BALTŲ KALBŲ VEIKSMAŽODŽIO TYRINĖJIMAI

LIETUVOS TSR MOKSLŲ AKADEMIJA

REVIEWS

J. Kazlauskas, Historical Grammar of the Lithuanian Language (accentuation, noun, verb), Vilnius, 1968, 414 pp.

Every language has a longer or shorter history, which to a large extent also reflects the history of the whole nation. The path a language has traversed is revealed through knowledge of the origin and development of words and grammatical forms. For this reason, having an etymological dictionary and a historical grammar of the native language is one of the most important tasks of every nation’s linguists. However, these major works are impossible without abundant factual material from old written sources and present-day dialects, without numerous detailed preparatory studies, and without scholars of high qualifications and broad linguistic erudition. For these and other reasons, relatively few languages today have written etymological dictionaries and historical grammars.

Owing to its archaism and richness, the Lithuanian language has attracted the attention of many linguists around the world since the mid-19th century, and continues to do so. During that time, numerous studies have been written on particular questions in the history of Lithuanian, and a considerable number of synthetic works have been published, especially those that have appeared in recent decades: Ernest Fraenkel’s “Etymological Dictionary of the Lithuanian Language,” published in West Germany¹; the three-volume “Grammar of the Lithuanian Language”² by the distinguished Polish linguist Jan Otrębski; “Comparative Grammar of the Baltic Languages”³ by Kristian S. Stang, professor at the University of Oslo; and others.

In recent years, Lithuanian linguists, too, have made a substantial contribution to the body of research on their native language. One of their most important works is “Historical Grammar of the Lithuanian Language” by Jonas Kazlauskas, professor at the former Vilnius State V. Kapsukas University—the first such grammar written in Lithuanian. It is a great gift to everyone interested in Lithuanian studies, and especially to philology students at the republic’s institutions of higher education.

J. Kazlauskas’s book is neither an imitation nor a repetition of other similar grammars. It is a mature and highly original work, to which several decades of painstaking, intensive work were devoted to gathering the linguistic data presented and investigating the problems raised. J. Kazlauskas laid the foundations for this work by publishing several dozen studies on various questions of the historical phonetics, phonology, and morphology of the Lithuanian language

¹ E. Fraenkel, Litauisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, Heidelberg – Göttingen, 1955–1965.

² J. Otrębski, Gramatyka języka litewskiego, t. III (Nauka o formach), Warszawa, 1956; t. I (Wiadomości wstępne. Nauka o głoskach), Warszawa, 1958; t. II (Nauka o budowie wyrazów), Warszawa, 1965.

³ Chr. S. Stang, Vergleichende Grammatik der baltischen Sprachen, Oslo – Bergen – Tromsø, 1956.

239

articles on which linguists from many nations interested in Baltic studies rely today. In a short time, the “Historical Grammar of the Lithuanian Language” also received a positive assessment and attracted interest. In 1971, the author was posthumously awarded the Republican Prize for it.

The grammar consists of three main sections.

The first section (pp. 5–122) examines in greater detail the nature of stress and accent in Lithuanian, stress retraction in dialects and its causes, and the principal laws that shaped the present-day Lithuanian stress system. Considerable space is devoted to explaining the formation of Lithuanian nominal accent paradigms and their relationship to the accent paradigms of other Indo-European languages. The determination of the original stress position in prefixed verbs, the reconstruction of mobile verb accent paradigms, and the account of the development of stress in participles, reflexive forms, and other verbal forms also contribute much that is new to Lithuanian accentology. The section concludes with a discussion of the fate in Lithuanian of acute endings and Indo-European ē. J. Kazlauskas’s original account of the development of Lithuanian stress is based on a phonological analysis of the stress systems of various modern dialects. The retraction of stress from the ending in certain cases, the shortening of long vowels at word end, the reflexation of the aforementioned ē in Lithuanian, and many other phonetic phenomena, hitherto generally studied in isolation from one another, are, for the author of the grammar, merely separate links in the evolution of the entire Lithuanian morphonological system. He relates all these phenomena to the development of the stress type itself, the transition from melodic to dynamic stress, and the strengthening of quantitative stress features: “the shortening of acute endings or their transformation into circumflex endings can be explained by the emergence of dynamic word stress, which in the subsequent development of Lithuanian (in the dialects) becomes increasingly established or turns into quantitative stress” (p. 108). Understandably, comprehensive and reliable experimental studies of stress and accent in various dialects would be extremely important for substantiating these claims more fully; unfortunately, such studies are still very much lacking in Lithuanian dialectology.

