„Kalbos kultūros“ šaknys ir kylantys modernizacijos vėjai

V. Labutis. Roots of language culture and rising winds of modernization 9 LANGUAGE CULTURE – 50 years VITAS LABUTIS Roots of Language Culture The beautiful 50th anniversary of Language Culture is a suitable occasion to talk about how, under what circumstances and with whose concern this publication found its way into the world of Lithuanian studies, what determined its direction, tasks and character. At the same time, I want to think a little bit about the present and future of this publication. The environment in which the idea of a permanent publication dedicated to language practice began to mature before 1961 was not easy for those who created something in Lithuanian, translated books, wrote articles, and especially for those who had to edit texts written in Lithuanian. At the end of the 1950s, a kind of “thaw” had already begun after the brutal Stalinist regime. Feeling that the Communist Party’s grip had at least slightly diminished, the most energetic younger generation of linguists (Vytautas Ambrazas, Jonas Palionis, Juozas Pikčilingis, Zigmas Zinkevičius and others) began to publish their scientific research in the newly launched publications – Lithuanian Linguistics Issues, Linguistics, Literature and Language, etc. A revised Lithuanian language dictionary has been revived. Works important for language practice appeared: Contemporary Lithuanian Language Dictionary (1954), Kazimieras Būga’s Selected Writings (vols. 1–3, 1958–1962), compiled from various hard-to-reach works and carefully prepared by Z. Zinkevičius. 10 LANGUAGE CULTURE | 84 The readers finally got to know the most important works of Jon Jablonskis, the two-volume of which, Rinktiniai raštai (1957–1959), was prepared and published with an extensive introduction by J. Palionis. The textbooks published for schools – Juozas Žiugžda’s Lithuanian Grammar Parts I and II, Napalijus Grigas’ and Antanas Lyberis’ Lithuanian Spelling Dictionary for Schools – were also such a stimulus. Nevertheless, journalists, editors, translators, terminologists and other employees lacking knowledge of language practice were constantly tormented by doubts about how to choose the right word, the exact expression of thought, there were many problems with spelling, punctuation, pronunciation, pronunciation. If anyone knew of the interwar Lithuanian language practice magazine (1933-1940) Gimtoji kalba and the summarized publication Kalbos patarėjas (1939) that grew out of it, they were not allowed to refer to them. Five volumes of the writings of Jon Jablonski published by Juozas Balčikonis (1933-1936) were kept under nine locks. Therefore, in the middle of the 1950s, there was a great lack of a permanent Lithuanian language practice publication that could advise how to write or speak, which ways of expressing thoughts are appropriate, and which will blind everyone as language errors. Not only instructions were expected, but also clarification, persuasion, where and how to use what. It is not very important who first said the word that some kind of permanent publication is necessary for Lithuanian language practice. There is information that this idea was raised in 1957 (or 1958) by Valdas Petrauskas, the editor of the works of the Academy of Sciences, to the deputy director of the Institute of Lithuanian Language and Literature (or to the entire management?). When the author of this article mentioned in an informal conversation with his immediate superior, Jon Kruopa, that a periodical was needed for language practice, J. Kruopa replied that a similar request had already been received and was being discussed in the institute. Cover of the first Language Culture Notebook V. Labutis. Roots of language culture and the rising winds of modernization 11 Unfortunately, it was not possible to collect sufficient archive data about the beginnings of the publication of language practice under consideration, so we have to mainly be satisfied with what has been published in the programmatic articles of the editor of Language culture Kazis Ulvydas, use fragments of archive data, add little reliable slices of my own memory and try to guess something. From the idea of the necessity of a publication on language practice to the appearance of Language Culture there was a long, winding and potholed road to be overcome. The idea of a publication on language practice for the general public was probably developed by consultation between the head of the Dictionaries Department J. Kruopas, K. Ulvydas, who headed the Department of Contemporary Literary Language (the departments were then called sectors), and the Director of the Institute Kostas Korsakas. After all, it was necessary to understand the direction of such a publication, to formulate its tasks and to be well prepared to prove in several stages of consideration that the publication is very necessary for society. In the Institute’s Scientific Council, matters of the publication of language practice should not have stumbled (the protocols could not be found). However, the Institute of Lithuanian Language and Literature was then a division of the Academy of Sciences, so no publication (especially a continuing one, intended for the public) could appear without the approval of the Presidium of the Academy of Sciences. Sooner or later, the government and the all-powerful Communist Party had to say the final word. so it was difficult for the proponents to hope to achieve anything without using diplomacy, sometimes even encouragement, experience, as it is done. On August 12, 1960, the Social Sciences Department of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences decided to publish a special bulletin entitled Language Culture Issues in 1961. It states that the Republic’s society, which is building communism, is increasingly interested in language culture issues and that the Institute’s employees are constantly providing consultations on various issues and have to solve the issues being discussed, so that all this is planned to be discussed in a special bulletin, which should be published twice a year. The Department of Social Sciences was headed by K. Korsakas. The Presidium of the Academy of Sciences approved the 1961 plan of the Institute, and thus the issue of the bulletin, in 1960. of 23 December The new publication of the Institute is here considered a bulletin, and the name may be given after the Moscow publication Вопросы культуры, which has been published since 1955. Say an analogy. The abundance of language consultations really pressed on the shoulders of the Institute’s department staff, and later one telephone number for consultations was even appointed and published. 