Antano Salio nuopelnai lituanistikai

LIETUVIŲ KALBOTYROS KLAUSIMAI, XXXIV (1994) LIETUVIŲ KALBOS TARMĖS IR JŲ TYRINĖJIMAI Zigmas ZINKEVIČIUS ANTANAS SALYS’S CONTRIBUTIONS TO LITHUANIAN STUDIES One of the great Lithuanian linguists of the interwar period, Antanas Salys was born in 1902 in Rėkėtė, Salantai rural district. His parents were farmers. He attended Salantai primary school and Telšiai Gymnasium, after graduating from which he enrolled at Kaunas University. There he studied Lithuanian and comparative Indo-European linguistics. He associated with K. Būga and served as secretary of the editorial board of his dictionary. He attended lectures by K. Būga, J. Jablonskis, A. Senn, and F. Brener. After Būga’s death, in 1925 he left with P. Skardžius to continue his studies in Leipzig. He chose Baltic studies, with Slavic studies and comparative Indo-European linguistics as subsidiary subjects. He earned his doctorate in 1929. After completing his studies abroad, Salys worked as a docent at Kaunas Vytautas Magnus University from 1930 to 1939. He organized a phonetics laboratory. From 1940 to 1944 he was a docent and professor at Vilnius University, where he taught Lithuanian dialectology, phonetics, lexicology, onomastics, an introduction to Baltic linguistics, Lithuanian, comparative Indo-European grammar, an introduction to linguistics, and several other subjects. He was a member of the Terminology, Spelling Reform, Surnames, and Place Names commissions. He was one of the founders of “Gimtoji kalba” and a member of its editorial board. He wrote extensively for “Švietimo darbas,” “Lietuva,” “Tautos mokykla,” “Lietuvos aidas,” “Naujoji Romuva,” “Tauta ir žodis,” “Kalba,” “Gimtoji kalba,” and other periodicals. After the Institute of Lithuanian Studies was established, he headed its Lithuanian Language Division from 1939 to 1941, and from 1941 to 1944 was director of the Lithuanian Language Institute of the Academy of Sciences. As the war drew to a close, he moved to the West in 1944. Until 1946 he taught at the universities of Greifswald and Tübingen. In 1947 he moved to the United States. With the help of Prof. A. Senn, he secured a position at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where he initially worked as a docent and extraordinary professor, and from 1956 as a full professor. He taught courses in Baltic and Slavic studies. His student was the renowned American Balticist W. R. Schmalstieg (Šmolstygas). He became involved in the country’s linguistic life, served as a member of various commissions and societies, contributed to linguistic publications, and edited the linguistics section of the multivolume Lithuanian Encyclopedia published by the émigré community. He died in Philadelphia in 1972. A. Salys’s greatest contributions were to Lithuanian dialectology. K. Būga encouraged him to work in this field. He studied his native Samogitian dialect extensively. He traveled on foot across a large part of its area, collected data from other parts of Lithuania as well, and refined the boundaries between dialects. He used questionnaires to collect data. In 1935, a hectographed outline of his lectures (based on J. Lāboks’s notes), “Lithuanian Dialects,” was published. Up to that time, it was the most comprehensive and complete description of our dialects— 8 The second, expanded edition appeared in Tübingen in 1946, and an entirely new version was published in volume XV of the Lithuanian Encyclopedia (1968). A. Salys compiled a map of Lithuanian dialects, which was included with the lecture outline and the article in volume IV of “Archivum Philologicum.” In classifying dialects, A. Salys essentially followed K. Jaunius. He distinguished an independent Central Aukštaitian dialect (the Central Aukštaitians). He divided the Western Aukštaitian dialect (the Western Aukštaitians), according to the pronunciation of o and ė in unstressed endings, into three subdialects: southern (the Southerners, who retain o and ė unchanged), central (the Veliuona speakers, who change them to u and i), and northern (the Northerners, who pronounce them as a and e). He divided the Eastern Aukštaitians (the Eastern Aukštaitians), according to the development of an-type sequences and the nasal vowels ą and ę, into the pantininkai (acute-accented forms unchanged, circumflex-accented forms narrowed to the o, ę grade)¹, pontininkai (all narrowed)², and puntininkai (narrowed to the u, i grade); within the territory of the latter, he further distinguished the rotininkai (who change a stressed non-final a to ɔ); within their territory, the dadininkai (now Kupiškėnai), panininkai (later called žadininkai, who still have long ā in place of o), and žalininkai (who