A. Salio kalbinė veikla

A. SALYS’S LINGUISTIC WORK Last year, the prominent linguist A. Salys, a member of the older generation, died. He had made a deep furrow in Lithuanian linguistics. He distinguished himself in various fields of Lithuanian language scholarship: he studied Lithuanian dialects and the history of the language, compiled dictionaries, developed Lithuanian terminology, and more. In the future, it would be useful for us to give a comprehensive account of A. Salys’s linguistic work and to examine in detail what new and significant contributions he made to the study of the Lithuanian language. For now, we will briefly mention A. Salys’s most important linguistic works and his contributions to Lithuanian linguistics. A. Salys was born in 1902 in Reketė, in the Kretinga district. From 1923 to 1925 he studied Lithuanian and comparative linguistics at Kaunas University; from 1925 to 1929 he studied Baltic and Slavic studies and comparative linguistics in Leipzig; and in 1929 he studied experimental phonetics in Hamburg. After returning to Lithuania, he held professorships at the universities of Kaunas and Vilnius until 1943, where he taught the principal disciplines of Lithuanian language scholarship (Lithuanian dialectology, an introduction to Baltic linguistics, the history of the language, and others), contributing greatly to the development of linguistic scholarship and training a large group of teachers specializing in Lithuanian studies, researchers of the Lithuanian language, and advocates of language culture. After leaving Lithuania, he worked at the universities of Greifswald and Tübingen from 1944 to 1946. From 1947, he was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he taught Slavic and Baltic studies, thereby popularizing Lithuanian studies in the United States and drawing a number of American linguists into the study of the Lithuanian language. The best known to us among them is V. Šmolstygas. A. Salys was not a scholar confined to his study. He maintained extensive scholarly contacts with linguists from various countries, was a member of several international linguistic societies, an editor and contributor to linguistic journals, and editor of the linguistics section of the Lithuanian encyclopedia published in the United States. A. Salys took an active part in scholarly organizational work: from 1939 to 1941 he headed the Lithuanian Language Section of the Institute of Lithuanian Studies; from 1941 to 1944 he was director of the Institute of the Lithuanian Language; and he served as chair and member of various terminology commissions, as a member of the surnames and place-names commission, and in other roles. A. Salys’s linguistic work was wide-ranging, intensive, and productive. He made significant contributions to dialectology, lexicography, onomastics, terminology, language culture, and other fields, thereby contributing greatly to the development of Lithuanian language scholarship. A. Salys accomplished a great deal in his study of Lithuanian dialects. When Lithuanian dialectology began to be taught at the university, it became essential to prepare a handbook of Lithuanian dialectology so that students specializing in Lithuanian studies would have a resource for learning about the dialects of the Lithuanian language. The information about Lithuanian dialects and their classification published by J. Juška, A. Baranauskas, K. Jaunius, and others could not serve as a substitute for a textbook of Lithuanian dialectology, and A. Salys enthusiastically undertook the task of preparing a survey course on Lithuanian dialects. He collected dialectological material himself and sought to involve students and teachers in the work. For this purpose, he prepared several extensive questionnaires for collecting dialectological material and sent them to various scientific institutions and schools— 257 —as well as schools. Together with others, he also worked to organize specialized dialectology courses, which trained a considerable number of dialect describers who were expected to do much in the future to advance the study of Lithuanian dialects. To provide dialectologists and other linguists with phonetic training, A. Salys established a phonetics laboratory at Kaunas University, which helped students become better acquainted with dialect phonetics. The result of several years of intensive work was A. Salys’s course on Lithuanian dialects, a summary of which, “Lithuanian Dialects,” was published in 1935. It presented a detailed classification of dialects and highlighted the phonetic and other features of individual dialects. The course was also used during the Soviet period; it will be important for the study of the history of Lithuanian dialectology as well. A. Salys successfully continued the historical studies of Lithuanian dialects begun by A. Baranauskas and others, and published the first part of his dissertation, “Žemaičių tarmės” [Samogitian Dialects] (in German, 1930), devoted to questions concerning the formation (history) of the Samogitian linguistic area. In addition to this work in historical dialectology, A. Salys published several articles on the history of dialects. Having become involved in the study of Lithuanian dialects, A. Salys also undertook the editing and publication of descriptions of individual dialects. The second volume in the series of dialect monographs “Lietuvių kalbos tarmės” [Lithuanian Dialects], P. Jonikas’s “Pagramančio tarmė” [The Pagramantis Dialect] (1939), was published under his editorship. In the postwar years, A. Salys’s works on dialectology helped students specializing in Lithuanian studies become acquainted with the fundamentals of Lithuanian dialectology and with methods for describing dialects. These methods were passed on to a new generation of linguists by A. Salys’s former students J. Senkus, E. Mikalauskaitė, and others. This made it possible to expand and carry out dialectological work rapidly: collecting material from more than 700 