The second section of the grammar (pp. 123–286) is devoted to the history of noun declension. It surveys the categories of gender, number, and case, and gives a detailed account of the historical development of all noun stems, as well as the loss of particular stems or their transition to other stem classes. The development of the singular dative, locative cases, and plural dative and instrumental forms is treated especially extensively and interestingly. J. Kazlauskas devoted most of his time and effort to investigating all the questions addressed here. As a result, the section on noun morphology is perhaps the most comprehensive: it presents the largest body of material from old Lithuanian writings and modern dialects, and its conclusions or claims are in many cases beyond doubt. Admittedly, however, some explanations of phenomena in noun morphology remain hypothetical and, one must assume, will be debated by linguists. One example is the forms of the namie, orie type, hitherto regarded as relics of the old locative, which, in the grammar author’s view, “are adverbs, not remnants of some extinct case forms” (p. 136; they are treated less categorically in this respect on p. 160: “most likely these forms were never case forms, but were earlier certain adverbial forms, later used with postpositions. And only the non-postpositional forms of some stems may also have performed case functions in the dialects.”). One may also question the author’s claim, which treats as absolute the expression of the locative in Prussian by

240

“the preposition en (an) and the dative or accusative case” (p. 136). After all, for well-known reasons, the written monuments of Prussian (whose data are used) may have been strongly influenced by the German of the time. The influence of this language (though much more recent) must undoubtedly also be invoked to explain the use of the construction into + accusative with an inessive meaning in Nida, which the author cites among other locations in seeking a Lithuanian dialectal parallel to support his conjecture “that in Prussian en with the dative and en with the accusative may earlier have been differentiated by meaning: en + dative denoted location, whereas en + accusative denoted direction” (p. 136). More examples could be cited in which claims are supported by data that might be interpreted differently from the way they are interpreted in the grammar. For example, the ending -ij in singular locative (inessive) forms from the areas around Bagaslaviškis, Gelvonai, and Pabaiskas, such as káili, móli (alongside aký, pirtý), may derive not only from -ij(e) (p. 156), but also from -yj(e), shortened there in an unstressed position. Moreover, the singular locative form kártij given alongside the examples mentioned could also be transposed to kártę, since feminine i-stem nouns with root stress in the dialect of those areas shifted to ē-stem declension (cf. also singular nominative žēmė ~ žēmėj, singular locative žēmij ~ žēmėj).

Some dialectal facts concerning noun morphology, which in recent decades have prompted considerable disagreement among linguists about their origin, are not only left unanalyzed by J. Kazlauskas but are not even mentioned. These include the singular dative ending -ai of the o-stem, and singular instrumental forms of the a-stem type rankai ‘(with) a hand’, among others.⁴

The title of the third section (pp. 287–404), “From the History of the Verb,” indicates that the grammar does not claim to provide a comprehensive account of the development of forms in this highly complex part of speech. Nevertheless, the questions selected— the development of personal endings and the formation and history of the present, past, and future tenses and of the imperative and subjunctive moods—substantially reveal the inflectional system of the Lithuanian verb. J. Kazlauskas expresses his general view of the Lithuanian verb at the beginning of the section, in surveying the general features of the development of the Indo-European verb. In his view, the “verb structure of all modern Indo-European languages (including Lithuanian) contains many innovations shaped by the regularities of individual language development and does not reflect the old Indo-European verb model” (p. 288). At the same time, he agrees with linguists (V. Toporov and others) who criticize the long-dominant Neogrammarian conception, according to which the Proto-Indo-European verb model was reconstructed on the basis of the verbs of Old Indian and Ancient Greek.

