Journal: Issues of Linguistics No. 1, 1952

“N.Ya. Marr, says I.V. Stalin, arrogantly dismisses any attempt to study groups (families) of languages ​​as a manifestation of the theory of the parent language. Meanwhile, it cannot be denied that the linguistic kinship, for example, of such nations as the Slavic, is beyond doubt, that the study of the linguistic kinship of these nations could be of great benefit to linguistics in the study of the laws of language development.
Even Engels in Anti-Dühring wrote: “The matter and form of a native language can only be understood when we trace its emergence and gradual development, and this is impossible if we ignore, firstly, its own dead forms and, in secondly, related living and dead languages” 2 . Highly appreciating the work of Western European scholars 3 who created "historical linguistics, which has been developing so strongly and fruitfully in the last 60 years," Engels brilliantly applied the position he formulated in his work "The Frankish Dialect", which is part of the study "On the History of the Ancient Germans." In this study, he proceeds from the unity of origin not only of Germanic, but also of all Indo-European languages, the oldest speakers of which he considers as a "large tribal group", a group of "peoples whose languages ​​are grouped around the most ancient of them - Sanskrit" 5 . All further research by Engels proceeds from the recognition of the unity of origin of the Germanic languages ​​as one of the groups of Indo-European languages. Engels always has in mind linguistic kinship, and of the classifications of the Germanic tribes belonging to ancient authors, he considers the classification of Pliny the Elder to be the most reliable for the reason that it “most of all corresponds to later facts and the remnants of the language that have come down to us” 5. “The classification of Pliny,” says Engels, “corresponds with amazing accuracy to the actual grouping of subsequently known German dialects” 6 .
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1 Report read at the Joint Session of the Institutes of the Department of Literature and Language and the Department of History and Philosophy of the USSR Academy of Sciences, on the methodology of ethnogenistic research on October 30, 1951
2 I. Stalin, Marxism and Questions of Linguistics, Gospolitizdat, 1951, pp. 33-34.
3 K. Marx and F. Engels, Soch., vol. XIV, p. 327.
4 The works of Russian scientists Vostokov, Buslaev and Sreznevsky were not known to Engels.
5 K. Marx and F. Engels, Soch., vol. XVI, part 1, p. 341. 8 Ibid., p. 350.
6 Ibid., p. 351.

Linguistic understanding of kinship relations between tribes is consistently carried out by Engels down to the most particular questions. So, for example, in order to substantiate his only amendment to Pliny - the assignment of the Cherusci to the Saxon group of tribes (i.e. to the Ingevons, and not to the Hermiones, as Pliny refers to them), - Engels points out that "just in the ancient land Cheruskov preserved in the greatest purity the old Saxon a in the ending of the genitive plural and in the weak declension of masculine nouns, as opposed to the dominant one in Westfalip about» 7 .
Exploring the Frankish dialect, Engels largely diverged from the views of contemporary Germanists and criticized them. This discrepancy in the specific conclusions of the followers of N.Ya. Marra tried to interpret it as a fundamental divergence between Engels and the basic principles of the comparative historical method, which was supposedly denied by him. This falsification legend, created by the Marrists, was put forward during the linguistic discussion in the Pravda newspaper in 1950. Thus, prof. N.S. Chemodanov wrote in his discussion article that in his work "The Frankish Dialect" "Engels resolutely rebels against the traditional classification of German dialects, built on the basis of the comparative historical method and the comparative scheme of language development" 8 .
Such a distortion of Engels' views is completely unacceptable, just as it is unacceptable to underestimate the difference between Engels's truly historical approach to the study of language and the overwhelming majority of bourgeois comparativists' schematic abstract interpretation of linguistic phenomena. Even where few of them attempt to connect the history of language with the history of a people, they view the latter from the positions of idealism and fail to give a scientific historical analysis of the connection between these two processes. The works of Engels remain for us a model for the application of the methods of comparative historical research of related languages ​​and dialects of one language on the basis of the Marxist historical method.
Comparative historical linguistics as a whole has accumulated a large number of valuable facts, put forward and developed a number of fruitful principles and provisions that should be subjected to critical examination in Soviet language science.
One of the main misconceptions of comparative linguistics of the 19th century. there was a simplified, schematic representation of the rectilinear disintegration of the base languages ​​into separate parts. Schematically, this was depicted in the form of the so-called "genealogical firewood" (schemes of Schleicher, Lottner, Fikk, etc.; cf. also the presentation of A.A. Shakhmatov in his "Introduction to the course of the history of the Russian language"). In a number of cases, the authors of such schemes imagined the “disintegration of the proto-language” as a one-time act, which, when depicted graphically, resulted in the growth of a whole bunch of “branches” from the common “trunk”. In other cases, the schemes were infinite bifurcations. The whole complexity of linguistic development, comparative linguistics of the XIX century. did not take into account, since in most cases it studied the history of the language in isolation from the history of the people, its creator and carrier. A gradual departure from simplified schemes became possible only at the end of the 19th century. in connection with the development of historical dialectology as a special linguistic discipline. However, her achievements very slowly influenced the understanding of the linguistic processes of prehistoric eras associated with the formation of language families and groups within them (the so-called "branches").
