Nomachi , Motoki Kiyosawa , Shiori Grammatika v obshchestve, obshchestvo v grammatike. Issledovaniia po normativnoi grammatike slavianskikh iazykov (review)

Abstract

Slavonic and East European Review, 99, 4, 2021 Reviews Nomachi, Motoki and Kiyosawa, Shiori (eds). Grammatika v obshchestve, obshchestvo v grammatike. Issledovaniia po normativnoi grammatike slavianskikh iazykov. Studia Philologica. Izdatel´skii Dom IaSK, Moscow, 2021. 304 pp. Illustrations. Tables. Notes. Bibliographies. Price unknown. This useful Russian-language volume is edited by two scholars from the SlavicEurasian Research Center at Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan’s leading institutionintheinterdisciplinaryfieldofSlavicstudies.Interestingly,although this exquisitely manufactured book was typeset and published in Russia, it was actually printed in Japan. Its focus is on how historical and political processes conditioned the concepts and production of the grammars that standardized Slavic languages, which now function as official and national languages in independent nation-states. The authors of these grammars were the products of their times and social situations, and as such their publications reflected these conditions, thus contributing to the shaping and coalescing of standard languages in accordance with social, cultural and political requirements. Rewardingly, unlike in traditional linguistics that takes languages for granted andseesthemasproductsofnature(e.g.AugustSchleicher’sSprachorganismen), this collection approaches languages as artefacts of human ingenuity, choice and labour. The book’s chapters are grouped into three sections that correspond to the current tripartite classification of Slavic languages, which in itself is a political creation, given that areal linguists distinguish only two Slavic dialect continua: Northern and Southern. Oksana Aleksandrovna Ostapchuk and Shiori Kiyosawa open the volume with chapters devoted, respectively, to the two Ukrainian grammars by Olena Kurylo and Oleksa Syniavskyi, and the Belarusian grammar by Branisłav Taraškievič, conceived at the end of the Great War and published before the Soviet Union was founded in 1922. During the period of the Soviet policy of korenizatsiia, these works were instrumental in standardizing Ukrainian and Belarusian, and their use became widespread in Moscow’s official ‘struggle against Great Russian chauvinism’. With the first five-year plan this policy came to an end. The grammars were banned and replaced with ones that strove to bring Belarusian and Ukrainian ‘closer to Russian’, the aim being to Russify both languages. All three grammarians were repressed and lost their lives, either by execution or in Soviet concentration camps. This change in fortunes opened a clear career path for the ethnically Russian philologist Viktor Vinogradov, who worked on the standardization of Soviet Russian through authoritative dictionaries. Daisuke Adachi’s chapter is not devoted to any grammar but focuses on Vinogradov’s reflection on the contribution of the fiction of the ethnically Ukrainian writer Nikolai Gogol´ (Mykola Hohol’) to REVIEWS 743 the emergence of standard Russian in the first half of the nineteenth century, including Ukrainian linguistic loans. A rather brief second section on West Slavic omits Czech and Sorbian, instead focusing on late eighteenth-century grammars by the Catholic priests Onufry Kopczyński and Anton Bernolák, in chapters by Natalia Evgen´evna Anan´eva and Konstantin Vasil´evich Lifanov respectively. Kopczyński’s grammar became the primary school textbook of the first-ever state-wide educational system in Europe and facilitated both the standardization and spread of Polish. Bernolák’s gave rise to a Western standard of Slovak that was subsequently replaced by a Central standard in the mid-nineteenth century which forms the basis of today’s Slovak, since Bernolák’s standard was deemed too close to Czech. The book’s third section on South Slavic languages considers Ivan Bogorov’s early mid-nineteenth century standardizing grammar of Bulgarian, the standardizing grammars of Serbian of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and Valentin Vodnik’s early nineteenth-century school grammar of Slovenian, in chapters by Maria Nikolaevna Belova, Danko Šipka and Ol´ga Sergeevna Plotnikova respectively. However, no discussion is offered on grammars of Croatian or the post-Serbo-Croatian languages of Bosnian and Montenegrin. In a way, the section compensates for this absence with two final chapters by Elena Vladimirovna Verizhnikova and Motoki Nomachi devoted, respectively, to the early standardizing grammars of Macedonian by Krume Kepeski and the Soviet linguist Samuil Bernstein (Bernshtein). The 1944 decision to recognize and develop Macedonian as a language in its own right in post-war Yugoslavia was intended to offset the influence of Bulgaria’s wartime occupation. However, the...