Having surveyed the system of verbal endings, the author concludes that in the Baltic languages it is much simpler than in other Indo-European languages. “This simplicity is due in part to the preservation of particularly archaic features, on the one hand, and to the distinctive development of the Baltic verb, on the other” (p. 304). Among the explanations concerning individual endings, especially noteworthy is the well-argued view that the single form used for the third person singular and plural in Baltic verbs is an archaism, not an innovation, and that a prehistoric bare stem can serve here as the third-person form. The author also identifies relic uses of the third-person form in such eastern Aukš-

⁴ Maty, like some other linguists in their recent work, J. Kazlauskas regards this ending as a newer form, arising from -ui in accordance with the phonetic laws of those dialects (cf. the singular dative vaikai ‘to a child’ and singular locative turgai ‘at the market’ in the Debeikiai dialect).

16. 902

241

However, in expressions found in dialects, such as: nėra kada važiuoja, nebuvo kada daro, nebus kada eina and so on. It is only regrettable that, for now, this conjecture cannot be supported by evidence from our written monuments, even those dating back to a relatively recent past.

Among the present-tense forms, the grammar examines athematic and infixed verbs, as well as sta-stem verbs. It presents a complete picture of verbs that have preserved athematic present-tense inflection, its remnants or traces, and indicates the frequency of these forms and their relation to the corresponding thematic forms in individual monuments of Old Lithuanian writing (M. Daukša’s “Postilė,” M. Petkevičius’s “Catechism,” etc.) and in dialects. The development of the personal endings of athematic verbs and the interaction of singular and plural forms are explained with particular insight.

Drawing on evidence from old writings and dialects, the author has convincingly demonstrated that forms of the optative mood (or permissive mood) such as tedārai, teeini, tetylė (or tetylỹ), like the second-person singular imperative forms in some Eastern Aukštaitian dialects (e.g., dārai “do,” tylỹ “be quiet”), are identical to the second-person singular present-tense forms. At the same time, he has refuted the view that prevailed for a long time on this issue and drawn the undoubtedly correct conclusion that “there are apparently no traces in Lithuanian of the existence of a thematic-verb optative entirely identical to the optative of Old Indian, Greek, or other Indo-European languages” (p. 382).

Of course, it cannot be claimed that, in the chapter on the verb, as in the other chapters, the author has already had the “last word” on every issue. The origins of short third-person past-tense forms found in dialects, such as dė, sto, which J. Kazlauskas considers older than the longer forms dėjo, stojo, will apparently continue to be debated. Despite some new arguments, the claim that the imperative marker -k(i) derives from the particle gi remains unconvincing. Among other things, such an origin for the marker -k(i) is difficult to understand from a phonetic perspective as well.

One or two more general critical remarks may also be made, that is, remarks concerning all the sections of the grammar. For example, without explaining his reasons, the author presents examples from Lithuanian dialects inconsistently in his work: in some places in phonetic transcription, elsewhere transposed into the literary language. The localization of dialect data is not always indicated consistently, and in some cases is not very precise.

Some terms have not been chosen and used particularly successfully. This applies especially to the names of individual Lithuanian dialects⁵, whose various doublets often cause confusion or even mislead the reader; compare the names used for one and the same dialect: “Western Aukštaitians” and “Aukštaitians of the West,” “Southwestern Aukštaitians” and “the dialect of the Southwestern Aukštaitians,” “Eastern Aukštaitians” and “Eastern Aukštaitians,” “Dzūkai” and “Eastern Aukštaitians,” and so on.

