Rita Miliūnaitė. „Ką manote apie nepriesagines moterų pavardes?“

ALDONA PAULAUSKIENĖ Vilnius University Research areas: grammatical theory, the history of grammatical scholarship, sociolinguistics. Rita Miliūnaitė WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT WOMEN’S NON-SUFFIXAL SURNAMES? Vilnius: Lietuvių kalbos institutas, 2013, 359 p. ISBN 978-609-411-090-0 The study’s title poses a timely and noteworthy question. Why is it so timely when we have been free and independent for more than two decades? Because Lithuanian women’s non-suffixal surnames (declinable and indeclinable) are foreign to our language, and their formation with the ending -ė goes against Lithuanian customs and established language norms. In 1979, Justinas Marcinkevičius spoke to the nation in poetic words: We are small, so small! It goes on and on I embrace your name: through our rye fields, where can we put it through our language—our desire to live, we are small, so small, where can we hide and oh, how great the desire to endure! our hope of being? “Ablinga’s Tear” Where did that great desire to endure suddenly disappear? Why was it replaced by the desire not to be, to disappear into the vast world? Why do many people now think our language ugly and impoverished, our women’s surnames ugly, and, in general, why do we not want to remain ourselves? If we are not ourselves, we will impoverish more than just ourselves. The disappearance of any nation’s language and culture is a great loss to the whole world. Women’s non-suffixal surnames are only a small part of the Lithuanians’ great desire to disappear. Rita Miliūnaitė has given us an excellent study of what people thought and still think about Lithuanian women’s surnames, and what motivates changing or retaining them. After reading it, one feels like addressing everyone with a transformed sentence from the first Lithuanian book: Take it and read! And as you read it, understand it! Do not merely understand it—act, if you want to endure. You are now mistakenly convinced that nothing bad can happen to the Lithuanian language, but it has already happened. And first of all, get to work, linguists! Learn, 324 Acta Linguistica Lithuanica LXIX Rita Miliūnaitė Ką manote apie nepriesagines moterų pavardes? …your homeland and its people’s history, customs, language, and the influences of foreign languages and cultures, and assess soberly everything that has happened and is still happening. For now, you are merely passive observers. The authorities declared Lithuanian the state language, established the State Commission of the Lithuanian Language under the Seimas of the Republic of Lithuania, and washed their hands of the matter, taking no interest in what the Commission has or what it can do. Miliūnaitė has written a timely and, in every respect, beautiful book. What pure feminine beauty on the cover! The cover reflects the beauty and perfection of the book itself: its excellent composition and high standard of writing determine its objectivity and appeal, as the subject of inquiry is clearly defined, its aims and objectives are set out, and the possible consequences of unsuccessful codification are considered. The book’s very title poses the question: “What do you think about women’s surnames without suffixes?” It also raises a number of other questions: After official permission has been granted for women to have surnames without suffixes, can the former system still be defended? If so, how? If not, why not? And why is the native language being regulated so unwisely on the model of foreign languages? The author’s experience, expressed in the book’s dedication, is worth noting: “[...] keeping her maiden name for a quarter of a century has caused no discriminatory experiences, obstacles, or, still less, various complexes in her life.” Yet, drawing on scholarship and folk linguistics, the study reaches a disheartening conclusion: “[...] the feminist revolt against suffixes in women’s surnames gradually developed into a revolt against the entire Lithuanian surname system as part of Lithuanian identity” (p. 319). Let us not be afraid of the term folk linguistics because the word folk has been dragged through the mud for more than half a century. The word is Lithuanian, was used by Simonas Daukantas, and was also recorded in the Dusetos region, where it meant ‘a crowd, a large group of people’ (Dictionary of the Lithuanian Language VII 391). Alongside professional medicine there is folk medicine, and alongside professional linguistics there is folk linguistics, because people feel they already know everything about themselves: they can treat themselves, decide for themselves what their language should be, and regard an inherited surname as their own property, like an object. Every healthy person has a language, but language belongs not to an individual alone, but to society; therefore, that person’s surname, too, belongs to the language. An individual can create only a pseudonym of their own choosing. A well-chosen pseudonym can often conceal a famous person’s real surname from the public. Thus some people may not know the real surnames of Maironis, Vaižgantas, Krėvė, Vienuolis, or Žemaitė. Just as folk medicine cannot replace professional medicine, folk linguistics cannot replace professional linguistics. The folk-linguistic reasons