MARXISM
AND
   PROBLEMS   
OF
LINGUISTICS

page 54

  ^[1] Stalin's essay Marxism and Problems of Linguistics was published in Pravda on June 20, 1950. Prior to this, there had already been discussion on Soviet linguistic problems in Pravda. This essay by Comrade Stalin is in reply to questions put to him by a group of Soviet students in connection with the discussion, and to essays published in Pravda's columns. The titles of these latter were "On the Path of Materialist Linguistics" by member of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences Bulakhovsky, "The History of Russian Linguistics and Marx's Theory" by Nikiforov, "On the Problem of the Class Character of Language" by Kudriavtsev and others.    [p.1]

  ^[2] Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Works, Ger. ed., Berlin, 1958, Vol. 3, p. 212.    [p.13]

  ^[3] Ibid., pp. 411-12.    [p.13]

  ^[4] Ibid., 1957, Vol. 2, p. 351.    [p.14]

  ^[5] Paul Lafargue (1842-1911), well-known activist of French and international workers' movements, and outstanding Marxist propagandist and publicist. He was one of the founders of the French Workers' Party, student and comrade-in-arms of Marx and Engels, and husband of Marx's daughter Laura.    [p.14]

  ^[6] Bund, General Jewish Workers' Union of Lithuania, Poland and Russia, was a Jewish petty-bourgeois opportunist organization founded at a congress held in Vilna in October, 1897, which worked mainly among Jewish handicraftsmen. At the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party's First Congress in 1898, Bund joined the R.S.D.L.P. as "an independent autonomous organization concerned only with the special problems of the Jewish proletariat." Once it joined the Party, however, it propagated

page 55

nationalism and separatism in the Russian working-class movement. The Bundist bourgeois-nationalist standpoint was sternly repudiated by Iskra, newspaper founded by Lenin.    [p.18]

  ^[7] V. I. Lenin, "The Right of Nations to Self-Determination," Selected Works in Two Volumes, Eng. ed., Moscow, 1952, Vol. I, Part 2. pp. 318-19.    [p.19]

  ^[8] J. V. Stalin, "The National Question and Leninism," Works, Eng. ed., Moscow, 1954, Vol. II, p. 353.    [p.19]

  ^[9] Arakcheyev regime, named after the reactionary politician Count Arakcheyev, was an unrestrained dictatorial police state, warlord despotism and brutal rule enforced in Russia in the first quarter of the 19th century. Stalin uses the term here to indicate Marr's overriding domination in Soviet linguistic circles.    [p.30]

  ^[10] Four-element analysis -- Marr asserted that pronunciation of mankind's primitive language was evolved from the four syllables sal, ber, yon and rosb.    [p.31]

  ^[11] "Proto-language" theory -- the doctrine of the Indo-European school which holds that a linguistic family consists of a group of patois (dialects), split from a common primitive "parent language." For example, modern Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian are sister languages derived from Latin, and were originally only different patois. However, as there is no documentary evidence for the existence of a "parent language" of most of the dialects or languages, the Indo-European scholars have worked out a hypothetical "parent language," their main aim being to facilitate explanation of the rules of phonetic changes, but there is no way to prove the extent of the truth.    [p.32]

  ^[12] Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Works, Ger. ed., Berlin, 1958, Vol. 3, pp. 432 and 430.    [p.35]