It is also regrettable that the book under review barely touches on questions concerning the development of adjectives and sheds no light at all on the history of numerals, pronouns, adverbs, and other minor parts of speech. J. Kazlauskas had planned a separate book devoted to those parts of speech. Assessing the “Historical Grammar of the Lithuanian Language” that we now have in hand, incomplete though it is, we can state that it was written using modern methods of synchronic and diachronic analysis of linguistic facts to good effect. Gau-

⁵ In the grammar, J. Kazlauskas uses the traditional classification of Lithuanian dialects (K. Jaunius–K. Būga–A. Salys), firmly opposing the new version of A. Baranauskas’s classification proposed by A. Girdenis and Z. Zinkevičius (see p. 410).

242

The use of material from Lithuanian dialects, old writings, Latvian, Prussian, and other Indo-European languages, especially Slavic, together with reliance on statistical data, enabled the author to offer a new and very well-supported account of the formation of the present-day Lithuanian accentuation system and the origin and development of many grammatical forms. J. Kazlauskas’s book is significant not only for Lithuanian linguistics, but also for Baltic studies, Indo-European studies, and linguistics in general.

K. Morkūnas

R. Eckert, Baltistische Studien, Berlin, 1971, 102 p.

Professor Rainer Eckert of the University of Leipzig is “one of our own” to linguists in our republic: we often meet him at various conferences and consultations, and frequently read his interesting articles published in the German Democratic Republic, the Soviet Union (first and foremost, of course, in our republic), and other countries. From time to time, we come across his name in reports on the activities of Balticists in the GDR, translations of Lithuanian literature into German, and so on.

Recently, the Saxon Academy of Sciences in Leipzig published a collection of this linguist’s articles as a separate volume in its series of proceedings, entitled “Baltistische Studien.” The publication of this book is a welcome event simply because it is the first book published in the GDR devoted exclusively to problems of Baltic studies. It is, as it were, a distant echo of the fine traditions of Baltic studies at the University of Leipzig and in Germany more generally, traditions established as early as the previous century by eminent German scholars. August Schleicher, a pioneer of these traditions, is honored in the preface written especially for this book by the distinguished GDR Slavist Rudolf Fischer, who notes, among other things, that interest in the Baltic languages has been growing again in recent years.

Recalling A. Schleicher, we can note the pleasing fact that, over the past few years, a particularly large number of interesting studies (by J. Dietze, R. Fischer, and others) have been published on this German linguist—“a hero of linguistics,” as Friedrich Kurschat once called him¹.

R. Eckert’s book also opens with an article about A. Schleicher, “Zu August Schleicher's ‘Litauischer Grammatik’” (pp. 9—20). The author aptly characterizes Schleicher’s famous grammar, gives an interesting account of how the book came to be, and recalls its significance for the history of Lithuanian-language research, the development of our literary language, and so on. Naturally, he also points out the weaknesses in A. Schleicher’s work, for which the author himself was largely not to blame; rather, they reflected the state of linguistics at the time.

Perhaps only one of R. Eckert’s criticisms of A. Schleicher is a little too “harsh.” The article’s author recalls a remark by A. Schleicher that has probably already become “winged” among many Balticists: Latvian is “eine in Laut und Grammatik jüngere Sprache (ist), die sich zum Litauischen etwa verhält wie das Italienische zum Latein” (cf. p. 13). R. Eckert is right to say that Latvian had not yet been adequately studied at the time, and that only J. Endzelīns’s work filled this gap. Yet even after J. Endze-

¹The Americans reprinted what may be one of the most interesting articles about A. Schleicher as a person and scholar, written more than a century ago by his famous student Johan Schmidt; cf. Portraits of Linguists, A Biographical Source Book for the History of Western Linguistics, 1746—1963, edited by Thomas A. Sebeok, I, Bloomington and London, 1967, pp. 374—395.

16*

243