LIETUVIŲ KALBOS LEKSIKOS RAIDA LIETUVOS TSR MOKSLŲ AKADEMIJA

SIMONAS DAUKANTAS – A PIONEER OF LITHUANIAN GRAMMATICAL TERMINOLOGY

A. BALASAITIS

Įvairiapusiška veikla Simonas Daukantas (1793–1864) yra nusipelnęs vieno iš žymiausių XIX a. pirmosios pusės lietuvių švietėjų vardą. Iki šiol lietuvių literatūros ir istorijos veikaluose nušviečiami ir akcentuojami jo nuopelnai istorijos, literatūros ir tautosakos srityse. Ne mažiau reikšmingi S. Daukanto darbai lietuvių kalbotyroje kol kas mažai tenagrinėti. Šiame straipsnyje apžvelgsime S. Daukanto pastangas kurti lietuvišką gramatikos terminiją.

S. Daukantas began his scholarly and educational work while still studying at Vilnius University. At the beginning of the 19th century, enlightened Lithuanian students were thinking about Lithuanian secondary schools and textbooks, and about educating the people in their native language. Influenced by popular ideas about public education and the creation of national culture, the future scholar considered preparing educational literature accessible to the people and Lithuanian textbooks to be one of his aims¹. This is evidenced by S. Daukantas’s published translated and original booklets about bees, fire, gardens, and the cultivation of fodder grasses, hops, tobacco, and other subjects. S. Daukantas also prepared textbooks for future Lithuanian schools. He published a Latin grammar, “Prasma of the Latin Language” (1837)², a chrestomathy with a glossary, “Epitome historiae sacrae” (1838), and a Lithuanian primer, “Alphabet of the Lithuanian Highlanders’ and Samogitians’ Language” (1842)³. In addition, the manuscript of a large Polish-Lithuanian dictionary compiled by him has survived, as have the beginnings of a Lithuanian-Latin dictionary and other lexicographic materials⁴. Drawing on the grammar and primer, we shall describe S. Daukantas’s contribution to the development of Lithuanian grammatical terminology.

First, a few words about “Prasma of the Latin Language.” The title suggests that this 129-page⁵ booklet deals only with matters of Latin grammar. However, after briefly introducing the reader to the sounds of Latin and its parts of speech, before beginning to discuss the noun, its author explains the choice of material in a note as follows—

¹ Žr. Lietuvių literatūros istorija, I (red. K. Korsakas), Vilnius, 1957, p. 478.

²Prasmą lotinų kalbos paraszė K. W. Myle. Petrapilis, 1837; hereafter “Prasma.”

³Abečelą lijtuwių-kalnėnių ir žiamajtių kalbos..., Petropilė, 1842; hereafter “Abėcėlė.”

⁴See J. Kruopas, S. Daukantas’s lexicographic works, “Lietuvių kalbotyros klausimai,” IV, Vilnius, 1961, pp. 301–317.

⁵There is a numbering error in “Prasma”: page 112 was printed instead of page 121, followed again in sequence by 113 and so on. The numbering ends with page 120. Thus, “Prasma” is in fact a 129-page book.

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recommendation in the textbook: “...for the greatest improvement in Latin, I shall set out first the declensions of Samogitian, or the declensions, since it is much easier for everyone to learn a foreign language when they know all the resources of their own, because they can compare the two with each other and see how one differs from the other”⁶. Following this principle, S. Daukantas describes at length the declension of nouns and conjugation of verbs in his native Western Samogitian dialect, devoting almost half of the entire textbook to this task: of its 129 pages, 53 are devoted to Lithuanian-language matters in “Prasma.” Moreover, when explaining the sounds of Latin, he compares them with the sounds of the Samogitian dialect. In describing the sections on Latin verbs and their inflection, a two-page note explains semantic distinctions among Lithuanian verbs and the abundance of their tenses⁷. Thus, “Prasma” is also a brief textbook of the Lithuanian language, in which, for the first time, the basic matters of Lithuanian morphology (that of the author’s native Western Samogitian dialect) were set out in Lithuanian, and Lithuanian grammatical terms were created.