for changing surnames are incompatible with professional linguistics. Can changing surnames bring about any kind of gender equality? In seeking equality, inequality is created, because the innate roles of men and women do not coincide and cannot coincide: men will never give birth to children. In many countries, women face discrimination regardless of their surnames. So why is such a revolt against the surnames of Lithuanian women necessary? Recenzijos / Reviews 325 ALDONA PAULAUSKIENĖ Zigmas Zinkevičius’s and Antanas Salys’s observations show that there was a time when Lithuanian women’s surnames differed from men’s only in their endings (Daugirdas – Daugirda, Derkintis – Derkintė), though it is unclear how widespread this was. The area borders Latvia, where Latvian women’s surnames are consistently formed with two endings (-a and -e) (Ozols – Ozola, Kalnačs – Kalnača, Rozenbergs – Rozenberga; Balodis – Balode, Rudzītis – Rudzīte, Ceplītis – Ceplīte), which do not indicate family affiliation. Yet no Lithuanian linguist has drawn attention to the simpler forms of Latvian men’s surnames, which permit regular formation of women’s surnames by adding an ending. Lithuanian men’s surnames have more varied suffixes and endings than Latvian ones. Therefore, the proposed single ending -ė cannot be used to form women’s surnames regularly from them. Interestingly, the suffix -ienė works with all Lithuanian men’s surnames, but would any of the young, beautiful women want a surname with this suffix, which has already acquired an almost indelible association in our minds with being married? Miliūnaitė’s study includes both a proposal to use it for all women’s surnames and the argument that it calls to mind an old, withered hag—even though a married woman may still be young and beautiful, and we will all grow old without exception. Today, linguistic scholarship is as far removed from Lithuanian-speaking society (and even from some linguists) as one star is from another. What can one say about a linguist who links a woman’s surname without a suffix even to Proto-Baltic, when Lithuanian surnames in general date from a fairly late period (the Lithuanian dukes had no surnames), and women’s surnames are later still than men’s? Miliūnaitė’s study begins by defining its subject, research methods, and aims, and by examining the scholarship that explains how Lithuanian surnames came into being. It draws on the scholarly works of Zigmas Zinkevičius, Meilutė Ramonienė, Vitalija Macijauskienė, Alma Ragauskaitė, and others. The bibliography includes all the linguists and non-linguists who have publicly expressed their views on women’s surnames. The account also records the views of our father of linguistics, Jonas Jablonskis, on women’s surnames without suffixes. But accounts are not documents: some suggest that Jablonskis looked favorably on them (p. 50). He discussed a rather stout young woman, Deveikytė, with Juozas Senkus, saying that the surname Deveikė would suit her better, and that the surnames of grown women should be used without diminutive suffixes. Jablonskis is also said to have called Vosylyte “Vosyle,” though it is unclear in what circumstances: whether he said it directly to her or only when speaking with others. I was on very close terms with Brone Vosylyte for a long time and heard many stories about Jablonskis, but she never once mentioned that he had called her Vosyle. Senkus recounts Jablonskis’s opinion: the village people were right to call the little Senkus Senkiukas, but the primary school was wrong to call the little peppercorn Senkum. In today’s discussions, Albinas Petrulis recalls a completely opposite statement by Jablonskis (p. 54): that only promiscuous women are given nicknames using surnames without suffixes. 326 Acta Linguistica Lithuanica LXIX Rita Miliūnaitė Ką manote apie nepriesagines moterų pavardes? Jablonskis may have said it one way or another, since he not only wrote grammars but also listened attentively to people’s everyday spoken language. And people may have called a woman who had grown up and was already somewhat withered by a non-suffix surname; they may have equated the suffixes in adult girls’ surnames with the diminutive and affectionate suffixes of common nouns and felt that they did not suit a withered woman. Little boys have certainly also been called, and are still called, Senkiukais, Vitkauskiukais, Jonaičiukais, indicating that they are not grown-up, not independent, and still belong to the Senkai, Vitkauskai, Jonaičiai families. Yet no one ever proposed entering diminutive forms of men’s surnames in official documents on the grounds that the boys would eventually grow up, marry, leave their parents, and become heads of other families; their surnames would then be used to form their wives’ and daughters’ surnames, and the little boys in their families, too, would be called by diminutive surname forms until they grew up and started families of their own. Jablonskis, a professional linguist, had grounds for saying that no reforms should be made to the established surname system, and that only promiscuous women were given nicknames using non-suffix surnames. And we should believe this, because in Jablonskis’s time the moral values of Lithuanian families were still very strong. The diminutive suffixes in Lithuanian surnames