Remarks on the phonological evolution of Russian in comparison with the other Slavic languages by Roman Jakobson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Remarks on the phonological evolution of Russian in comparison with the other Slavic languages by Roman Jakobson Ronald I. Kim Roman Jakobson. Remarks on the phonological evolution of Russian in comparison with the other Slavic languages. Tr. by Ronald F. Feldstein. Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 2018. xxiv + 215 pp. ISBN 9780262038690. During the 1920s and 1930s, in the capital of the newly independent Czechoslovak Republic, a Russian émigré and his associates produced a wealth of such innovative studies on the workings of human language that today, nearly a century later, their influence continues to be felt across a range of disciplines. Roman Jakobson, together with his compatriot Nikolai Trubetzkoy, was the central figure in the Prague Linguistic Circle, which built upon the insights of Ferdinand de Saussure to make lasting contributions to structuralist linguistics, poetics, and literary theory. Jakobson’s impact on fields such as linguistic anthropology and semiotics remains palpable down to the present, and his theory of distinctive features and understanding of linguistic changes not as isolated events, but as changes to whole systems inspired many leading minds of the postwar generation, from Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle, the founders of generative linguistics, to Uriel Weinreich and William Labov, who pioneered the study of language in its social context. Many of his observations were drawn from Russian and other Slavic languages, of which Jakobson had a legendary command, establishing his enduring status as a towering figure of Slavic studies. Jakobson is mostly known among linguists today for his postwar publications written in English, which along with his prewar œuvre are collected in the nine-volume Selected writings (Jakobson 1962–2014). The first of these contains the work under review, the second monograph composed by Jakobson after his celebrated study of Russian and Czech poetics (Jakobson 1923). But whereas the latter was printed and remains available in the original Russian, Remarks suffered a less fortunate fate: after the Russian manuscript was destroyed in 1939 during the German occupation of Brno, it survived only in the French translation of Louis Brun, published in Prague in 1929 as the second volume of the Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Prague. The precipitous decline in knowledge of French among Slavicists (and linguists at large) has had the consequence that this major achievement of Jakobson’s Prague years has tended to be somewhat overlooked, its analyses often known from citations in Jakobson’s later publications. [End Page 81] The present edition owes its appearance to the efforts of Ronald F. Feldstein, a leading figure in Jakobsonian linguistics who has written extensively on many of the topics addressed in Remarks. Feldstein, who also collaborated on the translation of V. M. Illič-Svityč’s classic Nominal accentuation in Baltic and Slavic (1979), has skillfully rendered Brun’s French into idiomatic English academic prose, while striving to maintain (and, in select instances, restore) as much as possible of the sense of the lost Russian original. Given Jakobson’s famously terse prose and the complexity of the concepts discussed, Feldstein has wisely decided to include annotations following each chapter, rather than after each section or all together at the end; this arrangement greatly facilitates the reader’s task, without unduly interrupting the flow of the text. The volume begins with a foreword by Feldstein placing Remarks in the context of Jakobson’s scholarship (xiii–xvii) and orientational “Notes on Early Common Slavic to Late Common Slavic” (xix–xxi), followed by Jakobson’s own preface (xxiii). The first two chapters, “Basic principles” (1–8; Feldstein’s annotations 9–13) and “Remarks on current issues of comparative historical phonology” (15–21; 22–24), introduce the main concepts used throughout the rest of the study, including phonemes, phonological correlations and disjunctions, archiphonemes, the relation between synchrony and diachrony, and “laws” linking correlations in phonological change. Chapter 3 is devoted to “Remarks on the evolution of the phonological system of Proto-Slavic” (25–43; 44–57), focusing on the palatalization of consonants and treatment of diphthongs as crucial events in the trend toward rising sonority and syllabic synharmony. Jakobson then turns to a perennial problem of Slavic historical phonology in Chapter 4, “The Proto-East-Slavic change...