Garbingas Antano Balašaičio jubiliejus

AURELIJA GRITĖNIENĖ Institute of the Lithuanian Language A DISTINGUISHED ANNIVERSARY OF ANTANAS BALAŠAITIS (would bring) his elder brother. During the war, the Eržvilkas school was turned into a military hospital. Windows were shattered, walls knocked down, everything was in short supply, and there were many children wanting to study, so they had to patch the windows, take care of firewood, and make benches themselves. Together with his brother, he built a tall bench, placed it at the back of the classroom, and the two of them sat there until they graduated from secondary school (1949). In 1942, while in the second grade, A. Balašaitis saw for the first time at the gymnasium the first volume of the newly published great Dictionary of the Lithuanian Language. At the time, the schoolboy had no idea that later he himself would work on other volumes of this Dictionary for as long as 25 years. But the road to the Dictionary was still long. After graduating from secondary school, he had to work for a year at the Tvėrai seven-year school (Rietavas district). In 1952 he graduated from the Klaipėda Teachers’ Institute and devoted two years to the Kartenai Secondary School (Kretinga district), where he taught Lithuanian and served as deputy headmaster. In 1953, the author’s first publication about this school also appeared in print. In 1956, he completed his studies at the Vilnius Pedagogical Institute. That same year, Tarybinis mokytojas published another of his short articles, “Thoughts on Completing the Institute.” From 1957 to 1960, he was a postgraduate student at the Institute of the Lithuanian Language and Literature. And taking up the pen then proved no obstacle: articles by A. Balašaitis began appearing in Literatūra ir menas and other newspapers about the Lithuanian language atlas in preparation, a new scholarly grammar of Lithuanian being written, conferences of linguists, and expeditions to areas where isolated Lithuanian dialects were spoken. In those years he also began publishing scholarly articles in MA Darbai on terminology in dialectology, phonetics, and other fields, drawn from his dissertation History of Lithuanian Linguistic Terminology, which he successfully defended in 1961. The dissertation typescript ran to more than 300 pages, with a further 80 pages devoted to historical and alphabetical indexes of terms. His dissertation supervisor, Jonas Kruopas, recognized what a conscientious and diligent postgraduate student he had agreed to mentor, and sought to draw him into broader scholarly activity: as early as 1959 he proposed that Balašaitis present a paper at an all-Union terminology conference in Moscow; two years later, an article by A. Balašaitis based on that paper appeared in Вопросы терминологии. After that, articles and short pieces poured forth in abundance. And not only about terminology. As A. Balašaitis himself says, having become “a lifelong guardian of his parents’ language and customs,” one must care for the Lithuanian language and culture at all times (his most recent publication on the editing of the Dictionary of Contemporary Lithuanian (1993), published by the Mokslo publishing house, appeared in 2011 in issue 11 of Gimtoji kalba). There have been, and still are, many different concerns related to language and culture. After completing his postgraduate studies, A. Balašaitis stayed on at the Institute of the Lithuanian Language and Literature, in the Dictionary Sec- A. GRITĖNIENĖ. Garbingas Antano Balašaičio jubiliejus 293 tion. At first he wrote entries himself (volumes VIII–XII), and from 1976 began editing dictionary entries written by colleagues (he was a member of the editorial board for volumes XI–XIV). Together with other lexicographers, he prepared a supplemented and revised Dictionary of the Lithuanian Language manual (1963 and 1983). He was among the first lexicographers to organize word-collection expeditions. From 1958 to the present, he has contributed more than 20,000 handwritten dictionary slips to the card index and visited over 30 locations, not only in Lithuania but beyond its borders as well (he brought back more than a few words from the dialects of Zietela, Pelėsa, Ródūnia, and Kamojai). He rejoiced at every newly published volume of the Dictionary (writing about them in periodicals such as Bibliotekų darbas, Naujos knygos, Pergalė, Lietuvos pionierius, Kalba Vilnius, Mokslas ir gyvenimas, Gimtasis kraštas, and others). In regional newspapers, he wrote about linguists’ expeditions in Baisogala, Eržvilkas, Daugai, and elsewhere. He urged people to stay close to the language of the people and record words for the Dictionary, and carefully counted the Dictionary’s contributors (he published short articles in Mūsų kalba, Kalbos kultūra, Tarybinis mokytojas, Kultūros barai, and others; his detailed instructions for collecting words were published in 1983 in Kalbos faktų rinkimo programa (pp. 129–139). He also worked on other dictionaries. Together with Jonas Kruopas and Kazimieras Gaivenis, he took part in meetings of the Botanical Dictionary committee. Together with Kazys Pakalka, he studied the watermarks in Konstantinas Sirvydas’s dictionary, and in 1976 the two published an article on the subject in Baltistica. When K. Pakalka prepared K. Sirvydas’s Dictionarium trium linguarum for publication in 1979, A. Balašaitis promptly introduced it in several publications (writing about it in Pergalė, Tarybinis mokytojas, Czerwony Sztandar). He also reviewed or wrote annotations for other dictionaries: Antanas Lyberis’s Dictionary of Synonyms, Vytautas Vitkauskas’s Dictionary of the North-Eastern Dūnininkai Dialects, Jonas Petrauskas and Aloyzas Vidugiris’s Dictionary of the Lazūnai Dialect, Dictionary of Contemporary Lithuanian, 3rd