Until then, Lithuanian grammars had been written in Latin or German, and the terms used in them were Latin. Admittedly, tentative attempts to create Lithuanian grammatical terms had already been made before S. Daukantas’s “Prasma.” K. Nezabitauskis gave Lithuanian names to several concepts related to reading and writing in his primer “Naujas mokslas skaitymo” (1824)⁸, namely: skaitytinės “letters,” balsinės, or balsininkės, “vowels,” dvibalsinės “diphthongs,” pusbalsinės “consonants.” K. Kasakauskis also supplied translated equivalents for some Polish terms in parentheses in his grammar of Lithuanian, written in Polish, “Kalbrėda liežuvio žemaitiško” (1832)⁹. Disregarding the distinctive word formation of Lithuanian, K. Kasakauskis translated the terms mechanically from Polish. Most of his translated coinages were unsuccessful, for example: patbalsės (: samogłoski) “vowels,” skaitlius daug ingas (:liczba mnoga) “plural,” susmulkintiniai vardai (:zdrobniale imiona) “diminutive nouns,” žingsniai (:stopnie) “degrees,” daiktininkas (: rzeczownik) “noun,” pripultininkas (: przymiotnik) “adjective,” praštuktojis (: wykrzyknik) “interjection,” žodis (: verbum, słowo) “verb,” and so on. Only a few of his translations took hold and are still used today: balsės, dvibalsės, aukštesnis || aukščiausiasis (laipsnis), sudėtiniai žodžiai.

S. Daukantas, who dedicated his textbooks to a future Lithuanian-language school, sought in his primer and grammar to name in Lithuanian all the grammatical concepts under discussion and thereby also to show that scholarly works could be written in Lithuanian. This required creating a considerable number of neologisms. “Prasma” uses only a few terms coined or used by other authors (e.g.: balsės, aukštesnysis || aukščiausiasis (laipsnis), laikas, sudėtinis (įvardis), and “Abėcėlė” also has dvibalsės), whereas all the other terms in “Prasma” and “Abėcėlė” (about 150 in total) were coined by S. Daukantas himself.

⁶ See “Prasma,” p. 11. For convenience, quotations and terms are written in modern orthography. Phonetic dialect features have been standardized.

⁷ In an effort to demonstrate the “breadth and clarity of the Samogitian language,” S. Daukantas sometimes included in the paradigm forms of tenses that were not in use: būsiu esęs, būčiau esęs, the causative verbs būdinti (būti), braukinti (braukti), and so on.

⁸ Naujas mokslas skaytima diel mažų waykų Žemajcziu yr Lietuvos… par Kajetona Niezabitawski, Vilnuje, 1824.

⁹ Gramatika języka litewskiego Kalbrieda leżuwio żiamaytiszko przez K. Kossakowskiego, Wilno, 1832.

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The terms in “Prasma” are presented thematically, with the Latin terms as their basis. The numbers indicate the pages on which they are used.

Grammatica – science of language, or grammatika 7,44,113 || pras ma 1.

Litera – rodbalsė 12,74,112 || rodbalsa 3, 5, 6, 7,24; vocales – short and prolonged vowels 4; consonantes – gaudės 4: labiales – labials 5, dentales – dentals 5, gutturales – gutturals 5, liquidae – liquids 5, mutae – voiceless stops 5; diphthongi – adjacent vowels, or diphthongs 4; syllaba – syllable¹⁰ 6,38,43,63.

Augmentum – augmentation 50,52,87 || augment 48,61,85; terminatio – ending 114; composita – derived words 9 || compound words 115: simplicia – simple words 9, primitiva – primary words 9, pirtmutiniai 112, derivativa – derived words 9.

Partes orationis – parts of speech 7: flexibiles – inflected 7, inflexibiles – uninflected 7.

