LIETUVIŲ KALBOTYROS KLAUSIMAI, XXX (1993) PERIFERINĖS LIETUVIŲ KALBOS TARMĖS

Aloyzas VIDUGIRIS

P. ARUMAA’S CONTRIBUTION TO THE STUDY OF SOUTHEASTERN LITHUANIAN DIALECTS

Peter Arumaa (hereafter Aruma) remains the most prominent Estonian Balticist to this day. He has secured a firm place in the history of Lithuanian linguistics through his works, the best known of which are “Lithuanian Dialect Texts from the Vilnius Region with Grammatical Notes” (1930) and “Studies in the History of Lithuanian Personal Pronouns” (1933). His other, no less important, works, both major (e.g., “Proto-Slavic Grammar,” 1964) and minor, are also significant. For Lithuanian dialectology, however, as for Lithuanian linguistics in general, the most valuable are the texts from southeastern Lithuanian dialects that Aruma collected and published, as well as those that remained unpublished; these dialects are now disappearing at an extraordinarily rapid pace, one after another. It is regrettable that a scholar who contributed so much to Lithuanian studies is still too little known, both in Lithuania and in Estonia. Interest in Aruma’s work and personality was prompted by a trip to Tartu in the spring of 1988, where many dialect texts in Lithuanian, handwritten by him (about 900 notebook pages), were found.

Aruma was keenly aware of the plight of the southeastern Lithuanian dialects, occupied by Poland and brutally devastated, and of their extraordinary importance for linguistics. The southeastern fringes of the Lithuanian language area are distinguished by an exceptional variety of dialects, captivating archaisms, and the distinctive innovations that arose through close contact with Slavic languages (first Belarusian, then Polish, and now Russian). Here, every parish, and sometimes even every village, has a different dialect, however small. Suffice it to mention the incomparable, historically evolved mosaic of dialects in present-day eastern and southeastern Lithuania (the districts of Zarasai, Ignalina, Švenčionys, Molėtai, Vilnius, Trakai, Šalčininkai, Varėna, and others) and in northwestern Belarus (in the Breslauja district: the areas around Apsas, Breslauja, Pelekoniai, and Vidžiai; in the Pastovys district: around Jūravas, Kamojai, and Lentupis; in the Astravas district: around Gervėčiai, Rimdžiūnai, and Kliukščionys; in the Vija district: around Bókštas, Dūdos, and Lazūnai; in the Varenavas district: around Armoniškės, Asavõs, Balatnõs, or Varenavas, Benekainiai, Kaulėliškės, Nočia, Pelesõs, Ródūnia, and Žirmūnai; in the Gardinas district: around Ašiūžia, Pariečė, and Pérvalkas; and in the Diatlovo, or Zietela, district and its environs). And how many more localities now in Belarus remain where, until the beginning of the 20th century, people spoke Lithuanian to a greater or lesser degree, but which had either not previously been systematically studied or had not even been visited by a linguist (e.g., in the Astravas district: around Bistryčia, Kiemeliškės, Mikališkės, and Varnionys; in the Ašmena district: Graūžiškės,

8

Klevėčia, and Palionys; in the Smurgainys district: Salos and Sniegonys; in the Vijôs district: Geranainiai, Lipniškės, Subātinkai, Surviliškiai, and Takoriškės, etc.).

It is hard to think of another language, at least in Europe, that has a comparable diversity of dialects. This is a phenomenon not only of the Lithuanian language but of our culture as a whole. Yet it is also hard to think of anywhere else where Lithuanian dialects have been—and essentially continue to be—destroyed and devastated for a second century, as they have here, both in northwestern Belarus and in southeastern Lithuania, where Lithuanians have been reduced to a minority. Here, every dialect, however small, is a living document of the Lithuanian ethnic affiliation of those places, in its originality and uniqueness. Unfortunately, the history of the southeastern fringes of the Lithuanian language area is also a living history not only of the disappearance of our dialects, but of the contraction of the Lithuanian ethnic territory, a process most often determined by the policies of more powerful neighbors and by our kinspeople, who, under the influence of those policies, have become or are becoming assimilated.

Thus, Aruma’s work as a linguist should be assessed in this light. In the history of the study of these Lithuanian dialects, he left an indelible mark not only as a scholar and researcher, but also as a kind of chronicler and diplomat of this region.