do not have a diminutive meaning. In women’s surnames they indicate belonging to a family, while in men’s they are entirely meaningless: Labutis, Seibutis, Urbutis, Gražulis, Balčytis, Saulytis, Antanėlis, Kunigėlis, and so on. To better understand the difference in meaning between proper and common nouns, let us compare two surnames that seem to have directly opposite meanings: Didžiulis and Mažiulis. A very small person can have the surname Didžiulis, while Mažiulis may be a tall, well-built man. Surnames belong to the same system of names as the names of cities, rivers, and lakes, and differ in their semantic properties from common nouns. On p. 117, Miliūnaitė writes that the discussions at the beginning of the 21st century did not make full use of the potential of the arguments advanced in 20th-century discussions. We are such that what concerns us most is not what someone once said or is still saying, but that we ourselves want to put forward our one and only truth. This study by Miliūnaitė is the first to present a wide variety of arguments, but whether anyone will make use of the potential of the rational arguments she brings to light remains doubtful, because we very often fail to notice the insights of individuals. In the 1967 discussion, Kazys Ulvydas wrote most sensibly (pp. 62–63). Who could say how his good sense should have been conveyed to society? Jonas Kazlauskas agreed with him, but Aleksas Girdenis, for example, saw no linguistic problems here: add the ending -ė as much as you like. At first Degutė, Girdenė, Vanagė, Skiauterė, Kačerauskė may seem a little strange, but “since there is nothing non-Lithuanian in these surnames, they would easily become established over time” (p. 65). Ulvydas made no mistakes, whereas Girdenis did. This depended on the times in which they lived and matured, on their age, and on how deeply they had grasped the essence of the matter. Recenzijos / Reviews 327 ALDONA PAULAUSKIENĖ Ulvydas saw no influence or possibility for anyone, by force of will, to interfere with the natural processes by which linguistic phenomena take shape and develop. He is convinced that what is native, distinctive, and beautiful in a language should be valued and protected. It is not surnames but the social order that changes attitudes toward married and unmarried women. He does not equate personal names with pairs of occupational terms (daktaras – daktarė), much less with animal terms (vilkas – vilkė), whereas Girdenis argues that these very examples show that non-suffix surnames for women do not conflict with the nature of the Lithuanian language (p. 64). In Girdenis’s view, only one minor linguistic detail would be inconvenient: if a man’s surname were Dirsė, Lapė, Kupė, Rutė, Ružė, Tupė, Žylė, then a woman’s surname would no longer differ from a man’s. But ultimately Girdenis’s conclusion promises no upheaval either, because the reason for changing women’s surnames is social, not linguistic, and therefore everything will remain as it was (p. 64). Thus Ulvydas is closer to sociolinguistics than Girdenis. Miliūnaitė’s study also presents the view that the Poles imposed suffixal maiden surnames for women on us and later abandoned them themselves. Sociolinguistics would refute this, since it studies not only language but also the history, customs, traditions, and folklore of the society that uses it, all of which reveal the norms of social life and family morality. The Lithuanians have an ancient mythological tale, “Eglė, Queen of Serpents.” It probably dates from pagan times, when Lithuanians worshipped trees and did not yet have surnames, yet it already reflects norms governing the formation of a family. Žilvinas is the king of the serpents, and Eglė, his wife, is the queen of the serpents. Their children—three sons and their youngest daughter—have the names of trees: Ąžuolas, Uosis, Beržas and Drebulė. The marriage of Žilvinas and Eglė is based not on love at all, but on deceit and coercion. Eglė promised to marry the serpent in order to get her shirt back, and then the serpents managed, only on their third attempt, to carry her away by force from her parents’ home. Eglė was happy in her own home, but she also missed her parents, brothers, and sisters and wanted only to visit them. With a wise woman’s help, after overcoming seemingly insurmountable obstacles, she was allowed by her husband to go on the condition that she not mention his name. She did not mention it, nor did her sons betray him, but her daughter did. After Žilvinas’s death, Eglė still did not return to her parents’ home, because there is no way back to the parental family for a married woman. She cursed her daughter, enchanted her sons and herself, and they all turned into trees. That, then, is how the family is structured. Sons remain loyal to their father, while daughters leave their parents’ home. The Lithuanian language reflects the difference between men’s and women’s nature and position in the family: men marry, while women wed (leave their parents’ home), take their husband’s surname, and become their husband’s property. This also accords with the tenth commandment of God. Even now, when that commandment has been worded somewhat differently, without emphasizing that a wife is just as much her husband’s property as a donkey or an object, men still dislike it