Nomina – nouns 7; verba – verbs 7; particulae – particles 7; nomen substantivum – noun 9: proprium – proper noun 9, appellativum – common noun 9, or general noun 9, commune – common 9; nomen adjectivum – adjectival name 8, or adjective 8,16,33,38 || būdrod is 36,37: masculine || feminine || neuter adjectives 33, “masculine, feminine, and neuter-gender adjectives”; adjectiva numeralia – numerical adjectives 39 “numerals”: cardinalia – cardinal numbers 39, ordinalia – ordinal numbers 40, distributiva – distributive numerals 40, adverbia numeralia – numerical adverbs 40.

Pronomen – pronoun 8: pronomina indefinita – indefinite pronouns 20, definita – definite pronouns 21 “definite pronouns,” personalia – personal pronouns 42, simplicia – simple pronouns 42, composita – compound pronouns 42.

Verbum – verb 8: verba inchoativa – inchoative verbs 8,113, frequentativa – frequentative verbs 8,113, impersonalia – impersonal verbs 119, activa – active verbs 45, passiva – passive verbs 45, deponens – deponent verbs 45, verbum substantivum – auxiliary verb 47, auxiliary 95, 114, participium – participle 8,60, participia activa – active participles 73, passiva – passive participles 81, irregularia – irregular verbs 113.

Adverbium – adverb 8,117.

Praepositio – preposition 12,116 || before the first syllable 8: praepositiones – separable prepositions 112, separable prefixes 113, praefixae – inseparable prepositions 112, inseparable prefixes 116; praefixae verborum – verb prefixes 20.

Conjunctio – conjunction 8 || connective 113: copulativae – copulative 113, disjunctivae – disjunctive 114, conditionales – conditional 114, adversativae – adversative 114, concessivae – concessive 114, causativae – causal 114, conclusivae – conclusive 114, ordinativae – ordering.

Interjectio – exclamation, or alas 9; lamentation, or exclaiming || exclamation 114. Subjectum – agent 45.

Numerus – number, or quantity 10: singularis – singular quantity 10, singular 14,24,43, pluralis – plural quantity 10, plural 14,24,43, dualis – dual quantity 14.

Genus – gender 9: masculinum – masculine 9, femininum – feminine 9, neutrum – neuter 9.

Declinatio – declension 9 || inflection 12 || stem 12; casus – case 9: nominativus – who-case 10, genetivus – whose-case 10 – dativus – to-whom-case 10, accusativus – object-case 10, vocativus – address-case 10, localis – location-case 11; casus recti – direct cases 11.

Gradatio – gradation 38; gradus – degree 39 || degree 112: positivus – positive 38, comparativus – comparative 38, superlativus – superlative 38, highest of all 38.

Tempus – tense 51: praesens – present 51, imperfectum – past 51, imperfectum consuetudinis – habitual past 53, perfectum – perfect 53, plusquamperfectum – pluperfect

¹⁰ Once on p. 3 of „Prasmos“, the form balsinys (plural nominative) is also used.

¹¹ Once on p. 38, this term occurs with its components reversed – rodveikvardžiai.

¹² Once on p. 8, the form prievardė is used.

¹³ In „Prasmoje“, individual cases are often also called by their numbers, e.g.: case 4, case 1, and so on.

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53, necessarily past 59, futurum — future 59, futurum exactum — future perfect 61, future perfect 67, praeterita composita — compound past tenses 85.

Conjugatio — conjugation¹⁴ 46,47,112 || tense-conjugation 62,82 || conjugation 119: conjugatio parisyllabica — equal-syllable conjugation 62, imparisyllabica — unequal-syllable 82,77; persona — person 45.

Modus — mood 57,69,73,75,81 || mood 45,51,63 || mood 45: infinitivus — infinitive mood 61, indicativus — indicative mood 46,63, in the indicative mood 51,75, conjunctivus — subjunctive mood 46,69 || in the subjunctive mood 57, imperativus — imperative mood 46 || in the imperative mood 61,73,81.

Actio indeterminata — general action 48: continua — continuous 48, perfecta — perfect 48, determinata — marked 48.

We also present the terms of the “Alphabet” thematically. The numbers indicate the pages on which they are used.

Vowels 7 “letters”: uppercase 7 “capital,” lowercase 7 “small”; vowels 2; adjacent-vowels, or close vowels 5 “consonants”; diphthongs 3: true, false 3; triphthongs 3; vowels dental || labial || nasal || lingual 5; semi-nasal vowels 5; syllable 12 “syllable”; past (tense) 5 “past tense”; third person 5 “third person”.

