PRANAS KNIŪKŠTA

Institute of the Lithuanian Language

KAZIMIERAS GAIVENIS – A TERMINOLOGIST WITH A POETIC SPIRIT

We could have celebrated Kazimieras Gaivenis’s seventy-fifth birthday. Sadly, fate decreed that we mark only the anniversary of his birth. We lost Kazimieras six years ago, but his work remains. And in the memories of his friends and colleagues, a bright image of Kazimieras has endured.

Kazimieras Gaivenis’s life journey was ordinary, yet deeply meaningful. The future linguist was born on January 18, 1934, in the poetic Tauragnai region, in the village of Stučiai in Utena District. He attended Šeimatis Primary School, Tauragnai Progymnasium, and Utena’s First Secondary School. After graduating, he enrolled at Vilnius University in 1954. There he studied Lithuanian language and literature. When it came time to choose a field of specialization, he chose language and applied himself to it with all his strength.

His fellow students had noticed this attitude as early as the entrance examinations. In the year we entered university, Dabartinės lietuvių kalbos žodynas had been published. Rumors spread that the exam might also include questions from this dictionary. We each did what we could to familiarize ourselves with it—some read a review in the press, while others sought out the dictionary itself and leafed through it. Kazimieras studied it especially diligently; his roommates even joked that Gaivenis slept with the dictionary under his head.

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Kazimieras—we called him Kazi then—was one of the best students in the class. He attended lectures diligently and completed seminar and practical assignments exemplary well, but was not content with the required courses. He was an active member of the Lithuanian Language Club, gave papers at student research conferences, and wrote short articles on language for the little journal published by his class.

He graduated from university in 1959 and was assigned to work at the Institute of Lithuanian Language and Literature, which later became the Institute of the Lithuanian Language. He worked there throughout his life, until 2001 (the year he retired). There he progressed from senior laboratory assistant to head of the Terminology Department. Alongside his regular duties at the institute, he also served on various terminology commissions and councils: he was executive secretary and responsible editor of the Terminology Commission of the Institute of Lithuanian Language and Literature, and secretary of the Terminology Council under the Presidium of the Academy of Sciences.

Wherever he worked, Kazimieras Gaivenis focused not on ceremonial but on concrete, practical terminology work: he advised terminology editors in various fields, evaluated and helped improve the terms they had created, reviewed terminology dictionaries and standards in preparation, and provided other assistance to term creators and his younger colleagues. He labored patiently and quietly, without seeking honor or reward and without sparing his health.

Kazimieras Gaivenis always did not ceremonial but practical, hands-on work in terminology management: he advised terminology editors in various fields, evaluated and helped improve the terms they had created, reviewed dictionaries of terms and standards under preparation, and provided other assistance to term creators and his younger colleagues. He worked patiently and quietly, without seeking honor or reward, and without sparing his health.

K. Gaivenis sought to align terminology management with the theoretical principles of terminology and himself contributed considerably to their dissemination and establishment. His publication bibliography lists more than four hundred items, many of them on terminology. He began his terminology research with compound terms. The first article on this subject, On the arrangement of the components of compound terms, was published in Language Culture in 1963 (KK, issue 5). This was followed by articles on the use of the genitive in compound terms, on compound terms with adverbial and participial components, and on terms consisting of two or three components. He brought this line of research together in his dissertation, Compound Terms in Contemporary Lithuanian. He wrote it without enrolling in postgraduate studies and without stepping away from his daily terminology-management work; he defended it in 1969.

Having become more thoroughly acquainted with terminological theory and gained more experience, he took up broader topics in terminology, such as: General Principles for the Creation and Standardization of Lithuanian Terminology: International Principles of Terminology

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application to our terminology. He summarized Stasys Šalkauskis’s theory of terminology and the principles he applied.

However, K. Gaivenis was more inclined—or, more precisely, felt it his duty—to explain narrower questions of terminology directly related to practice. He wrote about combining linguistic and logical principles of terminology, linguistic and extralinguistic principles, the standardization and determination of terms, shortening terms, cases of antonymy in terminology, the vividness of terms, and other relations between terminology and ordinary language.

What concerned him most was the practical ordering of terminology and the specific terms used in various fields. Many of his articles and short pieces were devoted to this. In his publications he explained new, necessary terms that had not yet taken root in the language: pakuotė, taršalas, pluoštinys, suklys, kvietrugiai, laikmatis, didbutelis, veislynas, išradyba. He also coined and proposed neologisms himself: rupiniai, stikliūnas, šienainis. He promoted Lithuanian equivalents of international words: yzopas – juozažolė, konvalija – pakalnutė, defektas – trūkumas.

Articles on individual terminological subsystems were particularly useful to the public, for example: Kai kurie gyvulininkystės terminai; Kelios mintys apie muzikos terminus; Būtiniausi lietuviški karybos terminai. He often presented word lists under headings such as: Uogų pavadinimai; Valgių pavadinimai; Žvaigždynų pavadinimai; Piniginių vienetų pavadinimai. As many as a dozen such lists and compilations of names were published.

Kazimieras Gaivenis worked in terminology and terminological standardization for four full decades, devoting much energy and effort to it. He summarized his accumulated experience in the book Lithuanian Terminology: Outline of Theory and Standardization, published in 2002.