when a girl makes advances to them, throws herself at them, and wants to dominate them. They find her uninteresting, because their nature demands that they obtain a wife by overcoming obstacles. In nature, males fight over females. You can see how far sociolinguistics can stray from the science of language as we all understand it. The system of Lithuanian women’s surnames was shaped by society’s (the community’s) view of the family as a natural—and indeed sacred—unit. And that was right. Let us examine 328 Acta Linguistica Lithuanica LXIX Rita Miliūnaitė Ką manote apie nepriesagines moterų pavardes? their wedding customs. They show that love was not the most important thing; wisdom was: care was taken to ensure that the family being formed could lead a normal life, have a roof over their heads and daily bread. Parents usually chose whom their children should marry: they assembled dowries for the girls, while the groom’s family would go to inspect the bride and see whether the matchmaker had lied or made anything up. A bride always wept at her wedding, because life with her mother-in-law would not be as good as with her own mother. Few married for love, but families were large and strong: A good husband is like a stone wall. Responsibility for the family and children is shared equally, with work divided according to each person’s abilities. Men ploughed the land, sowed crops, reaped rye, built houses, planted orchards, and took care of all the heavier farm work unsuitable for women, but they never wielded a ladle around the pots. Women prepared food, spun, wove, and stayed closer to the children and the home. Even in the first half of the 20th century, there were no feminists in Lithuania seeking equality between men and women. Nor was love a priority when people married. My parents did not choose a husband for me, since times had changed, but when I asked my mother, as I was getting married, what happens when love fades, she replied: “Don’t look at what passes, just look at what comes.” “And what comes?” “Responsibility for your husband and children comes, along with worries and the warmth of the home, which depends on you.” Vienuolis’s “The Drowned Girl,” from the first half of the 20th century. How deeply and subtly Vienuolis’s talent has entered into the plight of the unhappy Veronika, so that readers imagine that all the people around Veronika were terribly cruel, insensitive, brutal, unjust people (even her father and the young men who had once loved her). In reality, the people around Veronika, who lived in a society where premarital sexual relations were considered promiscuity, a mortal sin, were entirely ordinary. Even the priest refused to absolve her: in full view of the congregation, he sent Veronika away from the confessional. In Soviet times, when I examined prospective students orally with Brone Katiniene, a literature teacher and lecturer at Vilnius University, they would all, without exception, condemn the bourgeois system and people’s ignorance when answering questions about Vienuolis’s “The Drowned Girl.” They would say that in Soviet times Veronika would not have had to kill herself, because the government even supported single mothers and nobody condemned them. Then Katinienė would ask: – But is it really all right in Soviet times for an unmarried girl to have a child? The student being questioned did not know what to answer. They sensed that it was not all right, but also knew that there were many such women, that people viewed them differently now, and that their children were not singled out from the others in any particular way. Much changed in Soviet times: people were driven from the places where they lived, land was collectivized, churches were desecrated, established norms of life were disrupted, and the rights of men and women were made equal. Women, like men, wearing overalls that concealed every beauty and accentuated every flaw, mixed cement, carried bricks, plastered house walls, built and paved roads, and drove trac- Recenzijos / Reviews 329 ALDONA PAULAUSKIENĖ tors. Across the Union, the name of Paša Angelina, the first female Stakhanovite tractor driver, rang out. Is this the kind of equality our modern feminists want, too? Do they want to be alone with a little brood of children? Miliūnaitė noted that none of the discussions or resolutions concerning women’s surnames without suffixes had linguistic grounds. Purely linguistic grounds would not have sufficed. Social linguistics was needed. For instance, in the 1967 discussion of women’s surnames, Girdenis, one of the most gifted Lithuanian linguists, saw no linguistics in the matter at all. The standardization of language carried out in Soviet times could not yet take the place of social linguistics. Now social linguistics seems to be emerging, but it is merely descriptive. It does not seek to answer—and still cannot answer—the question of whether it is worthwhile at all to abandon the inherited suffixes of women’s and girls’ surnames, if they carry neither a derogatory connotation of becoming an old woman nor the meaning of spinsterhood. There is no shame in being married or unmarried, because the suffix –ienė does not mean that its bearer is a withered old hag, and the suffixes of maiden surnames do not mean that their bearers are unhappy spinsters. On the contrary, married