Punctuation marks 7 “punctuation marks”: comma “comma,” semicolon “semicolon,” colon “colon,” period “full stop,” unfortunately “exclamation mark,” question mark “question mark,” foreign-word mark “quotation marks,” apostrophe 8 “apostrophe.”

When did S. Daukantas create Lithuanian terms? Clearly, the traditional Latin grammatical terminology and the national terminology then developing in Polish and German linguistics could not fail to influence him. Therefore, when devising Lithuanian equivalents, S. Daukantas often translated from other languages. Some of the terms in “Prasma” are translated from Latin, for example: parts of speech (: partes orationis), nouns (: nominal), numerical adjectives (: adjectiva numeralia) “numerals,” cardinal adjectives (: cardinalia) “cardinals,” active, action-denoting, conjugation, declension (: declinatio), degree (: gradus), gradation (: gradatio), imperative, imperative mood (: modus imperativus), liquids (: liquidae), perfect action (: actio perfecta), and so on.

Some terms were translated from German: linguistics (: Sprachlehre), nominative (: Werfall), genitive (: Wesfall), dative (: Wemfall).

Polish grammatical terms may have influenced the creation of these terms: conjugation, tense conjugation (: czasowanie) “conjugation,” foreign-word mark (: cudzysłów) “quotation marks,” punctuation marks (: znaki pisarskie) “punctuation marks.”

Besides the loan translations mentioned above, most of S. Daukantas’s terms are independent descriptive neologisms, formed on the basis of a term’s meaning or functions. In preparing his textbooks for Lithuanian schools, the author sought to ensure that the formative components of new terms expressed the content of a specific linguistic concept, for example: noun (name of a thing), adjective (name of a quality), vowel (a sign representing a sound), verb (a word representing an action), preposition (a word situated before a name, i.e. a noun), verbal noun (a noun denoting an action), adverb (a word explaining a verb), agent (one who acts).

Quite a few terms used by S. Daukantas are words from spoken language, most often from his native dialect, adapted to express specialized concepts. Thus formed

¹⁴Alongside the conjugation used throughout “Prasma,” conjugation and the verb conjugates (orig. laikousina, laikouies), on p. 45 the form laikausina is also written once. This term is given only with the suffix -ausena in P. Skardžius’s “Word Formation” (p. 593), whereas the form used throughout the textbook, conjugation, should have been included.

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these terms: time, drika “syllable,” baigimas “ending,” ištisiniai (words), pašalpos “function words,” antaugas “suffix,” dejavimas, or ačiavimas “interjection,” dingstis “mood,” atentis laikas “future tense,” prydurai “praefixae verborum,” vientinys (gender) “singular,” keimarinis (gender) “dual,” etc. Terms for types of sounds are likewise colloquial adjectives: labial || dental || guttural || voiceless || nasal (resonant). S. Daukantas also adapted colloquial words to express these specific concepts: continuous words, proper name, definite (pronouns) “definita,” simple (pronouns) “simplicia,” uppercase || lowercase (letters) “letters,” continuous action “actio continua.”

In general, when creating terms, S. Daukantas also drew on the word-formation possibilities of his own dialect. The suffix -sena, characteristic of Samogitians and having the same meaning as -imas (cf. krioksena “howling, shouting,” lėksena “flying, running fast,” sėsena “sowing”), was also used in terms, for example: lankuosena “declension,” laiptosena “gradation,” laikuosena “conjugation.” With this suffix, S. Daukantas also coined further neologisms, for example: aukausena “sacrifice,” griesena “robbery,” kariausena, jaunikausena, mergusena, etc.

