and historical grammar the most interesting field of study. We did not yet suspect that, over time, excessive devotion to scholarship, the prestige it brings, awards and all kinds of prizes, and the desire to be first in everything can affect a person like a drug. Zinkevičius became wholly absorbed in scholarship, in the positions he held, and in the flood of honors and respect he received both in Lithuania and abroad. This is described with great respect in Sabaliauskas’s book. Zinkevičius was talented and hardworking, but it is now impossible to take in and assess everything he wrote. Rimvydas Šilbajoris spoke in the same way about Eduardas Mieželaitis: Talentingas Mieželaitis, bet jis trykšta kaip galingas fontanas aikštės vidury ir neįmanoma tinkamai įvertinti jo visumos. I read Zinkevičius’s Lietuvių kalbos istoriją very carefully, from the first page to the indexes, because I was preparing to write about the earliest Lithuanian grammars. I also know the background to this study by Zinkevičius. In 1964, the Lithuanian Language Department of VU, together with the Lithuanian Language and Literature Institute of the Academy of Sciences, had planned to write a Lietuvių kalbos istoriją and complete it by 1970. But the authors were more concerned with their doctoral (habilitation) dissertations and did not begin the planned work. At that time, plans had to be carried out. Thus, at the department meeting on February 8, 1968 (minutes no. 314), it was decided to separate from the Institute and write two scholarly works that would serve both as substitutes for the planned Lietuvių kalbos istoriją and as textbooks for university students. Palionis was assigned to write a Lietuvių literatūrinės kalbos istoriją. He wrote and published his textbook in 1979. Later, after revising it and slightly changing the title, he presented students with the Lietuvių rašomosios kalbos istoriją. in 1985. 316 Acta Linguistica Lithuanica LXIX Algirdas Sabaliauskas Lietuvių kalbos tyrinėjimo istorija. 1980–2010 m. The second was planned as a collective work, A Historical Grammar of the Lithuanian Language. The plan was as follows: I. Introduction and bibliography (3 printer’s sheets – Kazlauskas); II. Phonetics: 1) vocalism, 2) accentuation (8 printer’s sheets – Girdenis), 3) consonantism (3 printer’s sheets – Zinkevičius); III. Morphology: 1) noun (5 printer’s sheets), 2) pronoun (2 printer’s sheets), 3) numeral (1 printer’s sheet) – Mažiulis, 4) adjective (2 printer’s sheets), 5) indeclinable parts of speech (1 printer’s sheet) – Zinkevičius; 6) verb (5 printer’s sheets) – Kazlauskas. The work was to be textbook-like, organized into paragraphs, with references cited in the text; the deadline for completion was 1970. The discussions and defenses of their doctoral dissertations clearly prevented Kazlauskas and Zinkevičius from writing the work planned by the department. Then Kazlauskas’s tragic death completely wrecked the plan. It is best to write everything oneself: whatever you plan, if you are alive and well, you finish it. Zinkevičius did everything by himself: he provided students with textbooks on dialectology and historical grammar, wrote the major work A History of the Lithuanian Language, then condensed it, and Ramutė Plioplytė translated it into English and sent it out into the world. While reading Zinkevičius’s History of the Lithuanian Language, all sorts of thoughts came to mind, especially when I reached the written period. Palionis defended his habilitation dissertation on one of the most important periods in our old written tradition (the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), taught the entire history of written Lithuanian at Vilnius University for many years, published two versions of a textbook for this discipline, and, with T. Buchiene, wrote an extensive introduction to the first printed grammars of Lithuanian for the Institute’s publication The First Grammar of the Lithuanian Language (1957). Palionis was expected to provide a thorough analysis and assessment of Zinkevičius’s work, but for some reason this never came. A description of the present cannot be considered history. Everyone who lived during the period being described knows what it was like. There was no need for political commentary: writing about Gorbachev’s reforms, or the activities of Brazauskas and Beriozov. Sabaliauskas should have been left to write about Lithuanian language researchers. All the more so because here one encounters things beyond all common understanding. For example, Albertas Rosinas had already been a professor in the Department of Baltic Philology at Vilnius University since 1989, and head of the department from 1991 to 1996. Yet in volume VI of Zinkevičius’s History of the Lithuanian Language, published in 1994, he is still working at other institutions (p. 268). What on earth happened here? Page 189 lists a great many linguists who fostered language culture. And it draws a very unfair conclusion: “[...] the authorities’ complete lack of concern