Sveikiname Kazį Morkūną

ACTA LINGUISTICA LITHUANICA LI (2004), 141–144 PERSONALIA CONGRATULATIONS TO KAZYS MORKŪNAS Dr. Kazys Morkūnas, an exceptionally industrious and modest linguist, worked throughout his life—and continues to work—to this day at the Institute of the Lithuanian Language. Kazys Morkūnas was born on March 4, 1929, in the village of Piliakalnis, Ukmergė District. He completed four grades in Kulniškiai, then attended Gėlvonai Primary School and Antanas Smetona Gymnasium in Ukmergė, where he would see Zigmas Zinkevičius, who later (at university) became the supervisor of his fellow townsman’s diploma thesis on the native Gelvonai dialect. The strong attraction to the native word that arose during his gymnasium years prompted him to choose a career in Lithuanian studies. From 1949 to 1954, he studied at Vilnius University, attending lectures by Juozas Balčikonis, Vincas Mykolaitis-Putinas, Jurgis Lebedys, Juozas Senkus, Zigmas Zinkevičius, Jonas Kabelka, Kazys Ulvydas, Meilė Lukšienė, and other renowned scholars of Lithuanian. After graduating from university, Kazys Morkūnas began working at the Institute of the Lithuanian Language and Literature. From 1958 to 1961, he pursued postgraduate studies at the institute, and in 1962 defended his dissertation, “The Southern Eastern Aukštaitian Dialect” (supervisor Juozas Balčikonis). Most of the work was published in separate articles: “The Phonetics of the Southern Eastern Aukštaitian Dialect” (Lietuvių kalbotyros klausimai 3, 1960, 5–59) and “The Morphology of the Southern Eastern Aukštaitian Dialect: [noun, adjective, numeral, pronoun, verb]” (Lietuvių kalbotyros klausimai 11, 1969, 107–146). From 1966 to 2001, he was at the Institute of the Lithuanian Language 142 | PERSONALIA and Literature the head of the Department of Language History and Dialectology. Tactful, patient, calm, caring, and always ready to help—this is how his colleagues describe him today. He has never said an unkind word to anyone. In 1990, K. Morkūnas took up the post of deputy director of the re-established Institute of the Lithuanian Language. He carried out this challenging administrative work patiently and conscientiously until 2001, and was the principal organizer of many scientific conferences. From 1995 to 2001, he was editor of Lietuvių kalbotyros klausimų; he is now a member of the editorial board of this continuing publication. While still studying at Vilnius University, K. Morkūnas, together with fellow students and younger colleagues, began recording the dialects of various parts of Lithuania. He traveled hundreds of kilometers along country roads in search of people who spoke beautifully in their dialect. He devoted most of his time and energy to dialectology, especially to one of the greatest works in Lithuanian dialect studies, which took a dozen years of intensive work: Lietuvių kalbos atlasui (1–3, Vilnius: Mokslas, 1977–1991). K. Morkūnas was not only one of the principal collectors of the material and authors of the publication, but also the director of the project. Lietuvių kalbos atlase systematizes and discusses lexical, morphological, phonetic, and accentuation data from more than 700 locations. In all, the publication contains 376 maps (“Lexicon”—120, “Phonetics”—112, “Morphology”—144). No dialectologist today can do without it. The work of the editors of Lietuvių kalbos atlaso was deservedly recognized in 1994 with the Lithuanian Republic Science Award. Another scholarly publication important to Lithuanian dialectology on which K. Morkūnas worked extensively and meticulously is the reader Lietuvių kalbos tarmės (Vilnius: Mintis, 1970). It was the first comprehensive introductory publication to present dialect texts recorded between 1950 and 1966, collected from nearly 550 inhabited places and from people of various ages. Its introductory article provides an extensive overview of the main lexical, phonetic, morphological, and syntactic features of Lithuanian dialects, classified according to K. Jaunius and A. Salys. A mature linguist’s fresh perspective on Lithuanian dialects is revealed in the “Program for the Study of Lithuanian Dialects and Their Interaction”: in 1995, K. Morkūnas and Danguolė Mikulėnienė prepared the “Morphology” section of the program; he also served as responsible editor of its other sections (“Lexicon,” “Accentuation,” “Sociolinguistics,” Vilnius: Institute of the Lithuanian Language, 1995). In 1997, a book of dialect texts prepared by K. Morkūnas (together with D. Mikulėnienė), “Dieveniškės Dialect Texts,” was published (Vilnius: Institute of Science and Encyclopaedia Publishing). The book presents new information about one of the most interesting dialects on the southeastern edge of the Lithuanian-speaking area. For a time, K. Morkūnas headed the collection of Lithuanian-language data for the UNESCO-supported Atlas linguarum Europae and was a member of one of its General Editorial Board commissions. Together with the Latvian linguist Aina Blinkena, he wrote the article “The Baltic Languages” for that publication (Die baltischen Sprachen. Perspectives nouvelles en géolinguistique, Rome, 1997, 89–102). Over several decades of the linguist’s active career, the press also published numerous other articles and reviews of scholarly publications valuable not only to dialectology but to linguistics more broadly: “The Lithuanian Dialect of the Curonian Spit Fishermen and the Influence of the Lithuanian Language on Their PERSONALIA 143 “the language of Latvian fishermen” (with A. Sabaliauskas, Lietuvių kalbotyros klausimai 