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7 K. Marx and F. Engels, Soch., vol. XVI, part I, p. 387.
8 Pravda, May 23, 1950.

In this regard, the historical and linguistic constructions of A.A. Shakhmatova. Firmly standing on the ground of studying the history of the Russian language in close connection with the history of the Russian people and independently developing for this purpose some questions of ancient Russian history, Shakhmatov, from the end of the 90s, paints a picture of the formation of East Slavic tribes and dialects, solidly substantiated for that time, very dissimilar on a family tree diagram. But at the same time, in his presentation of the process of the disintegration of the entire Indo-European family of languages ​​and even the process of the disintegration of the common Slavic language, the basis of Chess, he remains on purely Schleicherian positions until the end of his life.
The first protest against the one-sidedness of the views of Schleicher and Fikk was related to the 80s of the XIX century. the so-called "wave theory" Jog. Schmidt. This theory was very perversely understood and used by some ethnographers and archaeologists who were close to the "new doctrine" of language (S.P. Tolstov, M.I. Artamonov). Actually Yogi. Schmidt never denied either a single source of origin of related languages, or the isolation of language families; he never attached any importance to linguistic (and even dialectal) confusion in the spirit of, for example, G. Schuchardt. Discrepancies in Jog. Schmidt with the dominant views coming from Schleicher concerned only the understanding of the processes of the spread of language neoplasms, leading to the isolation of language groups within the family. Without introducing the concept of “isoglossy”, he essentially operated on it, trying to explain the motley pattern of intersecting lines of neoplasms that unite each “branch” of the Indo-European family of languages ​​with one or the other branch. R.F. Brandt successfully applied his principles to the classification of Slavic languages.
The "wave theory" dealt a serious blow to the canonical schemes of "family trees". But taken in its pure form, this theory turned out to be just as unacceptable, since it was an equally schematic opposite extreme. Yog. Schmidt did not take into account at all that the resettlement of carriers of the base language could not occur as an undisturbed process of territorial expansion in all directions beyond the boundaries of the original "ancestral homeland" only in radial directions. According to Schmidt, it turned out that all the new formations that determined the fundamental differences between the language groups within the Indo-European family arose on the territory of the mit called "ancestral homeland", and the very placement of the dialect groups of the proto-language in the era of its disintegration (which Jog. Schmidt understood as a one-time act) turned out to be almost a photographic snapshot from the modern territorial distribution of individual language groups. In addition, Yog. Schmidt departed little from the views of his time on the nature of the "proto-language". He believed that the “proto-language”, until the moment of its supposedly simultaneous disintegration, developed as an absolutely unified whole, which did not have such dialects within itself that could not correspond to future separated groups (“branches”). Finally, Yog. Schmidt did not at all take into account the possibility of transferring the base language in one or another dialectal form to a foreign-speaking population even adjacent to the so-called "ancestral home" territories and the influences of the "substrate" of 9 conquered languages ​​of a different (non-Indo-European) structure.
"Wave Theory" Jog. Schmidt entered the development of comparative historical linguistics only with a number of significant amendments, and in its original form it is now only a fact of the history of science.
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9 Substrate - sublayer. (See footnote 26 below).

A number of linguists (Leskin, Shakhmatov, Rozvadovsky and others) made changes to it related to taking into account migrations not only outside the territory of the original linguistic community, but also in different directions within this territory, which should have disrupted the original connections. Already a contemporary of Schmidt, the Italian linguist Ascoli, put forward the “substrate theory”, which set the task of elucidating the traces of the influence of the original speech system of the population assimilating a foreign language. Beginning with Meillet's book "Indo-European Dialects" (1908) 10, the question of the dialectal fragmentation of the "base language" itself is being developed, although the views of various scholars on the initial grouping of these dialects still often contradict each other (cf. the concepts of Pedersen, Pisani, Bonfante and etc.). But all these questions in foreign linguistics were developed almost exclusively on the basis of the Indo-European languages. In the development of genetic issues related to the formation and development of other language families, even now in the West traditional schemes dominate, reflecting the views of the 19th century. Only in Soviet linguistics do we encounter the first attempts to analyze genetic relationships within other language families in all their complexity and diversity. Here it is necessary to mention the works of D.V. Bubrikh according to the Finno-Ugric-Samoyed, partly the work of G.M. Vasilevich in the Tungus-Manchu languages. Successfully developed research by D.V. Bubrikh were extremely confused in the last years of his life by his attempts to compromise with the so-called "new doctrine" of language ("contact theory").