His professional work did not contain him, nor was he satisfied with it; his interests and pursuits were broader. In language and literary publications and the periodical press, he wrote considerably about the language of scholarly works, and somewhat about the language of business documents, bureaucratic style, and public signage. He was interested in public language use, spoken language, and the language of poetry. On various occasions he wrote about place names, mostly the names of places in his native region. He explained more than once the formation and accentuation of the names of Lake Tauragnas and the town Taurāgnai. He took part in discussions of general language-culture matters and reviewed Kalbos praktikos patarimai and a collection of articles for teachers on questions of grammar and stylistics.

Nevertheless, K. Gaivenis was most drawn to lexicon, a field of language closely related to terminology. In language and literary publications, he wrote about dictionaries of synonyms, comparisons, and

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international words, presenting to the public individual volumes of the academic Lietuvių kalbos žodynas and several bilingual dictionaries. Together with others, he prepared the Mokyklinį lietuvių–rusų kalbų žodyną.

His lexical articles varied. Sometimes ordinary words are linked with terms—or, more precisely, the connections between terms and ordinary words are shown—while elsewhere they are examined as independent, neutral phenomena of the standard language. The most interesting reflections concern the special meanings of words and their stylistic nuances: the use of parenthetical and modal words, words of politeness, slang and vulgarisms, archaisms, and figurative and poetic meanings. The diversity of words and their distinctive uses are discussed colorfully in the little book Margas žodžių pasaulis. It contains so many lexical variations and curiosities that it reads like an engaging encyclopedia of language.

K. Gaivenis’s pieces are appealing also because their author’s language is lively and playful. This is particularly evident in the short articles printed in the “Language Tent” section of Lietuvos pionierius, and in their titles. For instance, a short piece discussing names for soldiers was titled Žygiuoja kareiviai; a piece about humorous expressions took its title from one such expression, Šypsosi kaip geležėlę radęs; and an article on morphological features of language begins with a title featuring a gradable noun: Už tinginį tinginesnis. Articles with meaningfully playful titles also appeared in language publications: “Verslininko žodynas” or žodžių sąvartynas? The book “Kas yra kas” turned out to be no great shakes.

He was also deeply interested in poetry itself. While still a student, at a gathering of one of the year groups, Kazys unexpectedly stood up and began to recite Širvys’ poetry with theatrical flair: Aš – beržas. / Lietuviškas beržas, / Išbridęs iš pievų nak­ties... Everyone had imagined him as a dry-as-dust scholar of linguistics, but here this “dry fellow” not only recited the poem, but also commented on Širvys’ poetry.

For a long time he kept his hands off poetry, and only in 1976 did he publish an article in Kalbos kultūroje entitled Dėl naujadarų vartojimo poezijoje (KK, issue 31). Its epigraph is a quotation from Vacįas Reimeris: Žodžiai talpūs – kaip indai. / Kaip indai – visai jie ir skamba... The article itself is full of the varied sounds of poetic words. It opens with a quotation from a poem by Judita Vaičiūnaitė, which plays on the name of a plant, veronika: Veronika žydi / <...> rasota veronika, / verk už mane. Further on, Marcelijus Martinaitis—and Kazimieras Gaivenis with him—play on the poet’s name, Judita: Švarkė isisegęs juditą, / dainuoja babekas žvaliai. Having discussed these and similar poetic occasionalisms, he uses the words of a German proverb to warn that they are “destined to live only in song,” with all their colors and shades understood.

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In later articles on various topics, words or quotations from poetry appear, woven into the author’s context. The words of poems are presented as vivid examples, and the arguments being developed are supported by quoted passages. Such examples and interpolations are particularly numerous in the pages of Margo žodžių pasaulio. Having discussed the essence of occasional neologisms, he offers as interesting examples Justinas Marcinkevičius’s apsi-lapsi-cinta, Albinas Žukauskas’s medmedžiai, and tūkstantvuakarykštė. Ūmedė, introduced in lines by Antanas Baranauskas: Here rosy, bluish, grey ūmedės sit perched, / Cheerful, they grow beautifully, troubled by nothing. And he pairs the word audūsis, from an idiom, with Maironis’s nobleman Čičinskas, an aldadrikas, and quotes the entire stanza of the poem in which he appears.

How Kazimieras Gaivenis could examine linguistic phenomena in a playful style and connect them with poetry can be seen from the short article Žvaigždynų pavadinimai (KK, issue 59). We recall Lithuanian and other peoples’ legends about the origins of constellation names; an eight-line stanza by Dionizas Poška is quoted, listing twelve constellations known to the ancient Lithuanians: Avins, Bulius, Dvynaičiai, and so on. A lyrical quatrain by Maironis is quoted:

How beautiful the sky! Among the stars are set Seven, those Mowers! Higher still, brighter, Grigo Ratai overturned On the road paved blai̇ȯiai.

The article opens lyrically, with lines by Vincas Mykolaitis-Putinas serving as its epigraph: I lifted my face to the starry heights – / And vanished like a drop in the sea.

An article about proposed Lithuanian flower names (KK, issue 69) also opens with a lyrical epigraph. Bernardas Brazdžionis is quoted: What will fade sooner than all the flowers? / Our years, our years. Here it is not only the epigraph that is poetic; the proposed flower names, too, are suffused with the poetry of language: ajerūnė, kardūotė, kopūstūnė, lapainis, margulė, pavasariukas, saulūkė, spurguotė, vieksvūnė. Only a terminologist with a poetic feeling for language could have gathered them so precisely and beautifully into a single bouquet.

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