Aruma was a linguist of broad interests and thorough training. He was born on October 11, 1900 (September 28, Old Style), in Estonia, near Tartu, in the town of Piltsama (now a district center), into a craftsman’s family. He graduated from the Tartu Gymnasium in 1920 and entered the Faculty of History and Philology at the University of Tartu in 1921, graduating with a master’s degree in 1927. At the university he studied Indo-European linguistics, Slavic philology, and Finno-Ugric philology. The professor of Slavic languages was L. Masing, whose linguistic works from his youth had interested Antanas Baranauskas, a man of nine talents who had immersed himself in linguistics at the time. Indo-European linguistics was taught by Professor E. Kiekers. Upon his death in 1938, Aruma was destined to occupy his former professor’s chair and head the Department of Indo-European Languages. From his gymnasium years onward, Aruma was interested in Finno-Ugric languages: Estonian and its dialects, and later Finnish, Hungarian, Uralic Finnic, Livonian, and others. Most importantly, it was at the University of Tartu that he began his career as a Balticist, writing a diploma thesis entitled “О порядке слов в литовском языке, место глагола в начальном предложении”.

After his studies, having received a foreign scholarship, he pursued further training in Berlin for three years, attending Schultze’s lectures on Greek, German, Lithuanian, and Sanskrit; M. Vasmer’s lectures on Slavic philology; H. Lüders’s on Sanskrit; J. Pokorn’s on Celtic languages; and J. Marchwart’s on Persian. He spent a fourth year in Lithuania and Poland, gathering material for his doctoral dissertation. In 1931–1932 he continued his studies in Prague, attending lectures on Slavic languages by Professors S. Smetanka, M. Weinhart, J. Torak, and O. Hujer. He worked in the libraries of Danzig (Gdańsk), Königsberg, Kaunas, and Vilnius, and also studied the dialects of the southeastern fringes of the Lithuanian language area.

From 1933, P. Aruma taught Russian literature and Slavic philology at the University of Tartu. In 1934 he defended his doctoral dissertation and was appointed extraordinary professor of Slavic philology at the University of Tartu. In 1939, Aruma was awarded a professorship in Slavic philology and comparative Indo-European linguistics

9

the title of an ordinary professor. While working at the university, he studied Russian dialects in Estonia and participated in Slavist congresses held abroad. He was secretary of the Estonian Learned Society, edited a Swedish–Estonian dictionary, compiled and edited a collection of Estonian scholarly works (“Liber saecularis”), and more. That Aruma was esteemed as a Balticist is also shown by the fact that in 1938 the Latvian Society of Philologists in Riga elected him a corresponding member¹. In 1940–1941, having incurred considerable displeasure from Soviet officials because of his person (as can be seen from the several autobiographies he wrote in beautiful Russian), and with the front drawing nearer, P. Aruma emigrated to Sweden in 1944, where he died in 1982.

Fortunately, a large body of dialect texts collected by P. Aruma has survived. Most of the texts were recorded in dialects on the outskirts of the southeastern Lithuanian-speaking area: Gervėčiai, Lazūnai, Dieveniškės, and Zietela; fewer came from the villages of Kargaudai and Klaišiai in the vicinity of Ródūnia, and from the village of Ramaškonys in the vicinity of Kamojai. A few texts were also recorded in the so-called main Lithuanian dialect areas, around Jurbarkas, Utena, and elsewhere. Most are continuous folktales; there are fewer songs and various narratives, and occasionally individual sentences, words, and inflectional and conjugational paradigms. The texts are accent-marked and written in pencil in neat, even handwriting, using simplified transcription. Thus, the dialect texts collected by Aruma are important not only to Lithuanian dialectology and linguistics in general, but also to folklore, ethnography, and other fields.

Aruma fairly quickly prepared some of the dialect texts he had collected and published them within a short time, with an introduction written in German and extensive grammatical notes, as “Litauische mundartliche. Texte aus der Wilnaer Gegend. Mit grammatischen Anmerkungen” (Dorpat, 1930). This was the first scientifically prepared collection of Lithuanian dialect texts. Here, texts from the areas around Dieveniškės, Gervėčiai, Lazūnai, and Zietela are presented in almost equal numbers. The texts were recorded relatively well, despite the rather complex transcription. Balticists gained a handbook whose importance has not diminished to this day. On the contrary, its significance is increasing. After all, Aruma recorded the texts at a time when traditional dialects were still naturally in use in all the places mentioned. In the families of many villages in those areas, people of every generation still spoke Lithuanian.