D.V. himself Bubrikh (died in 1949) did not leave a printed presentation of his theory, and indeed could not do so under the conditions of the “Arakcheev regime in linguistics”, when the leaders of this regime accused him of deliberately “inventing” his theory for disguise their and." essence of "Indo-European" views. This accusation is based on nothing. In fact, D.V. Bubrikh, the largest researcher of the Finno-Ugric languages ​​in comparative historical terms, in the last years of his life, under the influence of the so-called "new doctrine" of the language, became a sincerely convinced opponent of the position of the origin of related languages ​​from a single source. In this he was deeply mistaken. However, he continued to consider the comparative historical study of related languages ​​necessary, mistakenly believing that their similar features in grammatical structure and vocabulary developed as a result of interaction (“contact”). In essence, he accepted the entire Marrian principle of "crossing tongues", but, being a conscientious and knowledgeable researcher, he did not consider it possible to apply it with the ease with which Marr's followers used it. In other words, he studied the similarity of the structure of languages ​​where they really were (in related languages), but explained it ahistorically. The "theory" of oho is therefore confused and contradictory. It can be judged by a brief summary of it as applied to the Finno-Ugric languages ​​in the 1st collection "Soviet Finno-Ugric Studies" (L., pp. 21-32).
In his speech at a meeting of the Academic Council of the Institute of Language and Thinking on October 15, 1949, D.V. Bubrich said: “... You can see what happens if we compare the history of languages. There is no parent language, but there is convergence and divergence depending on the movement of specific social and economic relations ... But how can Finnish and Khanty converge and not converge when they are separated by thousands of kilometers, separated by modern conditions of existence. Once upon a time there were conditions for the convergence of languages ​​- the predecessors of these languages, from somewhere they got communities, but now there is no convergence, now they diverge from each other, but converge with a new partner. Khanty converges with the Russian language.
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10 A. Meillet, Les dialeclcs indoeuropeens, Paris, 1908 (2nd ed., Paris; "1922)

What is contact development? Joint and separate development, dialectical magnitude... There is such a thing, and it is impossible to get away from it, because the matter cannot be explained by simple confusion, and we do not see only confusion. We also see development in interaction, contact development” 11 . Thus, D.V. Bubrikh understood language as a superstructural phenomenon, mixed language with culture, and adopted such a "doctrine" about the crossing of languages, in which languages ​​of a new quality could supposedly be obtained from the interaction of several languages. But from the direct teachings of Marr D.V. Bubrikh was distinguished by a constant desire for a conscientious study of the facts.
Taking into account the entire course of development of scientific views on the problem of genetic ties between kindred languages ​​in bourgeois linguistics outlined above, we must single out a number of provisions that can be taken as the basis for the further development of this problem in Soviet linguistics in terms of using the study of linguistic kinship to enforce internal laws. the development of languages, primarily the languages ​​of the Soviet Union, among which some language families (Finio-Ugric-Samoyed, Turkic, Mongolian, Tungus-Manchurian, Iberian-Caucasian) are represented entirely or almost entirely. The experience of working out these problems on the material of the Indo-European languages ​​can be fruitfully used by Turkologists, Finno-Ugric scholars, Caucasian scholars, etc., unless they transfer it mechanically, always remembering that there should be no place for a priori schemes here and that any construction should come from from the close connection of the history of the respective languages ​​with the history of peoples, their creators and speakers.
Since the isolated and independent emergence of whole series of materially similar roots and formatives is fundamentally impossible, the existence of a family (group) of related languages ​​necessarily implies the existence in the past of a single common language, from which related languages ​​developed in complex and diverse ways. Each of the related languages ​​goes back genetically to the same source. This source could only be a real real language - one to the extent that an unwritten language can be one, always breaking up into dialects and dialects. This single common language we denote by the term "base language". Like any real language, it had its own vocabulary, basic vocabulary, grammatical structure and phonetic system, and developed according to the internal laws of its development. In the dialects of the base language, lexical, grammatical and phonetic differences should have existed, but the differences in the dialects, as "offshoots of the language", did not violate the unity of the base language, which opposes these dialects of the national language.
The carriers of the base languages ​​could be a separate tribe, a union of kindred tribes, or in some cases become an already established nationality. “History speaks,” teaches I.V. Stalin, that the languages ​​of these tribes and nationalities were not class, but nationwide, common to tribes and nationalities and understandable to them.
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11 Quoted from a transcript, corrected by the author himself, from the archives of the Institute of Linguistics of the USSR.