12 LANGUAGE CULTURE | 84 at which the employees of the Dictionaries and Contemporary Literary Language Department had to take turns. However, the consultation affairs also served as a cover for requesting a publication for the public, whose tasks covered far more than the consultation. Why and on whose initiative the planned publication was named Language Culture, precise data could not be found. Maybe the name “Language Culture Issues” could have given the impression that this would be only a translation of a Moscow publication into Lithuanian, or maybe the word “questions”, which should have been published earlier by “Lietuvių kalbotyros klausimai”, was a stumbling block? The title Language Culture is mentioned in the prospective work plans for 1961-1980 drawn up by the Academy of Sciences in early 1961 (the Russian equivalent Culture of speech is also presented there). We would not like to ignore a fact that is probably little known: that plan provided for the establishment of a separate Lithuanian Language Institute since 1969, because the scope of linguist work is very wide, and such an institute operated in 1941-1952. Unfortunately, the separate Lithuanian Language Institute was never restored during the Soviet period. Language culture is nowhere later called a newsletter, and individual publications are notebooks. When there were 60-70 pages, the name of the notebooks might be appropriate, but now, after far exceeding 300 pages, of course, they are already real volumes. The real status of the publication is described in the 1st edition of the Dictionary of Language Culture. „Pratarmė“ is a non-periodical publication of the Lithuanian Language and Literature Institute for the general public. Initially, there was no editorial board, only a few consultants for one notebook. Two Institute linguists – V. Ambrazas and J. Kruopas, a writer (who also worked at the Institute at the time) Petronėlė Česnulevičiūtė, Vincentas Drotvinas from the Pedagogical Institute and Juozas Pikčilingis from Vilnius University – advised on the preparation of the first notebook. Twenty-five years later, when the so-called restructuring had already begun, K. ulų vydas, evaluating 50 Language Culture notebooks, spoke again about the beginning: “The work of language practice had to be concentrated, a periodical publication had to be established.” Thus, a new, first periodical published in the post-war years, dedicated to questions of language V. Labutis. The roots of language culture and the rising winds of modernization 13 culture (s. 51, 31). What was hidden for 25 years, was revealed when the situation changed. The 36-member board of directors is known as the Board of Directors. The fact that it was necessary to hide the status of Language culture for a long time can be confirmed by such a, let’s say, “lyrical deviation”. In 1966, 1-10 notebook arrows had to be made. There was a considerable puzzle as to how to group the articles printed during that time by theme. Which article should be listed in which section, when they are not so divided in the notebooks themselves? true, it was in the content of the 1st edition of Language Culture, but later it was abandoned. It seemed to the young hothead that separate thematic sections should be in each notebook. It would be easier to compile the notebook if the terminologist collected the terminology articles, the nomenclature specialists – their fields, etc. After presenting these reasonings to K. ulvydas, he rejected such an idea without much comment: one compiler is enough and there is no need to invent any separate chapters of the notebook. practice, appeared – Languages of the World. I added that a short question and answer section is very necessary. The director briefly said that the current plan is quite good, we should be happy that we have a good publication. Without doing anything, after a few days in an informal conversation, without anyone else hearing, I consoled J. Kruopa about my unsuccessful “hike”. He revealed the truth: a publication with separate sections and coming out at fixed intervals would be considered a periodical, which would require a special Moscow permit, and there is no reason to expect it. Of course, the most important are the matters of language culture content. Sometimes the editor-in-chief of this publication, K. Ulvydas, is reproached for complicity with the Soviet regime. For example, the program article of the 1st textbook of Language Culture writes about a qualitatively new stage of Lithuanian literary language, about the cultural revolution that took place, while at the same time criticizing the difficult conditions that existed in bourgeois Lithuania (see notes 1, 3). it's nothing but propaganda cover-up bubbles. But even this article begins, as befits a good Lithuanian linguist: “The present Lithuanian literary language is a huge wealth of the nation, accumulated for us by dozens of previous generations. our sacred duty to preserve, increase and pass on this wealth to future generations. We have no right to lose anything of that property, to scatter it." such words are still very important today. Let us quote another thought of K. Ulvydas from the theoretical reasoning about the concept of language culture: “Together with the functions of the Lithuanian literary language 1 The first number shows the number of the notebook, the second – the page. 14 CULTURE OF LANGUAGE | 84 with the spread of the language, the responsibility of its users for its purity, correctness, beauty and clarity increases” (p. 9, 7). In Language Culture there have been published not dozens but hundreds of articles on various general or very specific subjects, the authors of which are almost all linguists who have worked at the Institute and a considerable number of university