edition, Chackelis Lemchenas and Jonas Macevičius’s Russian–Lithuanian Dictionary, A. Vidugiris’s Dictionary of the Zietela Dialect, Vincentas Drotvinas’s edition of Clavis Germanico-Lithuana, and others (writing about them in Gimtasis kraštas, Naujasis dienovidis, Lietuvos aidas, and elsewhere). After beginning work at the Mokslo publishing house, he also edited a number of dictionaries himself: the 3rd edition of the Dictionary of Contemporary Lithuanian, Dominykas Urbas’s Dictionary of the Writings of Martynas Mažvydas, and A. Vidugiris’s Dictionary of the Zietela Dialect. In 1984 he published a popular science booklet, Words and Dictionaries, in which he concisely yet informatively described the history, types, and categories of dictionaries. The author has also prepared a revised and substantially expanded second edition of this survey. It gives a more extensive account of the history of the academic dictionary, presents- 294 KALBOS KULTŪRA | 84 more data about the obstacles to publishing its first volumes and the history of preserving the card index. Other sections have also been expanded, with new facts presented about recently published practical and scholarly dictionaries. Let us hope that next year this booklet will reach its readers. Speaking of the many-sided work of A. Balašaitis, his writings on language culture must also be mentioned. For as many as 18 years (1971–1989), A. Balašaitis was a member of the editorial board of Mūsų kalbos. From 1962 onward, more than 100 of his articles were published in Mūsų kalboje, Kalbos kultūroje, Literatūroje ir mene, Žemės ūkyje, Buityje, regional newspapers, and elsewhere; they raised a range of language-related problems and offered suggestions for addressing them. The author was particularly concerned with the Lithuanian character of terminology and with meanings and lexical borrowings penetrating our language from Russian. The titles of his articles show how devotedly and diligently he worked for the benefit of the language: “On the use of the verbs gauti, nuimti, įsisavinti” (Žemės ūkis, 1966, No. 9), “Do we fill the seed drill?” (Mūsų kalba, 1974, No. 5), “How we translate terms” (Lietuvių kalbos sekcijos sąsiuvinis, 1969, No. 10), “Let us name things correctly” (Buitis, 1970, No. 10), “For the culture of language” (Tarybinė mokykla, 1964, No. 8), and others. He wrote several articles on the language of school textbooks (mathematics and biology) and took an interest even in the language of preschool education programs. Two booklets of language advice for trade union employees were published (1978 and 1982). New publications devoted to language standardization were introduced to the public: Aldonas Pupkis’s Kalbos kultūros pagrindai (1980); Kalbos praktikos patarimai (1976 and 1985), edited by the same author; Danguolė Mikulėnienė’s glossary Kaip nereikia kalbėti (1991); and others. The jubilarian never forgot his native region. In the summer of 1966 he took part in a local-history expedition in Eržvilkas, and later published two articles in the Eržvilkas monograph (1970): “On the origin of the name Eržvilkas” (pp. 196–197) and “The Eržvilkas dialect” (pp. 180–187). Every few years he published linguistic or journalistic articles devoted to Eržvilkas: “A local-history expedition in Eržvilkas” (Kraštotyra, 1967), “Who gave Eržvilkas its name?” (Švyturys, 1970, No. 21), “To you, dear homeland” (Šviesa (Jurbarkas), 1970), “What the surroundings of Eržvilkas remember” (Tiesa, 1971), “Resistance to the occupiers at Eržvilkas Gymnasium” (Lietuvos aidas, 2001), “Skaistutis Šveistys—an Eržvilkas Gymnasium graduate” (Profesorius Juozas Skaistutis Šveistys ir jo indėlis į gyvulininkystės mokslo sklaidą, 2009), and “What we were like, what we return as” (about the reunion, after 60 years, of the graduates of class IV (1949) of Eržvilkas Gymnasium) (Šviesa (Jurbarkas), 2009). As a true A. GRITĖNIENĖ. Garbingas Antano Balašaičio jubiliejus 295 patriot of his native region, he cared about more than just his home surroundings. Together with colleagues, he prepared the collection of articles Kraštotyros (1966), wrote the annotation for the Merkinė monograph (1971), and, with great care, edited Juozas Maceika’s monograph about his native Lazūnai (1998). From 1985, A. Balašaitis may also be called an encyclopedist. When he began working at the Mokslo publishing house, he encountered a number of encyclopedias published there and was always quick to introduce them to readers (he wrote annotations for the encyclopedias Vaikų (1994), Kultūros paminklų (1996), Žemės ūkio (1998), Lietuvių kalbos (1999), Technikos (2001), and Mažosios Lietuvos (2010). He wrote more than 20 articles for Mažosios Lietuvos ir Visuotinei lietuvių enciklopedijai, while the two-volume biographical reference work Jungtinių Amerikos Valstijų lietuviai (1998–2002) was augmented by several hundred biographical entries written by A. Balašaitis. The author devoted much time and care to this work: not only did he diligently write biographical entries, but he also traveled to Chicago to gather material in archives, served as one of the scholarly editors of both volumes, and authored the “Preface” and “Afterword.” I will not count them all; suffice it to say that a whole host of books not mentioned here were reviewed or annotated by A. Balašaitis. So many publications edited, dissertations defended, anniversaries, conferences, events, and expeditions described. It all found its way into the Bibliografijos rodyklę. And the work is not yet done. So, on the occasion of this distinguished anniversary, we wish him the very best of health and strength, so that his industrious hand may never tire, and the linguist’s pen he took up 50 years ago may remain wet with ink for a long time to come! Received 2011 12 12 296 KALBOS KULTŪRA | 84