Of course, along with this, there were dialects, local dialects, but they were dominated and subjugated by the single and common language of the tribe or nationality. I.V. Stalin speaks here of the tribes and nationalities that were part of the empires of the slave and medieval periods, but since the carriers of any base language could only be a tribe or nationality, we have no reason to assume that the development of base languages ​​was subject to some other patterns. "... The elements of the modern language were laid down in ancient times, before the era of slavery" 13 .
In the vast majority of cases, the existence of foundation languages, as well as the process of forming a family of related languages ​​from them, dates back to ancient times, or at least to such a time from which no written monuments have been preserved or in which there were no written monuments at all. Therefore, only in exceptional cases are the base languages ​​of a group of related languages ​​that are parts of larger families relatively known from written sources. An example of such a base language fixed in writing is the common East Slavic (Old Russian) language. According to written monuments, it has been known since at least the 11th century. Approximately from the XIII-XIV centuries. groups of dialects of this common East Slavic language, gradually separating themselves, give rise to modern East Slavic languages ​​- Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian. All this is happening, one might say, before the eyes of history.
The basis language of the Romance group of the Indo-European family of languages, known from inscriptions in the so-called "Vulgar Latin", is also partly attested. From this "general Romance" language, which became the language of the western half of the Roman Empire and some other areas of Western Europe as a result of the Roman conquest, where it assimilated the local languages, the modern Romance languages ​​developed 14 .
However, in the vast majority of cases, the underlying language actually turns out to be completely unknown and can only be hypothetically restored by means of a comparative historical method.
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12 I. Stalin, Marxism and Questions of Linguistics, p.
13 Ibid., p. 20.
14 The best description of the "living Latin" III-V centuries. AD, as the basis language of all Romance languages, see V.F. Shishmarev - “On the latest works of I.V. Stalin on Linguistics”: “The establishment of clear boundaries between the concepts of language and its varieties, as well as the position of the enormous stability of the language and the absence of class in it, make it possible to clarify some important concepts that linguists operate with. Such, for example, is the concept of the so-called "vulgar", or, as we usually call it, "folk", Latin, which lies at the basis of the Romance languages. It is not the language of the lower strata of the population. This is living Latin, in the form that it took, roughly speaking, between the 3rd and 7th centuries, i.e. adopted its basic vocabulary and grammatical structure, when the old "classical" Latin lived out its last days on the pages of literary works. The liquidation of tradition occurred, of course, unevenly. The living Latin of that time solved the dictionary and grammatical tasks put on the queue by the time in various ways; in other words: the Latin of this period had its own lexical and grammatical varieties and did not always and everywhere treat traditions in the same way. But the general direction of the main changes was the same both in the field of basic vocabulary and in the field of style. This is how one should understand the “unity” of Vulgar Latin, which was questioned by the supporters of the shopidialectal theory” and on which their opponents insisted, relying on the uniformity of the early Romance base, revealed by the comparative historical study of the Romance languages” (“Izv. Academy of Sciences of the USSR, Department of Literature and language”, 1950, No. 1, p. 65). The fact that the formation of the Romance languages ​​was based on the process of differentiation of the common Romance language-Osvova, and not the crossing of the Latin language with other languages ​​(“polydialectal theory”, mentioned by V.F. Shitmarev), is convincingly shown in the article by T.S. Sharadzenidze “Processes of differentiation and integration of languages ​​in the light of the teachings of I.V. Stalin" (Questions of linguistics, 1952, No. 1).
Due to the "serious shortcomings" of the comparative historical method, the presence of which was pointed out by I.V. Stalin, the restoration of the basis language with the help of this method is by no means always and not to the same extent possible. The restoration of the base language or its individual elements in a number of cases turns out to be more or less conditional, and the practical possibilities of such restoration are very different for individual families (groups) of languages.
Roughly speaking, the more back in history the time of the existence of the base language is pushed back, the longer the period of time separates it from the appearance of writing in the languages ​​ascending to it, the less there are corresponding related languages ​​involved in comparison, and the more they have moved away from their ancient state , - the more hypothetical are the constructions that restore the base language and, consequently, the more conditional are the results of the reconstruction. In this regard, the practical possibilities of restoring the base language, for example, common Indo-European and common Slavic, differ significantly. If the restoration of the first is characterized by significant problems, then the restoration of the second turns out to be much more reliable and conclusive. This is understandable. Numerous Slavic languages, which retain much in common in their system, since they relatively recently separated from the common base language, present the richest opportunities for applying the comparative historical method. In addition, an exceptionally favorable circumstance for the restoration of the common Slavic language is that writing among the Slavs arises very early, after an insignificant period of time after the individual Slavic languages ​​began their historical life. Written Old Slavonic language, created in the 9th century. and attested by the monuments of the 10th and 11th centuries, according to the basic vocabulary, grammatical structure and sound system reflected in it, it is nothing more than a literary processing of one of the Slavic dialects of the time, which was still very close to the beginning of the collapse of the common Slavic base language.