localities for an atlas of Lithuanian dialects, describing individual dialects, and preparing a comprehensive work on Lithuanian dialects. A. Salys also made a significant contribution to Lithuanian lexicography. He was one of the authors and editors of volume two of the five-volume “Lietuvių rašomosios kalbos žodynas” [Dictionary of the Lithuanian Written Language], which included German equivalents and was published in Heidelberg from 1932 to 1968. From the third volume onward, A. Salys supplied much vocabulary from the vernacular, especially from the Samogitian dialect, substantially enriching the Lithuanian section of the dictionary. This is one of the largest dictionaries of the Lithuanian language; in the number of words, it is greatly surpassed only by the academic “Lietuvių kalbos žodynas” [Dictionary of the Lithuanian Language], which is currently being published. The German equivalents enable scholars of Indo-European languages to use the above-mentioned dictionary by A. Salys and other authors; previously, their largest sources for Lithuanian vocabulary were the dictionaries of G. Nesselmann and Fr. Kurschat, which contained several times fewer words. For several decades, A. Salys collected material for a historical dictionary of the Lithuanian language, hoping to trace the development of its vocabulary and the history of words from the earliest times to the present day. To this end, he visited Soviet Lithuania in 1969 and collected material for his planned dictionary from the card index of the academic “Lietuvių kalbos žodynas” [Dictionary of the Lithuanian Language] and other sources. He said he would try to prepare a small historical dictionary, covering chiefly the vocabulary of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, whose cultivation and standardization he himself had actively participated in. It is regrettable that A. Salys’s plan was never realized. A. Salys also contributed to the preparation and improvement of the great “Lietuvių kalbos žodynas” [Dictionary of the Lithuanian Language]. For several years, he was a member of the Dictionary’s scholarly commission and actively partici- 258 while raising and considering various lexicographic questions that remain relevant even today (e.g., transcribing words and expressions recorded in dialect into literary language, identifying borrowings and homonyms, presenting adjectives that have become nouns, etc.). A. Salys devoted much attention to collecting, compiling dictionaries of, and studying proper names (personal names, place names, names of bodies of water, tribal names, etc.). There are hundreds of thousands of such names in the Lithuanian language. K. Būga collected a considerable number of them and began to study them, greatly valuing the “language of the land” as an important source for learning about the nation’s past. Among those who continued K. Būga’s work, one of the most active was A. Salys, a member of the Commission for Surnames and Place Names, established in 1933. After the publication of the “Instructions for Recording the Names of Lithuania’s Land” (1934), with the assistance of teachers, foresters, land surveyors, students, and others, most of the collection had been gathered by 1940; it is now preserved, expanded, and studied at the Institute of the Lithuanian Language and Literature. A. Salys was also highly productive in developing and standardizing Lithuanian terminology. He was a government adviser on terminology, chaired and served on several terminology commissions, and coined various scientific and technical terms. With his keen, quick linguistic intuition and deep feel for language, he readily and swiftly found the necessary term in folk speech or coined one himself. He used hundreds of folk words in narrower, broader, or figurative senses, and over time they became terms, for example: slogutis “nightmare,” nuospaudas “power press,” grūdalas “hardening mortar,” prašvaitas “illuminated area in a photographic negative,” and so on. He also successfully coined many terms that became established in usage, for example: požiūris, šviesomatis, tolimatis, išvaizta, sąnara, staigmena and so on. A. Salys was also concerned with cultivating and standardizing the literary language and with other matters of language culture. He closely followed the development of the literary language and responded quickly and vividly to language issues requiring correction that arose in language practice, especially in the press. To address the needs of language practice, he and others began publishing the language periodical “Gimtoji kalba,” in which he actively contributed, examining various practical language issues. Some of his published articles remain interesting today because they address relevant questions, such as Lithuanian names, tribal names, abbreviations, and others. In one of the daily newspapers, A. Salys launched a “Language Column” that paid constant attention to everyday language use, corrected language, offered new words and terms, and advised readers on how to use various words and constructions. To help people learn accentuation, A. Salys marked the accents in parts I and II of the chrestomathy “Vargo mokyklai.” Thus, A. Salys contributed greatly to expanding the fields of Lithuanian linguistics, organizing and carrying out new research, training linguistic personnel, and promoting language culture. While in exile, in his final years he maintained close ties with the Institute of the Lithuanian Language and Literature and with linguists in Soviet Lithuania, followed and positively evaluated their work, and had visited his homeland to collect linguistic material. His native land and native language, whose study he had devoted himself to wholeheartedly, always drew him back. A. Salys enriched Lithuanian linguistics with significant works that our philologists use and will continue to use for a long time, respectfully remembering their author, who contributed so much to the science of Lithuanian studies. J. Kruოპas