As can be seen from the list of terms provided, S. Daukantas strove to create an entirely Lithuanian grammatical terminology. He even gave grammar itself the Lithuanian name prasmą¹⁵, which in other writings he used in the sense of “understanding,” for example: “The women spun, wove, and dyed their cloth and woollens in various colours without being taught by anyone, through their own understanding. They also played the violin, or fiddle, by their own understanding.¹⁶

Instead of the translated adjectival construction Lithuanian tongue, Lithuanian language¹⁷ used at the time and later, S. Daukantas generally used the characteristic genitive for this purpose, for example: Grammar of the Latin language, “for a better understanding of Latin, I shall first explain the declension of the Samogitian language”, and so on.

The purity, or Lithuanian character, of S. Daukantas’s grammatical terminology is also shown by the fact that he avoided foreignisms; when he did use them, they were only those established in colloquial speech, and he either had not devised Lithuanian equivalents for them or perhaps regarded them as native or common words. Only a few foreignisms used in colloquial speech were employed as grammatical terms, for example: abelnosios (pronouns) “indefinita,” asaba “persona,” neasabiniai “impersonale,” abelninė (mood) “infinitivus,” (action) abelnas “actio indeterminata.”

¹⁵ In S. Daukantas’s “Būdė,” published in 1935, the editor treats this word as masculine and writes “savo prasmų” (“of one’s own understanding”). This was probably done because the instrumental endings of both o-stem and a-stem nouns are written identically by S. Daukantas (since they are pronounced identically in his dialect as well), for example: vaiszino keptą mesą, duoną juodą ir prastą mint, jauną budams, to tarpop and so on. In the manuscript material for the dictionary, S. Daukantas gave the nominative form of this word as well: prasma – opinion, ingenium. The feminine gender of this word is also suggested by the derivative noun prasmėna, for example: “Thus, according to my understanding, I have said all that could be said about young plants” (Pamokslai apie sodnus, 1849, p. 26).

¹⁶ Žr. S. Daukantas, Rinktiniai raštai, 1955, p. 205. I. Simonaitytės raštuose žodis prasma vartojamas „išmislo, išmonės“ reikšme, pvz.: „Čia jau nei tikėti, nei įsivaizduoti; aišku, kad tai ne o, o vienos Eitmes prasma ir darbas. Ir sakyk tu viens žmogau, prie kokių minčių pereinama“ (I. Simonaitytė, Raštai, t. 1, Vilnius, 1957, p. 401).

¹⁷ Pvz.: K. Kasakauskio „Kalbrėda liežuvio žemaitiško“ (1832), S. Stanevičiaus „Trumpas pamokymas kalbos lietuviškos arba žemaitiškos“ (1829), J. Juškos „Kalbos lietuviško liežuvio“ (1861) ir kt.

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We see that S. Daukantas chose the right approach to term formation: in creating neologisms, he relied chiefly on the word-formation patterns of folk colloquial speech. As a result, his terms are more comprehensible and fluent than K. Kasakauskis’s slavish translations. Thus, S. Daukantas should be regarded as the conscious originator of Lithuanian grammatical terminology, having understood term formation correctly. During the period of bourgeois rule in Lithuania, S. Daukantas’s linguistic legacy was not studied and, probably for that reason, A. Baranauskas was mistakenly regarded as the first creator of Lithuanian linguistic terminology¹⁸. In view of S. Daukantas’s linguistic works, the beginnings of Lithuanian linguistic terminology should be dated not to the end of the nineteenth century but to an earlier period, namely the 1830s.

However, owing to unfavourable political and cultural conditions, S. Daukantas’s “Prasmą” was unable to fulfil its role. The Lithuanian schools for which it was intended were not established in the nineteenth century. Consequently, the terms in “Prasma” could not become more widely known: the book was not used as a textbook and was forgotten. Lithuanian, including a course in the Lithuanian language, began to be taught only 30 years later (in 1867), at the Kaunas Catholic Seminary, whose teachers A. Baranauskas and K. Jaunius began devising Lithuanian linguistic terms themselves, drawing on the grammars of A. Schleicher and F. Kurschat and adopting only a few well-formed terms from S. Daukantas’s “Prasma.” By then, the book, as a Latin textbook, was already difficult to obtain because of its small number of copies and, especially, its dialectal character. At the end of the nineteenth century, when Lithuanian literary language was taking shape on the basis of the western Aukštaitian dialect, “Prasma” was no longer suitable as a textbook of Lithuanian either.