It is regrettable only that Aruma did not publish all the Lithuanian dialect texts he had collected. The question arises as to why the collection mentioned above did not also include texts recorded in the dialects of the nearby outlying areas around Ródūnia and Kamojai. Perhaps he had too few of them, and did not have time to collect more. Or were other factors involved?

It should be remembered that at the same time Aruma was also writing his doctoral dissertation, “Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der litauischen Personalpronomina,” published in Tartu in 1933. (Aruma dedicated this work to the Lithuanian Scientific Society of Vilnius. K. Avižonis, P. Skardžius, Chr. S. Stang, and F. Specht commented on it in one way or another.) This substantial study, of more than 300 pages, examines chiefly rare forms of personal pronouns, of which the author collected a great many

¹The data were taken from Aruma’s autobiographies, written in Russian and Estonian for various assessment commissions in 1941, which are held in the Manuscripts Department of the Tartu University Library. Further biographical information on P. Aruma is also available at the Tartu Central State Historical Archive (F. 2100. Ap. 2. B. 662) and at the Kreutzwald Literary Museum in Tartu.

10

from old Lithuanian writings. It is astonishing how thoroughly he had studied the old texts—not only those of Mažvydas, Bretkūnas, Daukša, Sirvydas, and Morkūnas, but also the lesser nineteenth-century monuments of Lithuanian writing. Most strikingly, Aruma found the greatest number of counterparts to the various forms of personal pronouns collected from old texts in the dialects of Gervėčiai, Lazūnai, and Zietela, and fewer in Dieveniškės. This seems to have determined the author’s decision, when publishing the collected texts, to limit himself to the dialects of the places mentioned. It would appear, then, that Aruma’s published dialect texts, together with the frequent comparisons in the grammatical notes between forms of these dialects and corresponding data from old written monuments, constitute a kind of supplement to the dissertation and its first substantial publication on the dissertation’s subject.

The texts collected by Aruma, especially those from the outlying Lithuanian dialects, are of immense importance. The once fully viable dialects of Lazūnai and Zietela were already dying out in the postwar years, when Lithuanian linguists began studying them. The Zietela dialect has now disappeared entirely; the last days of its existence are being lived out by a few elderly people in the Lazūnai area who know Lithuanian. The Kamojai and Ródūnia dialects are on the verge of extinction. The areas where Lithuanian is spoken are shrinking ever further around Dieveniškės, Gervėčiai, and Pelesa.

Moreover, not only is the number of Lithuanian speakers declining here, but the local dialects themselves are becoming greatly impoverished and deteriorating. Even people who spoke Lithuanian from early childhood have often already forgotten their language to some extent and speak a distorted dialect. The erosion of traditional dialects, most often caused by the assimilation of the population, is evident at every level of language: phonetics, morphology, lexis, and syntax. Therefore, by comparing the material recorded by Aruma with that gathered by later researchers, it is possible to determine how the levels of these dialects have changed. Admittedly, doing so without specialized studies would not be easy. Aruma’s complex printed transcription would need to be deciphered in detail. Differences in the morphological and lexical strata are somewhat more evident. Changes in the morphological stratum have affected, to a greater or lesser extent, almost all the linguists who later wrote about these dialects (J. Senkus, Z. Zinkevičius, E. Grinaveckienė, A. Jonaitytė, J. Kardelytė, T. Sudnik, and others).

More can be said about lexis. Here we will be content to mention one or two words recorded by Aruma in the Zietela dialect that are the only entries of their kind in the index-card file for the Zietela dictionary—that is, they were not recorded or attested by other researchers. Thus, Aruma’s recorded texts reveal little-heard words or meanings (e.g., kliūnkti “to chirp, sing (of a nightingale)”; salaujys kliunkia; metinykas “a being that governs the seasons,” miegulys “sleepiness,” plėstelėti “to slap,” etc.); ordinary or rarer prefixed or suffixed derivatives (e.g., iškloti, pralėkti, insilip(y)ti “to cling on,” mėlynumas, etc.); and various loanwords or hybrids (e.g., kalina “viburnum,” karanačia // karanavōnė “crowning, coronation,” karanavōtis “to crown oneself,” karonà “wreath, crown,” machtelėti “to wave,” etc.). There are also words with a different stem or accentuation (e.g., klonis instead of the currently usual klõnis, etc.).