retain half-long a in unstressed position). From the area of eastern Lithuania that, in Jaunius’s time, lay outside Kaunas Governorate, Salys formed a separate Aukštaitian subdialect—the Dzūkai. Like earlier dialectologists, he divided the Samogitian area according to the reflexes of Standard Lithuanian uo and ie into the ūnininkai (ū, ī), donininkai (ọu, ei), and dounininkai (ō, ē). Based on the previously known reflexes of the affricates č and dž, he also distinguished the Coastal Samogitians (the coastal speakers, who lack č and dž in inflectional syllables) and the Samogitian Dzūkai (who pronounce c and dz instead of č and dž). A. Salys did extensive work in historical dialectology. He sought to explain the emergence and chronology of dialect features. His article “A Few Notes on the History of Dialects,” published in 1933 in volume IV of “Archivum Philologicum,” is significant. He investigated the extralinguistic situation of the past. His dissertation (“Die žemaitischen Mundarten”) was devoted to this topic; it was published in 1930 in volume VI of “Tauta ir žodis.” Many of these questions cannot readily be separated from historical grammar, to which Salys contributed significant observations and ideas in many of his works. Particularly noteworthy is his article on vocatives ending in -ai, published in English in 1952 in volume IX of the Italian serial publication “Studi Baltici.” Dialect research is closely connected with phonetics. Salys was also a highly qualified specialist in this field and may be considered a pioneer of modern phonetics in Lithuania. He put his knowledge and skills to practical use: he laid the foundations for the pronunciation of the standard language. Another field in which Salys was very active, especially during his years in exile, was lexicology and lexicography. Earlier, he had worked for a time as a member of the Lithuanian Language Dictionary Commission. From 1950 he took part in compiling the major “Dictionary of the Lithuanian Written Language” (Wörterbuch der litauischen Schriftsprache), published abroad. Together with A. Senn, he prepared volumes III–V of this dictionary (published from 1932 onward). He greatly enriched them with folk-language vocabulary, especially Samogitian, and systematized the accentuation. He completed the work in 1968. 1,2 In fact, not all these sounds undergo this change throughout the entire area. 9 Later, he planned to prepare a historical dictionary of the Lithuanian language. For this purpose, he came to Lithuania in 1969 and collected data from card files and other sources. He promised to compile a dictionary that would highlight neologisms from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which linguists otherwise find difficult to recognize because they even appear in etymological dictionaries (e.g., Fraenkel’s) as inherited words, thereby misleading scholars. It is regrettable that his unexpected death prevented him from preparing this much-needed work. A. Salys accomplished much in the study of proper nouns. His studies of old Lithuanian personal names (e.g., Jogáila, Kęstutis, Márgaris, Mindaugas, Žygimantas...), many baptismal names (Jãckus, Jadvyga, Jókimas, Jokūbas, Juõzapas, Jùrgis, Jùslas, Kãsparas, Kazimieras, Klėm consultas, Kristijõnas, Kristupas, Laurynas, Marijà, Onà...), surnames (Doneláitis, Ivìnskis, Juškà...) and place names (Karaliáučius, Kaũnas, Kėdainiai, Klaipėda, Krėtingà, Marijámpolė, Maskvà, Vìlnius, Nėmunas...), published in encyclopedias and other publications, are significant. Salys contributed particularly greatly to the Lithuanianization of Lithuania’s nomenclature. After the Vilnius region was liberated, he led efforts to establish authentic Lithuanian forms of place names and surnames and edited the corresponding dictionaries, whose printing had already begun but was interrupted by the war and occupations. He made great efforts to preserve the old Lithuanian nomenclature of the Klaipėda region and East Prussia and to reconstruct poorly documented place names. He carried out this work everywhere responsibly and conscientiously, never artificially replacing Slavic or German names with Lithuanian ones (unfortunately, they were later indiscriminately replaced by Russian and Polish names in East Prussia). In 1956, Salys compiled the nomenclature for a map of Lithuania prepared by Juozas Andrius and published in the USA. Historical research into toponymy naturally led to studies of the past of the ancient Baltic tribes, begun by K. Būga. Salys wrote about these questions in Lithuanian and foreign encyclopedias and addressed them in many of his articles. Salys became interested in practical matters concerning the standard language while