for the future of the Lithuanian language, their acceptance of its disappearance in the ‘communist era,’ rendered all those efforts futile.” It pains me greatly to read these lines. After all, this is not true! Palionis’s History of the Written Lithuanian Language tells quite a different story: after the war, a new generation of talented writers emerged; compulsory secondary education was introduced; qualified stylists worked for newspapers, journals, and book publishers; and radio, television, and the theater cared about linguistic correctness. As a result, the standard language has now reached its highest degree of perfection. I wonder what Zinkevičius thinks now. Does the government of independent Lithuania take much better care of language culture? Recenzijos / Reviews 317 ALDONA PAULAUSKIENĖ, SARMA KĻAVIŅA Is it better now, when Lithuanian is stuffed with all kinds of unadapted foreign words and there is no sign of any language standardization? By 1994 it was already clear what was happening to the Lithuanian language, yet Zinkevičius still offers this as the book’s final sentence on its back cover: “We must look to the future optimistically.” Closing the book with that sentence, one would like to respond in the words of Vincas Mykolaitis-Putinas: “Pure optimism sounds like a lie to me.” Aleksas Girdenis said that English would do more harm to Lithuanian than Russian. Perhaps he and Jörundur Hilmarsson talked about that specter of English while playing chess (p. 637), but it is unclear whether it has harmed Icelandic as much as Lithuanian. The Icelanders are a free people, while we, having escaped one gallows, are willingly sticking our heads into another noose. At the very beginning of Lithuania’s national revival, Girdenis wrote: “Each of us has done this or that, but probably not as much as we should have and were capable of doing... It is especially painful when you think it over: what good have you actually accomplished? You studied language, especially that of the Samogitians of this region (and first and foremost those of Mažeikiai), but has anyone’s life become better, or at least more interesting, because of it? Pupils from here are choosing the path of philology less and less often (a city or town is not the place where people become interested in their mother tongue and their people’s culture, and how many talented people are born nowadays in the hard-drinking countryside?)” (Gimtoji kalba, 1990, no. 10, pp. 1–2). People as gifted as Aleksas Girdenis are perhaps born only once a century. That is why it was not easy for him to choose a specialty: he could have reached the top in every science and art. How he played the violin! What a voice he had! Although he chose to study language, he never abandoned lyric poetry or the analysis of hexameters. It was not his mastery of languages that lured him to pursue internships at universities around the world; rather, the world came to him. Having taught himself Ancient Greek, he was able to study its prosody and challenge Mindaugas Strockis’s work. His gifts for mathematics and physics came in handy in the experimental phonetics laboratory; from the engineer Vida Žilinskienė, Girdenis made an independent Lithuanian language researcher (pp. 291–293). All of Girdenis’s publications are discussed in Sabaliauskas’s book, which also states: “Today we can speak of a linguistic school of Girdenis: more than thirty Lithuanian and Latvian linguists under his supervision defended their dissertations” (p. 189). Who could say how much of Girdenis’s time went into other people’s scholarly work, how hard he worked to bring up linguists capable of continuing what he himself had so brilliantly begun? I would like to write much more about him, since we lived and worked together. I can only add that when talking with you, he never glanced at his watch to indicate that he was in a hurry or that he found what you were saying uninteresting. Girdenis’s three volumes of Linguistic Works deserve separate attention. At the end of each volume there is a Dialogue, where one can also read Girdenis’s own views on linguistics. He was aware of the strength of his talent, but did not want to boast. On the cover of the first volume, we see Girdenis with Balčikonis, smiling as he would only smile with friends in the countryside or when visiting Lithuanians living in Belarus. I asked Girdenis 318 Acta Linguistica Lithuanica LXIX Algirdas Sabaliauskas Lietuvių kalbos tyrinėjimo istorija. 