Thus, the greater or lesser reliability of the restoration of one or another feature of the base language is determined by the shortcomings of the comparative historical method and the nature of the linguistic material at our disposal. Therefore, the conditionality of restoring the foundation languages ​​does not say anything about their historical unreality.
Denial of N.Ya. Marr and all his followers of the kinship of languages ​​and the reality of the base language from which families and groups of related languages ​​developed, relies on the unsubstantiated assertion that the recognition of the linguistic kinship of nations supposedly leads to the pinnacle of their ethnic unity and even the unity of their race. At the beginning of his scientific activity, N.Ya. Marr himself really identified language and race. Later, realizing the fallacy of such an identification, he attributed his error in general to comparative historical linguistics, although this latter, as early as the middle of the last century, clearly formulated the proposition that there was no necessary connection between language and race. This position has become generally accepted even for bourgeois linguists, and only a few obscurantists from science allowed themselves to assert the opposite for completely unscientific purposes.
Attributing to all comparative-historical linguistics such an understanding of the relationship of languages ​​and the language-base, which as a whole was completely alien to him, N.Ya. Marr, along with other representatives of the “new doctrine” of language, contemptuously qualifying this understanding of kinship as a “proto-language theory”, accuses comparative linguistics of racism and arrogantly dismisses any attempt to study groups (families) of languages ​​as a manifestation of the “proto-language” theory, although he invented and The theory of "proto-language" attributed to comparative-historical linguistics has nothing to do with this matter.
The base language, as already mentioned, is a real language that has its own basic vocabulary and vocabulary, its own grammatical structure and its own phonetic system. Its development was determined by the action of the same causes and factors as any language. It developed according to the “internal laws of its development”, and at the same time, its development was determined by the history of the people to whom this base language belonged. As already mentioned, the base language was national, common to a tribe or nation, and the dialects and dialects that existed in it were subject in their development to a single and common language of a tribe or nation.
The formation of dialects, local dialects is determined by historical processes and events experienced by their speakers. In general, the formation of dialects and their unification, their merging are the result of processes of separation caused by various reasons or, conversely, the unification of the population of certain territories. In other words, the unity of a language and its dialectal fragmentation is a function of the unity and disunity of the population in the territory occupied by one language or another. It is clear that these processes of unification and disunity of the population proceeded differently at different stages of the development of society, since they always depended on the specific conditions in which this development took place.
The existence of the language-base of the vast majority of modern families and groups of related languages ​​belongs to the early (pre-class) stages of the development of society. Therefore, the development of the base language was determined by those social processes that were characteristic of precisely these stages of social development.
As you know, the primitive communal system is characterized by the process of fragmentation of tribes and tribal languages ​​and dialects into new tribes and new languages ​​or dialects; what takes place, as Engels points out, is "a new formation of tribes and dialects by means of division." The tribes formed in this way are called kindred (or consanguineous) tribes by Engels, just as their dialects are called kindred dialects of the same language. “The constant tendency to division,” wrote K. Marx, “was rooted in the elements of the tribal organization; it was intensified by the tendency to discriminate in language, inevitable in their (i.e. savage and barbarian tribes) social condition and the vastness of the territory they occupied. Although oral speech is remarkably stable in its lexical composition and even more stable in its grammatical forms, it cannot remain unchanged. Local separation - in space - led over time to the appearance of differences in language 15 .
Thus, the fragmentation of tribes as they grew and settled territorially led to the formation of tribal dialects in the base language, which, however, were not independent languages, since they did not lose the ability to experience common language processes with other dialects of a language common to a group of related tribes.
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15 Archive of K. Marx and F. Engels, vol. IX (1941), p. 79.

With a small population and poorly developed means of transportation, communication of the population over large areas was very difficult. This led to the fact that the unity of the base language could be preserved only when it occupied a relatively limited and compact territory. Only in this case could all the local dialects experience common linguistic processes, indicating the preservation of the unity of the language. With further settlement over larger areas or with the wedging of a foreign-speaking population, the opportunity to experience common processes was lost, and dialects or groups of dialects became separate languages. This was determined only by the specific historical conditions of the life of the tribes and nationalities who spoke these dialects.