What were S. Daukantas’s contributions to Lithuanian linguistic terminology? First and foremost, his conscious effort to write in Lithuanian served as an example for later authors of linguistic works. Some of S. Daukantas’s terms also seemed acceptable to other authors of Lithuanian grammars. J. Juška used the same or only slightly modified terms from “Prasma” and “Abėcėlė” in “Kalbos lietuviško liežuvio” (1861) and “Lietuviškoje kalbrėdėje” (1862): abelninė || imperative || optative || indicative mood, iteration, asaba, future || prospective future tense, noun, resonants, tense conjugation, case, gender, ending, rodobalsė, singular; M. Miežinis, in “Lietuviškoje gramatikoje” (1886): abelninė || imperative || desiderative || indicative mood, asaba, adjective, dual, išūnas, kergė, interrogative, tense conjugation, declension, case formation, pronouns; and K. Jaunius, in “Lietuviškame kalbomoksl yje”: antauga, or prydura, adjective, present || past tense, conjunction, inflection “declension,” agent. However, not all of these terms became established or entered the usage of literary language, since the linguistic works of both S. Daukantas and later authors could not then become widely known or be used as textbooks.

Among the terms coined or used by S. Daukantas, the following were used by later authors and became established: noun, adjective, short vowels (S. Daukantas’s short bal-

¹⁸ See Lietuviškoji enciklopedija, vol. II, col. 1181, where it says: “He (A. Baranauskas. — A.B.) is the first creator of Lithuanian grammatical terminology; the old grammar was written in Latin and German. His terms balsis, liemuo, būdvardis, skaityvardis, sakinys, rašyba, tarmė... immediately became universally established.” We see that this claim does not accord with the historical facts. Moreover, not all the terms mentioned here are A. Baranauskas’s work. S. Daukantas was already using balsė, būdvardis. Meanwhile, volume VI of “Lietuviškoji enciklopedija,” which discusses S. Daukantas, does not examine his “Prasma” in detail or discuss its terminology (see cols. 144–145).

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ses), the superlative degree, dental || labial || nasal (consonants), parts of speech, compound words, compound tenses, masculine || feminine (gender). These fundamental grammatical terms, coined by S. Daukantas under conditions unfavorable to the growth of Lithuanian national culture, are among his contributions to Lithuanian scholarly terminology (other neologisms of his, from history and ethnography, have also taken root) and to the formation of the literary language in general.

SIMONAS DAUKANTAS—THE FOUNDER OF LITHUANIAN GRAMMATICAL TERMINOLOGY

A. BALASAITIS

Abstract

Simonas Daukantas (1793–1864) was one of the outstanding Lithuanian enlighteners and scholars of the first half of the 19th century. He wrote many popular works on the history and ethnography of Lithuania. During the awakening of the Lithuanian people's national consciousness, S. Daukantas’s works, written in his native language, played a very positive role. He also made contributions to linguistics and pedagogy: he compiled dictionaries and published the first grammar of the Latin language in Lithuanian, „Prasma lotynu kalbos“ (1837).

One area of S. Daukantas’s work merits attention—his coinage of words. After all, writing textbooks in Lithuanian required the creation of specialized terminology, since all Lithuanian grammars published up to that time had been written in Latin or German. In the aforementioned Latin grammar and primer „Abėcėlė“ (1842), S. Daukantas coined about 150 Lithuanian linguistic terms. Many were successful and were used by other authors of Lithuanian grammars (I. Juška and K. Jaunius); terms such as daiktavardis “noun,” būdvardis “adjective,” laipsnis “degree of comparison,” kalbos dalys “parts of speech,” sudurtiniai žodžiai “compound words,” trumpieji balsiai “short vowels,” and others became firmly established in the Lithuanian literary language and remain in use today. Therefore, the beginnings of Lithuanian linguistic terminology should be dated to the first half of the 19th century, and S. Daukantas, rather than A. Baranauskas (1835–1902), as had been maintained until now, should be regarded as its founder.

14. Užsak. Nr. 174