It is regrettable only that not all the texts recorded by Aruma have come down to us, having suffered the ravages of war, as did their author. And yet so little more was needed for these texts all

11

would have perished. They were saved by a friend of Lithuanian linguists, Academician of the Estonian Academy of Sciences and professor at the University of Tartu, Paul Ariste. After the war, Arumaa’s now-empty apartment was ransacked. The floors of all the rooms and the corridor were strewn with the notes and torn pages of books left behind when the professor suddenly fled². The tragedy is also attested by the dialect texts that survived with considerable gaps and jumbled pages; many sheets were crumpled and trampled. For example, the Zietela texts alone, scattered across five locations in a folder of manuscripts, were numbered by the author himself up to page 141, but about 20–30 pages are missing. The Lazūnai dialect texts, according to their new numbering (apparently as P. Ariste gathered them from the floor), ended up in four locations, while the Dieveniškės and Gervėčiai texts were in two. Only fragments—just a few pages each—remain of the texts collected in the Kamojai and Rodūnia areas.

In general, when reading the texts Arumaa wrote in a clear, beautiful hand, one cannot help marveling at how wonderfully he knew Lithuanian. If you did not know, you would never guess that they had been written by a non-Lithuanian. All the more, therefore, do you feel gratitude and affection for this Estonian scholar of enviable diligence, who remained faithful to Baltic (as well as Slavic) studies to the end of his life³.

Moreover, when Aruma traveled to southeastern Lithuania, then part of Poland, he often acted as a kind of envoy of Lithuania and ambassador of the Vilnius Region. It is said that he would often convey to cultural and educational societies in the Vilnius Region donations collected in Lithuania, transporting them via Czechoslovakia, Danzig, and Latvia, since Lithuania had no direct diplomatic relations with Poland at the time. Even now, the elderly people of Dieveniškės and the Rodūnia area speak very warmly of Arumaa. The Zietela teacher K. Juodienė used to mention him often. And this is no wonder: Lithuanian was forbidden, persecuted, and disparaged by Polish officials and nobles, while a young foreigner who came there addressed the oppressed in their mother tongue. Here Aruma won sincere friends and helpers. This is evidenced by the correspondence of the Gervėčiai peasant Petrikas and a notebook of stories written in dialect. P. Aruma is called here a highly respected, dearest friend of the Lithuanians, a close friend, benefactor, and advocate. These are truly moving words.

P. Aruma, a broad-ranging linguist, specialist in Baltic and Slavic languages, and Indo-Europeanist, had earned international recognition. As a Baltist, however, he erected his greatest monument through his research into the southeastern dialects of Lithuanian. Alongside scholars of other nations such as E. Volteris, O. Brochas, Chr. S. Stangas, J. Rozwadowskis, V. Porzeziński, J. Otębski, G. Gerullis, E. Fraenkelis, and the Lithuanians K. Būga, J. Jablonskis, J. Balčikonis, J. Senkus, and others, P. Arumaa undoubtedly occupies one of the most distinguished places in terms of the importance of his work.

²The author of these lines was told about this by Prof. P. Ariste on April 14, 1988. This is also partly evident from the entry on the first page of the folder of texts /Shelfmark ERA Leedu 3/.

³For more on P. Arumaa’s linguistic work, see A. Sabaliauskas. Lietuvių kalbos tyrinėjimo istorija iki 1940m. V., 1979. P. 233-235.

12

P. ARUMAA’S CONTRIBUTION TO THE STUDY OF THE SOUTHEASTERN DIALECTS OF THE LITHUANIAN LANGUAGE

Summary

The article examines the research on the Lithuanian language conducted by the most renowned Estonian Baltist, Peter Arumaa. Particular attention is devoted to his records of texts from Dievēniškės, Gervėčiai, Kamojai, Lazūnai, Ródūnia, Žietela, and other rapidly vanishing southeastern dialects of the Lithuanian language, which are of great importance for linguistic research. (P. Ariste, another trusted friend of the Lithuanian language, saved most of these manuscripts from destruction during the Second World War and handed them over to the Kreutzwald Literature Museum in the city of Tartu.) The article highlights P. Arumaa’s cultural and diplomatic activities, which were important for eastern Lithuania.

13