1980–2010 m. to write memoirs about Balčikonis. He refused to do so: “someone else might think that I am bragging.” This is true, because when writing about others, you inevitably reveal something about yourself, too. A true paradox: the most gifted Lithuanian linguist of the 20th century received only two collective state awards: one for secondary-school textbooks, and the other jointly with the authors of one-volume grammars. And not a single work by Girdenis was found worthy of the Lithuanian Republic’s Science Award. Zinkevičius wrote about himself. In such a case, the author towers above everyone else, while the others, even when praised, are inevitably diminished. It would be only half as bad if that piece did not contain gossip and dismaying errors. He rechristens his colleague Vladas Bartusevičius as Vincas; at a meeting where Zinkevičius’s lecture was being discussed, he and Kabelka gossip about Julija Žukauskaitė, who, according to Kabelka, had asked Skardžius how one should say: The stars shine in the sky, or on the sky? And Skardžius supposedly replied: “For you, miss, on your epaulettes” (Zinkevičius 1999: 149). Could Skardžius, who had devoted his whole life to the cultivation of language, really have answered such a perfectly sensible question that way? And in mocking Žukauskaitė, the speakers showed that they themselves did not know that either way is acceptable, depending on how you interpret that sky: as a roof above your head, or as a space filled with stars. Clearly, publishing Būga’s writings is more difficult than publishing Jablonskis’s. But Palionis published what was most needed at the time: Jablonskis’s grammars. Zinkevičius boasts that he introduced both volumes of Jablonskis’s Collected Works on the radio: the first volume consisted of articles on correcting language, and the second of textbooks (p. 184). But in fact, the first volume of Jablonskis’s Collected Works contains not articles but grammars, syntax, the study of cases and prepositions, works that Jablonskis himself did not consider textbooks; the articles are in the second volume. In 1925, Jablonskis wrote a summary of his 1922 grammar and, with reservations, proposed it as a textbook for the upper grades of secondary school, but Palionis did not include this summary in the Collected Works. It is not at all difficult to remember what is in the two volumes of Jablonskis’s Collected Works; if you do not remember, check. Yet here Zinkevičius feels not the slightest responsibility for what he writes. And even the publishing house’s best editor did not check, because it was written by an academician. After finding examples of such incredible superficiality, one begins to doubt some of the scholarly claims as well. The floor is now given to Sarma Kļaviņa. Sabaliauskas devoted 265 pages of the book (from 463 to 728) to foreign linguists who learned Lithuanian, studied it, used its facts in their work, and assessed the value of their research for Lithuanian studies, Baltic studies, and Indo-European studies. The author acknowledges, of course, that by the late 20th and early 21st centuries historical-comparative linguistics had already achieved its goals, and that Lithuanian, as the oldest Indo-European language, had become less necessary, since new approaches to synchronic linguistics now predominate. Nevertheless, it remains important for etymology, language typology, and other areas of linguistics. Recenzijos / Reviews 319 ALDONA PAULAUSKIENĖ, SARMA K̦LAVIN̦A Sabaliauskas has written about many linguists from countries all over the world (Europe, Asia, the Americas, Australia, and elsewhere) who learned Lithuanian and studied the language from one perspective or another. His book, a comprehensive encyclopedia, offers valuable information about these individuals and their countries. In this review, we will mention only a few of them. Naturally, the first foreigners Sabaliauskas describes are linguists from the related Latvian nation. There is no linguist in Latvia today who could contribute as much to Lithuanian linguistics and Baltic studies in general as Janis Endzelynas once did. Yet the comparative tradition in Baltic linguistics has not disappeared. Before the Second World War, when Janis Endzelynas worked at the University of Latvia and it had a department of Baltic philology, many Balticists went to Riga to study; by the mid-20th century, their destination had shifted, as Vilnius had become a center of Baltic studies. It was no longer only Latvian linguists who studied at Vilnius University. Several Latvians, too, have defended dissertations there or taken part in joint research on the Baltic languages, for example, in compiling the Atlas of the Baltic Languages. In this book, Sabaliauskas first introduces readers to those Latvians who became Balticists under the guidance of Vilnius professors Vincas Urbutis, Vytautas Mažiulis, Aleksas Girdenis, Zigmas Zinkevičius, and Aleksandras Vanagas. The first doctoral student at Vilnius University was Reinis Bērtulis, born in the village of Pipirai in Akmenė district (1937–994). In 1962, he enrolled in the doctoral program at Vilnius University and studied the lexical relations between Latvian and Lithuanian. He wrote articles on the subject. He also published his Lithuanian-studies work in the Latvian press. Since Sabaliauskas himself has translated Latvian literature into Lithuanian, he also remembers that Bērtulis translated Lithuanian literature into Latvian. Gifted linguists from various countries also had literary talents: they translated