lecturers, editors, journalists, translators and even scientists. It is not even an attempt to cover all the topics discussed in this publication and the whole long path of Language Culture. A lot has been written about this in this publication and in other summarizing works. It can be emphasized that in the Soviet era, Language Culture paved the way for other works of language practice – Our Language, Tips for Language Practice, works of individual authors in this direction. After Lithuania regained its independence, many new challenges arose. During the 50 years of its existence, the publication, headed by three chief editors (Kazis Ulvydas, Pranas Kniūkštas, Rasuolė Vladarskienė), has basically maintained a relatively high scientific level and a responsible attitude to language matters. The grown-up tree of language culture is now branching in all directions. that is natural, and one could be pleased about it. but the rising winds of innovation are beginning to blow the branches of this tree. There are loud arguments that the times of language standardization are a thing of the past, that language culture itself as a publication and such culture as a phenomenon are outdated. such languages begin to emerge from the lips of hyper-globalized and super-modernized linguists. Let’s leave journalistic metaphors behind and consider at least a couple of these postmodern concepts. There is an attempt to divide all speech works into two strictly opposite groups – prescriptive, which indicate how it is appropriate and how it is not appropriate to speak, and descriptive, which describes everything that is used in speech. For the proponents of the latter approach, all works with at least some normative characteristics seem prescriptive and not scientific at all. According to this approach, J. Jablonski’s works, all normative dictionaries and grammar would be included in this group. Without delving into the substance, almost the entire culture of Language is considered an example of prescription. In order not to dive into theoretical discussions, let us take a look at Adele Valeckienė’s article about the meanings of nominative adjectives, published in the 1st volume of Language Culture. The author, based on her dissertation, accumulated this path most V. Labutis. Roots of language culture and rising winds of modernization The 15 nominative adjectives catalog (which can be called a specialized textbook) first describes in detail four semantic functions of nominative adjectives, and then discusses several cases of their incorrect use. Therefore, A. Valeckienė first works as a descriptivist and ends up as a prescriptivist. often followed in the works of Jonas Jablonskis and in all normative grammar and dictionaries of the Lithuanian language. Many articles in Language Culture also follow this pattern. And if the language errors are described immediately, then the general “image” of positive cases of use is kept in mind. so prescription (in other words, standardization, language promotion) is inseparable from the laws of language derived from the description (description) of language facts. It is possible to cite current English authors whose grammar is not based solely on the contradiction of description and prescription. For example, in the English grammar published by the University of Cambridge, the authors acknowledge the contradiction between descriptivism and prescriptivism not only in the descriptions of grammar2. In this basically descriptive grammar, it is impossible to do without special signs, what is not grammatical, what is semantic or pragmatic anomalies, what is doubtful grammatical, what is completely non-standard. The authors do not reject what is well described in traditional grammar. therefore it is primitive to measure everything only by the opposite of description and prescription, description (description) often follows prescription (normation). K. Ulvydas had published a programmatic article “More attention to the literary spoken language” (vols. 2, 3-10). our liberal individualists shout that spoken language cannot be standardized, because all that I have heard is a fact of language that has the right to function. One morning this summer, when leaving the bus from Vilnius to Kybartai, the driver shouted to an elderly passenger with a Zanavika accent: “Oh, I am your age until the light bulb!” So does the value until the light bulb have to be equivalent to Lithuanian sayings: I don’t care..., What do I do...? Let’s take a look at another grammar, The Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written3, which has a separate section on “Conversation Grammar”. And here there are no special signs: “inappropriate”, “unsuitable”, “unwanted2 Huddleston R., Pullum G. K. 2002: The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, Cambridge: Cambridge university Press. 3 Biber, D., Johansson S., Leech G., Conrad S., Finegan e. 1999: The Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English, London: Longman. 16 LANGUAGE CULTURE | 84 tina". it is a true descriptive grammar, but it also filters the spoken language in a certain way. modern grammarists want to justify a lot of things by the fact that language changes, but they do not want to realize that language changes require constant supervision. Therefore, the living language must continue to be regulated, it must not depart from the already established laws and tendencies of language. The publication of language culture, which has grown in both thickness and width, is both admirable and alarming. Perhaps excessive weight for a publication, as for a person, hinders health and popularity? A separate branch of sociolinguistics could be distinguished from it, although language culture is also a social phenomenon. A thinner edition of Language Culture could be purchased cheaper. One more request. It may be good that this publication does not engage in petty discussions, but when the new version of the language law is being discussed, when the periodicals and conferences talk about the relationship between the Lithuanian language and the nation, silence in Language Culture is not a good thing. We wish Language Culture to continue on the path of language development despite all adverse winds and adversities. Received 12/12/2011