women who are famous on stage traditionally keep their maiden surnames: Vos yliūtė (Dauguvietienė), Dauguviety tė, Mironaitė, Juodytė, Kymantaitė, Ožel y tė, Pleškytė, Kazragytė, Teišerskytė, Kochanskytė, Leitaitė, Rubackytė, Starošaitė, Ibelhauptaitė, Prudnik ovaitė, and others. By keeping their maiden surnames with their suffixes, what matters most is neither marriage nor even nationality or the country where one now lives! The choice of surname is guided by respect for one’s homeland and native culture, to which one belongs and which one represents not only in Lithuania but throughout the world. Benjaminas Kondratenka, a longtime Lithuanian-language and literature teacher, writer, and traveler who follows in the footsteps of creators throughout Lithuania, deliberately chose the surname Kondratas. His reason for changing his surname was: “There is nothing wrong if nationalities or religions intermingle in marriage; what matters is how you behave in the country where you were born, where you live and speak its language, in the land that is now like your Motherland” (Kondratas Benjaminas. Kūrėjų pėdsakais 6. Vilnius, 2010, p. 138). I have already argued that feminists seeking equal or even broader rights should pause over maiden surnames and stop distorting established forms of women’s surnames (p. 117), and I repeat that now. I oppose resolutions requiring foreign surnames to be written in their original language. Latvians did not do this; they kept the traditional spelling, writing them as they are pronounced, even though they had to take the matter to court. I also oppose restructuring Lithuanian women’s surnames by eliminating their suffixes. One world-famous opera singer, married to a foreigner and having entered his family, did not take her husband’s surname but shortened her own Lithuanian surname from Urmanavičiūtės to Urmaną. The latter formation does not conflict with the language norms; at least it indicates feminine gender and is declinable. But another prima donna, often seen on Lithuanian television, turned Kazlauskaitės into the indeclinable surname Kazlaus. In the context of the Lithuanian language and culture, this surname is simply impossible—and yet it exists. 330 Acta Linguistica Lithuanica LXIX Rita Miliūnaitė Ką manote apie nepriesagines moterų pavardes? Abroad, Lithuanian women were forced by foreign laws to take their husbands’ surnames. This was a consequence of foreign languages that, generally speaking, do not distinguish grammatical gender. In the context of English language and culture, under the law Drąsučio’s wife would also have to be Drąsutis. Now in Lithuania, too, in contempt of our values, language, culture, and laws, and quite disregarding the fact that a man’s surname does not suit a woman and is unattractive, and that it becomes detached from her husband’s surname as an indeclinable form, some women choose their husbands’ surnames even without an ending indicating the feminine gender. In saying this, I have in mind the surname Bosas, borne by a very beautiful woman. Let us imagine it in a linguistic context. Lithuanians more often referred to their neighbors by surnames than by first names: “Šarkus goes to the market alone and provides for the whole family, while Šarkuvienė lives like some lady, never setting foot outside the house.” Now let us use the woman’s surname Bosas in this context. What do we get? And which Lithuanian laws authorize such surnames? If I say, “This is Boso’s house,” people who have not lost their sense of the Lithuanian language will understand me as speaking only about a man’s home, whereas what I wanted to say was that this is his wife’s home. Enough about women’s surnames! In conclusion, it must be said that they are only a small part of a very great upheaval in society, one in which our culture as a whole is collapsing. Nothing of what we now call modern has even a whiff of national identity. There are many examples to support this claim: art of every kind, official and unofficial public inscriptions, announcements, advertisements, our speech habits, exclamations, emotional and expressive words. The Lithuanian language has so many of these of its own (it distinguishes interjections from onomatopoeic words, unlike other languages), yet it seems that our own are not enough: we shout super, yes, vau! So do the defenders of our state language and national culture have nothing left to do? In the future, we will be even more short of such defenders, because who could say when Lithuanian studies will become a prestigious field, or when the most talented secondary-school graduates will choose it. While in the Soviet Union, we still retained our longing for freedom and took pride in our homeland, whereas now perhaps we shout “LITHUANIA!” in unison only during basketball games. Now our homeland is at home, as the President of the European Union Parliament said in the Great Courtyard of Vilnius University when congratulating Lithuania on its EU Council presidency. I am unable to conclude Rita Miliūnaitė’s book review properly. I can only answer the question on its cover. I think we do not need women’s surnames without suffixes. Submitted on October 27, 2013. ALDONA PAULAUSKIENĖ Vilniaus universitetas Balio Sruogos g. 8-1, LT-10220 Vilnius, Lietuva [email protected] Recenzijos / Reviews 331