still studying at Telšiai Gymnasium, prompted, as he later said, by his Lithuanian teacher, Matas Untulis. His university studies, where he attended J. Jablonskis’s lectures, deepened this interest. Later, life itself drew him into the work of cultivating the standard language. As a specialist, he took part in various commissions, the activities of the Lithuanian Language Society, and the editorial work of “Gimtoji kalba.” He wrote numerous articles on the development of the standard language. He also contributed to other ongoing projects: he created Parts I–II of “Vargo mokykla,” was one of the editors of “Kalbos patarėjas” (1939), and so on. Salys devotedly observed the development of the standard language. He reacted quickly to points in practical use that needed correction. He did much to ensure that poorly coined words were replaced by more correct ones. He had a keen sense of language and could create good neologisms, forming them on the model of folk speech. Most of the new words he proposed took root, and today it is not easy to distinguish them from inherited words. Examples include póbūdis, póžiūris, rankininkas, senatis, slaigmenà ‘surprise’ (included in Fraenkel’s dictionary!), šviesómatis, tarmėtyra, laršà, tolìmatis, and others. He particularly enriched the terminology of various fields. For this purpose, he also adapted folk words, e.g., grūdalas ‘hardening mortar’, núospaudas ‘compression press’, slogūtis ‘nightmare’, and others. He is credited with— 10 the following linguistic terms: balsynas ‘vocalism’, priebalsynas ‘consonantism’, garsų perkaita ‘German Lautverschiebung’, įgarsis ‘Anglitt’, išgarsis ‘Abglitt’, jungmė ‘English liaison, the linking of a final consonant with the initial vowel of the following word’, perilgì garsai ‘sounds longer than long ones’, pertrumpi garsai ‘sounds shorter than short ones’, pilnãgarsis ‘Russian полногласие’, prãtaras ‘German Einsatz’, and others. A. Salys’s scholarly legacy and contribution to practical language work are rich and immensely valuable. His articles, scattered across Lithuanian and foreign publications and difficult to access, were published in Rome in four large volumes of “Raštai,” thanks to the care and funding of his wife, S. Salienė, and the Lithuanian Catholic Academy of Sciences. Petras Jonikas prepared them for publication. The first volume (1979) contains writings on various questions of the standard language; the second volume (1983) is devoted to nomenclature; the third (1985) contains various other articles; and the fourth (1992) is devoted to dialectology. This was a great service to Lithuanian studies and to linguistics in general. CONTRIBUTIONS OF ANTANAS SALYS TO LITHUANIAN LINGUISTICS Summary One of the most outstanding Lithuanian linguists of the period between World Wars I and II is Antanas Salys, who made a substantial contribution to Lithuanian dialectology. His monograph ”The Lithuanian dialects” (Lietuvių kalbos tarmės) remains one of the most exhaustive and brilliant studies of the Lithuanian dialects. He is the author of the first map of the dialects. A.Salys also contribute to historical dialectology, especially by his studies of the Žemaičiai (Samogitian) extralinguistic situation in the 13—16th centuries. His works of dialectology are concerned with both historical grammar and phonology. The scholar may be rightly considered the father of modern phonology in Lithuania. The other spheres in which A.Salys excelled were lexicology and lexicography. Together with A.Senn, he compiled the 3rd and 4th volumes of a major dictionary ”Dictionary of written Lithuanian” (Wörterbuch der litauischen Schriftsprache), where he admitted words and phrases of the so-called country Lithuanian, especially the vocabulary of the Žemaičiai dialect, and systematized Lithuanian accentuation. Unfortunately, he had no time left to compile a historical dictionary of the Lithuanian language — a dictionary he had promised to write. In this dictionary A.Salys had intended to interpret the neologisms of the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries. Many such neologisms were often confused with old Lithuanian words and were even included in etymological dictionaries. A.Salys is also known for his studies in onomastics as well as for his investigations of the old Baltic tribes and their language. His attempts to standardize and improve Standard Lithuanian deserve special mention. He is the author of many neologisms which later became part of Standard Lithuanian. With the publication of the four volumes of his works 1979— 1992, linguists now have access to the scholar’s scientific and practical works which present great value and interest to modern linguistics. 11