2, 1959, 131–149), “Rare Forms of the Subjunctive Mood in Lithuanian” (with A. Kučinskaitė, Lietuvos TSR MA darbai, Series A 1 (16), 1964, 215–218), “Die Onomastik in Litauen” (Acta Baltico-Slavica 7, 1970, 197–206), “On the concept of peripheral dialects” (Lietuvių kalbotyros klausimai 30, 1993, 4–7), “On the glottal stop and its boundaries” (Lietuvių kalbotyros klausimai 34, 1994, 84–92), and others. The scholar devotes his dialectological data and knowledge as a dialect researcher not only to scholarship but also to the general public. He wrote a book for the public, An Introduction to Lithuanian Dialects (Vilnius: Mokslas, 1980), in which, in an accessible style and without avoiding a touch of playfulness, he tells of the origins of Lithuanian dialects, their classification and characteristics, and draws readers’ attention to the significance of dialect data for scholarship and language practice. Many popular articles by K. Morkūnas about dialects, their study, well-known linguists, new publications, and other topics have appeared in Gimtoji kalba, Gimtojo žodis, Gimtasai kraštas, as well as other periodicals and newspapers. From dialectology to language history is but a single step. Thus, he also managed to explore the fields of Lithuanian language history and accomplish much there. His 1959 dissertation topic was already related to language history: the article “Remnants of Pronominal Adjectives in the Southern Dialect of Eastern Aukštaitians” (MA darbai 2 (7), 1959, 191–203). K. Morkūnas published his first work devoted specifically to language history four years later, in 1963: “On the Origin of the Word atšlaimas” (MA darbai 2 (15), 1963, 267–273). Drawing on abundant material from dialects and old writings, he convincingly demonstrated that atšlaimas is related not to the verb šluoti (as P. Arumaa and E. Fraenkel believed), but to the verb šlieti. Historians of the language, especially researchers into the historical morphology of Lithuanian, also rely on his 1964 article “From the History of the Plural Inessive Forms in Eastern Aukštaitian Dialects” (Lietuvių kalbotyros klausimai 7, 1964, 145–152). Of the authors of old, K. Morkūnas has devoted the most attention to the writings of the eastern Lithuanian Konstantinas Sirvydas. In his 1967 article “The Mixed Diphthongs am, an, em, en and ą, ę in the Writings of K. Širvydas” (Lietuvių kalbotyros klausimai 9, 1967, 139–146), drawing on statistical data from eastern dialects and on these diphthongs, he perceptively noted “that in Part I of Punktų sakymų, as well as in the first edition of the dictionary, these diphthongs occur consistently only in proper and common nouns from other languages; the diphthong an in the conjunction idant; and the diphthong en quite often in derivatives of the root švent-. In the later editions of the dictionary, published after K. Širvydas’s death, and especially in Part II of “Punktų sakymų,” more words and forms occur that inconsistently have the aforementioned diphthongs and vowels. This suggests that the later publishers and editors, who came from other parts of Lithuania, contributed most to the appearance of those diphthongs and vowels here” (p. 145). We would hardly be exaggerating if we said that every researcher beginning to study the language of K. Sirvydas’s writings ought to keep this conclusion formulated by K. Morkūnas on their desk. The language of Konstantinas Sirvydas’s writings is also the subject of the linguist’s largest work on the history of the Lithuanian language, published in 1980 in Lietuvių kalbotyros klausimai – Punktų sakymų verb index (“The Verb in Konstantinas Širvydas’s ‘Punktų sakymų’ (Index)”). Lietuvių kalbotyros klausimai 20, 1980, 109–222), which registers all verb forms, and, “to bring out their meaning (or meanings), after the grammatical forms it gives a sentence or part of a sentence containing one of those forms” (p. 110). 144 | PERSONALIA In the volume Donum Balticum, dedicated to the great Norwegian Baltist Chr. Stang, K. Morkūnas published the article “Several Linguistic Features of M. Daukša’s Writings” (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1970, 347–351), which discusses this author’s orthographic features. Language historians will also find subtle observations in K. Morkūnas’s reviews of linguistic publications, which should be read rather than merely mentioned. Bibliographers, too, have many kind words for K. Morkūnas—for he contributed considerably to the preparation of numerous bibliographies of Lithuanian Linguistics. These books are used not only by researchers of the Lithuanian language, Balticists, and Indo-Europeanists, but also by everyone interested in linguistics and the cultural history of the Lithuanian people. Even now the linguist sits down each day at his book-laden desk and gets to work: he reads the proofs of the Dictionary of the Dieveniškės Dialect, prepares the commentaries for the fourth volume of the Atlas of the Lithuanian Language for publication, writes explanations for texts in the Balbieriškis dialect, and prepares and edits new articles about various Lithuanian dialects for the monograph series Lithuanian Localities, published by Versmė… On the occasion of this fine life anniversary, on behalf of the entire Lithuanian studies community, we wish this industrious scholar of language a long continuation of his work without tiring, for “our soul has within itself an imagination boundless in space, in which all kinds of knowledge and sciences can fit without number” (K. Sirvydas). Juozas Karaciejus, Asta Leskauskaitė