Such isolation of dialects or groups of dialects of the base language could only be the result of isolation, isolation of individual parts, groups of the population that spoke the base language. However, the isolation of the group of the population might not coincide completely with the boundaries of the dialects of the base language. Thus, the settlement of part of the Slavic tribes of the Balkan Peninsula in the VI-VII centuries. led to the isolation of part of the Slavs from other Slavic groups and to the emergence of clearer linguistic boundaries between the South Slavic and other Slavic languages; appearance at the beginning of the 10th century. in the Danube Valley of the Hungarians, wedged between the western and southern Slavs, contributed to the deepening of this process. However, this does not mean that the part of the Slavs that invaded the Balkan Peninsula was already a bearer of a special dialect of the common Slavic language-base before that. As part of the invading Slavic tribes, there could be speakers of several dialects, and other parts of the speakers of the same dialects might not participate in the invasion. This is also indicated by some features that bring the Czech-Slovak group together with the South Slavic languages. The conquest of Britain in the 5th century BC. AD Germanic tribes of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes led to the fact that the dialects of these West Germanic tribes, breaking away from the West Germanic languages ​​​​and dialects remaining on the continent, merged into one language, which later developed independently. The process of disintegration of the base language went on in the same or similar ways in earlier eras. This, for example, should have been the separation of a group of dialects that formed a common Indo-Iranian language from the Indo-European base language and its subsequent division into Old Iranian and Old Indian as a result of the settlement of speakers of this language over large territories. The Avesta and the most ancient part of the Vedas give us facts testifying to the very close proximity of the two separate parts of the common Indo-Iranian base language.
However, it is necessary to take into account, along with differentiation, which is the predominant type of the development of languages ​​and dialects, also the processes of integration, which, of course, did not take place in the form of the Marrian "crossing" of languages ​​\u200b\u200bof different systems and originating from different sources, but in the form of rapprochements and even mergers. still very close but different structure related dialects. These integration processes constantly alternated with processes of differentiation. The latter have always played a decisive role in the emergence of neoplasms, but the former were of great importance for the spread of these neoplasms.
Separation of groups of dialects of the base language was accompanied by the strengthening of ties within these groups, the development of common language processes in this isolated territory, the folding of linguistic features that distinguish the entire isolated group of dialects from other dialects ascending to the same base language, and the erasure of old dialect differences within this group.
The emergence and disintegration of alliances of kindred tribes, often very fragile and short-lived, was a very important factor in these linguistic processes, but alliances of tribes could not create kinship of languages. There is no reason to speak of the "language of the union of tribes" as a type of linguistic formations. This is also noted by I.V. Stalin, when he speaks of the development "... from tribal languages ​​and tribal languages, from tribal languages ​​to the languages ​​of nationalities and languages ​​of nationalities to national languages" 16 .
The commonality or closeness of the language of several tribes is the result of their common origin from a common source. "The new formation of tribes and dialects by division," says Engels, "occurred in America not long ago and has hardly ceased at the present time." Linguistic kinship could not have arisen on the basis of the union of heterogeneous, speaking non-related dialects, tribes. There could only be cases when "in certain localities, originally related, but disunited tribes again rallied into long alliances" 18 . Moreover, Engels emphasizes that only kindred tribes, tribes with related dialects, could unite in strong alliances. Thus, speaking of the Iroquois, Engels points out that the “blood relationship” of the tribes that formed the eternal union was the real basis of this union, and “the common language, which differed only in dialects, was an expression and proof of a common origin” 19. Moving on to the Greek genus, Engels again emphasizes that here, too, "only tribes with the same main dialect have united into one big whole" 20 . The linguistic proximity of the tribes that make up the union is, therefore, one of the important prerequisites for the formation of this union itself, and by no means its result.
At a certain stage in the development of the primitive communal system, Engels points out, “the union of kindred tribes becomes a necessity everywhere, and soon even their merging and, thereby, the merging of individual tribal territories into one common territory of the whole people” becomes necessary.
Thus, the union of kindred tribes, which turned out to be strong and durable due to certain historical conditions, inevitably turns into a nationality after one or two centuries. Closely related tribal languages ​​are then ground into a single language of the people, within which their own territorial dialects are formed, which do not necessarily correspond to the former tribal languages ​​or dialects.
On the basis of related tribes settled in vast territories in the process of their further disintegration or rapprochement, several isolated tribal groups could be created, which, under favorable conditions, would transform into nationalities. The languages ​​of these groups of tribes or nationalities were related only because they ascended to a common base language.
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16 I. Stalin, Marxism in questions of linguistics, p. 12.
17 K. Marx and F. Engels, Op. vol. XVI, part I, p. 71.
18 Ibid., pp. 73-74. Here Engels indicates the nature of linguistic integration in pre-class society—it was a process of convergence and even merging of disparate but linguistically related dialects of one language.