and even studied literature, and wrote poems and short stories. At the University of Latvia, Bērtulis taught Lithuanian alongside other subjects. Later, it was his students who went to Vilnius to study. Pēteris Vanagas was a student at Vilnius University from 1982 to 1984, a doctoral student there from 1985 to 1988, and eventually defended his doctoral dissertation there. Albertas Sarkanis is not only a linguist but also a diplomat. As a linguist, he was interested in Latvian dialects and contacts between Latvian and Lithuanian. In 1993, Sarkanis defended a doctoral dissertation in experimental dialect phonetics at Vilnius University. Laimutė Balodė (Anelauskaitė), meanwhile, has roots in both our nations. She is a graduate of Vilnius University, but also studied for two years at the University of Latvia. She now works at the universities of Riga and Helsinki, where she teaches both Baltic languages, researches Baltic onomastics, and collaborates on compiling dictionaries. Sabaliauskas also describes studies in Latvian linguistics for which it is simply impossible to do without Lithuanian, such as Marta Rudzīte’s “Historical Phonetics of the Latvian Language” (1993), Konstantīns Karulis’s two-volume “Etymological Dictionary of the Latvian Language” (1992), and the works of Anton Breidak. This remarkable encyclopedia also features Aina Blin- 320 Acta Linguistica Lithuanica LXIX Algirdas Sabaliauskas Lietuvių kalbos tyrinėjimo istorija. 1980–2010 m. the studies of Benita Laumane, Daina Nitiņa, Ožars Bušs, Dace Markus, Valentina Skujiņa, Brigita Bušmane, Anna Stafecka, Lidija Leikuma, and others, with references to what is important for Lithuanian studies in their work. It is simply astonishing how well Sabaliauskas knows the linguistics of neighboring countries, and how deeply he has explored everything that might attract other linguists, whether as a method or as an object of research. For example, the study of children’s language by a Latvian émigrée and professor at Stockholm University, “From Five Months to Five Years” (1982). Our professor managed to pursue necessary and very interesting linguistic research even while raising her children. Slavists’ interest in the Lithuanian language, dating from the second half of the nineteenth century, continues to this day. This is also demonstrated by Sabaliauskas’s thorough analysis of the work of Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Czech, and Bulgarian linguists (482–568). The work of Russian Balticists is described with particular respect and care, for the Moscow scholars Vladimir Toporov, Oleg Trubachev, and Vyacheslav Ivanov are indeed highly versatile researchers—linguists, folklorists, mythologists, ethnologists, and scholars of literature. The work of two outstanding specialists in theoretical linguistics, Tatiana Bulygina and Yuri Stepanov, is particularly significant for contemporary linguistics and Lithuanian studies. Their studies of grammatical theory and theoretical grammar, semantics and semiotics, comparative linguistics, and the philosophy of language are a precious legacy for researchers of many languages. Lithuanian linguists can take pride in their friendship and support; many of Lithuania’s well-known linguists today are indebted to them for their guidance at the beginning of their scholarly careers. The work of the older generation of St. Petersburg Balticists (Yuri Otkupshchikov), the younger generation (Alexei Andronov), and the Ukrainian scholar Anatoliy Nepokupny is described with great respect. Polish linguists occupy a special place in Sabaliauskas’s account, especially the biography and scholarly career of the preeminent Balticist and Indo-Europeanist Wojciech Smoczyński, his work publishing linguistics journals, bulletins, and bibliographies, and his most important contribution to Lithuanian studies, the “Etymological Dictionary of the Lithuanian Language” (2007). Leszek Bednarczuk, Michał Kondratiuk, and others have made great contributions to Lithuanian studies. Czech and Bulgarian Balticists are also notable. German linguists are presented particularly well; it was in their homeland that comparative historical linguistics emerged at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The most active German Balticist today is Rainer Eckert. During the period covered by Sabaliauskas, he published many studies of importance to Lithuanian studies, reviewed major works in Lithuanian studies in the German press, and, until his retirement, headed the Baltic Studies Center he had founded on his own initiative at the University of Greifswald. Well acquainted with this scholar’s areas of research and pedagogical work, Sabaliauskas concludes that the last two decades were very successful for Eckert, in both Baltic and Slavic studies (p. 573). The contribution of the German Indo-Europeanist Wolfgang P. Schmid (pp. 583–588) to Baltic studies is highly valuable. He proposed that Old Europe (his term) Recenzijos / Reviews 321 ALDONA PAULAUSKIENĖ, SARMA KĻAVIŅA had