19 Ibid., p. 74.
20 Ibid., p. 83.
21 Tam ne, p. 139.

We know reliable historical examples of both the relatively rapid transformation of tribal alliances into nationalities, and processes of a different nature. So, relatively quickly from the early tribal unions of the eastern and southern Slavs, isolated nationalities developed - Old Russian, Bulgarian, and somewhat later Serbo-Croatian. Longer, apparently, continued the process of isolation of the Slovene-Horutan people. The tribes that created it, and we will offend omu, until the invasion of the Hungarians into the Danube plain, did not lose touch with the Moravian tribes (see, for example, the state of Samo, which united the Czecho-Moravian and Slovene tribes), and this led to the existence of isoglosses uniting the southern Slavs with the Czechoslovak language group (see above, p. 49). On the other hand, on the territory of ancient Greece, under the conditions of the polis system, for almost half a millennium (VIII-III centuries) the language of the people could not be developed and there were slowly converging territorial dialects, although in general the entire linguistic development of ancient Greece was directed towards an increasing and greater unification of previously divergent dialects. This fact allows us to say that already at the dawn of history, ancient Greek dialects were dialects of one language, although there is still no reason to talk about the final formation of a single ancient Greek people by this time. Slowly converging territorial dialects disappeared only in the common Greek "Koine" of the Hellenistic-Roman period, which arose on the basis of the Attic and partly Ionic dialects. At the same time, none of the dialects of the Middle Greek and Modern Greek languages ​​(except for the isolated dialects of the mountainous parts of Laconia - Tsakenian) can be elevated to the ancient Greek dialects, and all of them are the result of a new differentiation of the Hellenistic-Roman "Koine". The very brief unions of the Germanic tribes of the first centuries AD did not lead to any linguistic integration. (Sevian, Marxmannian), uniting in their composition representatives of different dialect groups of West Germanic languages. The subsequent development of the Germanic languages ​​that remained on the territory of Germany after the great migration of peoples continues the development of tribal dialect groups of earlier eras, and those mergers that took place later took place already within the early feudal state formations.
Various historical conditions led to new segregations already within a separate group, and segregation, as it was in an earlier community, could coincide, but might not coincide with the boundaries of the old dialects of this language. In a separate language, shifts in dialect boundaries could occur, and as a result, new groups of dialects could form, which in turn could develop into independent languages. Thus, a new language formed as a result of the isolation of a group of dialects of the base language could, in turn, become the basis language for the languages ​​formed as a result of the further isolation of its dialects. So, due to certain historical conditions, the East Slavic language, which was isolated due to certain historical conditions from the common Slavic language-base, later became the language-base for the Russian (Great Russian), Ukrainian and Belarusian languages, which were formed in the XIV-XV centuries. in the process of isolation of the dialect groups of this language, which was the result of the collapse of the Old Russian nationality and the isolation of individual groups of Eastern Slavs in various state associations. Here one should proceed from the position of I.V. Stalin that there are cases, “... when the single language of a nationality that has not yet become a nation due to the lack of necessary economic conditions for development collapses due to the state collapse of this nationality, and local dialects that have not yet had time to grind in a single language come to life and give the beginning of the formation of separate independent languages” 22 .
It should not be assumed that each of the closely related groups of languages ​​necessarily goes back in the past to any single pra-dialect, to any progenitor tribe, the collapse of which gave rise to these languages. There is no reason, for example, to believe that the common Slavic language broke up into three dialects, each of which, having become an independent language, broke up into new dialect-languages, etc. The East Slavic language, at its very separation from the common Slavic language, had dialects, just like the Russian language, it inherited dialect fragmentation from the common East Slavic language. However, during the period of existence of each language, its dialect grouping could change several times, as a result of which the boundaries of the dialects of the base language during the period of its separation from the previous community and during the period of its decay into new languages ​​often do not coincide. Thus, the borders of the tribal dialects of the common East Slavic language do not in most cases coincide with the borders of the regional dialects of the period of the formation of individual East Slavic languages. The displacement of dialect boundaries meant not only the layering of old boundaries on new ones, but also the erasure of old boundaries, not only the emergence of new dialect differences, but also a partial leveling, erasure of old dialects. At the same time, interactions also occurred between dialects, as a result of which some features of the dominant dialects in a separate group, as a result of strengthening the connection within this group, could spread to neighboring dialects. Therefore, it is wrong, for example, to attribute modern Russian, Belarusian, Ukrainian languages ​​directly to the tribal dialects of ancient Russia in the 9th-11th centuries. We cannot indicate such differences in these languages ​​that would undoubtedly reflect the differences in tribal dialects, but at the same time we clearly see in them traces of the processes of linguistic differentiation and integration of the 13th-15th centuries. At the same time, it is possible that not all features, for example, of the Ukrainian language, which distinguish it as a whole from Russian, developed simultaneously in all dialects of this language, some dialects could receive them under the influence of neighboring dialects after the completion of the process of folding the Ukrainian language within certain boundaries. .