its hydronymy center in the Baltic lands. He studied the Prussian and Curonian Spit languages; from 1985 he edited the publication series Hydronymia Europea and, together with Bernowski, edited and co-authored the three-volume work “The Language of the Curonian Spit: Studies in the Historical Linguistics and Instrumental Phonetics of a Dying Dialect” (1989–1999). Friedrich Scholz, a professor at the University of Münster and a versatile philologist, has made especially significant contributions to Lithuanian studies and Baltic studies more broadly (pp. 591–599). His work on the literatures of the Baltic peoples, “The Literatures of the Baltic Peoples: Their Origins and Development” (1990), is of extraordinary importance to us. It is a study of Lithuanian, Latvian, and Estonian literatures that highlights the particular features of their formation and their connections with neighboring literatures. Of immense importance to Lithuanian scholars is the publication of photocopies of the greatest monument of sixteenth-century Lithuanian writing, Jonas Bretkūnas’s Bible translation, conceived by Scholz in 1981. He prepared the initial publication plan, secured funding, and the results of this work began to appear in 1991. Four volumes in total were published (1991–2002), prepared for publication by Jochen Dieter Range, Scholz, and Friedemann Kluge. It should be said that Sabaliauskas describes all of Scholz’s works that have even the slightest connection with Baltic studies with great respect for their author. At the University of Münster, Scholz headed the Seminar for Slavic and Baltic Studies and later the Interdisciplinary Institute for Baltic Studies. Italy has a fairly strong tradition of Baltic studies. In 1931, the eminent Italian linguist Giacomo Devoto began publishing the world’s first journal of Baltic studies, Studi Baltici, which continued until 1969. It is pleasing to note that the journal Res Balticae was founded at the University of Pisa in 1995. Sabaliauskas considers Maria Teresa Ademollo Gagliano, Guido Michelini, and Pietro Umberto Dini the most active Balticists of this three-decade period. As people who know Dini well, we feel the greatest affection for him. He is not only a great scholar and polyglot, but also a very charming person. We are impressed by Dini’s interest in the Baltic languages and the history of linguistics; his opus magnum, “The Baltic Languages” (Le lingue baltiche. Florence, 1997), appeared in Lithuanian and Latvian in 2000 and in Russian in 2002, and has already been translated into English. Among his many other works, “ALILETOESCVR: The Beginnings of Baltic Linguistics” (ALILETOESCVR: linguistica baltica delle origini. Livorno, 2010, 844 pp.) stands out. And how much Dini has accomplished in art and culture! He has introduced Europe to the Baltic peoples, their past and present, and has produced many excellent essays and translations of literary works (prose and poetry). It is impossible in a review to list even the most important researchers and their work. All that remains is to urge readers to open Sabaliauskas’s book, where they can find everything—or almost everything—related to Lithuanian and Baltic studies. Sabaliauskas’s History of Lithuanian Linguistic Research is a wonderful legacy of the history of linguistics for future generations. 322 Acta Linguistica Lithuanica LXIX Algirdas Sabaliauskas Lietuvių kalbos tyrinėjimo istorija. 1980–2010 m. LITERATŪRA Dėk žodį prie žodžio – turėsi žodyną. Atsiminimai apie kalbininką Juozą Balčikonį 2006: Vilnius: Lietuvių kalbos institutas. Gimtoji kalba, 1990, nr. 10, p. 1–2. Jablonskis Jonas 1957: Rinktiniai raštai 1. Vilnius: Valstybinė politinės ir mokslinės literatūros leidykla. Kazlauskas Jonas 1968: Lietuvių kalbos istorinė gramatika. Vilnius: Mintis. Kļaviņa Sarma 2012: Jāņa Endzelīna akadēmiskās biogrāfijas mzzināmas lappuses līdz 1940. gadam – Latvijas Zinātņu Akadēmijas Vēstis, A daļa, 5/6 nr. lpp. 5–18. Mūsų kalba 1975, nr. 3. Паулаускене Алдона, Степанов Юрий 1985: Универсальные категории в грамматике балтийских языков. – Baltu valodas senāk un tagad. Riga, lpp. 17–24 Pikčilingis Juozas 1982: Žodžio interviu. Vilnius: Mokslas. Skardžius Pranas 1936: Veikslaı ir jų vartojimas. – Gimtoji kalba 4. Safarewicz Jan 1938: Stan badań nad aspektem czasownikowym w języku litewskim. – Balticoslavica 3. Wilno. Stang Christian S. 1966: Vergleichende Grammatik der baltischen Sprachen. Oslo – Bergen – Tromsö. Степанов Юрий С. 1981: Имена. Предикаты. Предложения. Москва: Наука. Urbutis Vincas 1978: Žodžių darybos teorija. Vilnius: Mokslas. Zinkevičius Zigmas 1999: Prie lituanistikos Židinio. Vilnius: Mokslo ir enciklopedijų leidybos institutas. Эндзелин Янис 1905–1906: Латышские предлоги 1–2. Юрьев. Įteikta 2013 m. spalio 8 d. ALDONA PAULAUSKIENĖ Vilniaus universitetas Balio Sruogos g. 8-1, LT-10220 Vilnius, Lietuva aldona.platuk [email protected] SARMA KĻAVIŅA Latvijas universitātes Ozოლciema 24/1-112, LV-1058 Riga, Latvija [email protected] Recenzijos / Reviews 323