The process of the formation of a new language was, therefore, a long and complex process, by no means straightforward. Ignoring the facts of the displacement of dialect boundaries that existed within the base language in the process of its disintegration into new dialect groups, ignoring the facts of convergence and merging of divergent dialects or their parts, the fact of the spread of the features of the dominant dialect to all the newly formed dialect group - all this was a huge drawback. old concepts with their schematic constructions of all kinds of "family trees" of languages. In contrast to these anti-historical views, it should be remembered that each reconstructed base language should be considered as a very complex formation, forcing one to assume within it, within the framework of the entire period of its existence, the continuous development and change of dialect differences. Some of these differences deepened (at the boundaries of isolated groups), while others, on the contrary, were erased (within these groups). The former led under certain historical conditions to the formation of new languages, i.e. to the disappearance for a certain dialect group of the opportunity to experience new formations common with other dialects. The latter were preserved only as remnants of the old dialects.
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22 I. Stalin, Marxism and questions of linguistics, p. 45.

Related languages, separated from the base language, in their differences from each other, on the one hand, retain a certain part of the old heritage, going back to the dialectal differences that existed even within the base language. On the other hand, the differences of related languages ​​from each other date back (usually for the most part) to new formations that reflect the already independent history of these languages, which in many cases also had a long “prehistoric” i.e. a period not attested by written monuments, also subject to reconstruction using the comparative historical method. Thus, for example, the final separation of the Baltic languages ​​from the Slavic languages ​​must be attributed to the time no later than the last centuries BC, and the first written monuments of these languages ​​date back to the 16th century. During this long period, the Baltic languages, for all the archaism of certain facts of the Lithuanian and Old Prussian languages, undoubtedly lost some part of the old heritage that they preserved in the first time after separation, and also developed many specific new formations.
For almost each of the modern Indo-European languages, whose genetic relationships are better studied than in other language families, one can indicate a different degree of kinship with other languages ​​of the same family. Consequently, each such language is included not in one, but in several related groups of varying degrees of proximity, and all previous communities naturally deposited in it. So, the Russian language, differing from the closest related languages ​​- Ukrainian and Belarusian - by a number of differences in vocabulary, grammar, phonetics, at the same time combines with them a huge number of sound features, forms, root and derivational morphemes and whole words, including such , which distinguish all three East Slavic languages ​​from other Slavic languages. At the same time, all Slavic languages ​​are united by a number of common features that delimit them from other Indo-European languages, and the further into the depths of history, the more and more of these features are found. But at the same time, the Slavic languages ​​are related to all Indo-European languages ​​by a number of common roots that form the oldest layer of the root part of the main vocabulary of the Slavic languages, as well as a number of formatives that may not be identical with other Indo-European languages ​​in their sound appearance, but easily are reduced to common archetypes. One can point to such groups of Indo-European languages ​​with which the Slavic languages ​​have common features in Poland than with other Indo-European languages. This suggests that the Slavic languages ​​were previously included in such a community as the Slavic-Baltic, and earlier, perhaps, in an even more extensive community. One can hypothetically admit such a commonality, which is characterized by changes in common Indo-European back-linguals of a certain type into whistling and hissing spirants and affricates. This commonality unites the Baltic and Slavic languages ​​with the Indo-Iranian, Albanian and Armenian languages, although this phenomenon (spirantization of back-languages) admits another historical explanation. Each such community is, of course, not a collection of dialects that exactly correspond to future languages, but a common language spread over a relatively limited territory, the isolation of dialect groups of which, as a result of the complex interaction of individual dialects and dialects, marked the beginning of the formation of new languages. This means that the related Indo-European languages ​​ascend through a complex series of steps to the oldest of the languages ​​conditionally reconstructed by means of the comparative historical method - the Indo-European language-base, from which they inherited a number of their features, revealed by the linguist through the thickness of neoplasms, borrowings, traces of the "substratum" etc. This is quite consistent with the position of I.V. Stalin that "the elements of the modern language were laid down in ancient times, before the era of slavery" 23 . The presence of intermediate base languages ​​only indicates that these languages ​​were not directly separated from the Indo-European base language and that they are in varying degrees of relationship with other Indo-European languages.
However, one cannot ignore the enormous difficulties that inevitably arise in determining the degree of kinship between related languages ​​and groups. These difficulties are determined both by the complexity and duration of the linguistic processes themselves associated with the formation of a family of languages, and by the significant shortcomings of the comparative historical method. It is important to keep in mind that the disintegration of the base language could not take place in the form of a “single act of a decisive blow”, and the formation of different groups within a language family, as a rule, took place at different times, over many, many centuries and even millennia. So, for example, the separation of the Hittite (Non-Sit) language from the Indo-European linguistic community should be attributed to the time not later than the middle of the 3rd millennium BC, since at the beginning of the 2nd millennium BC. the monuments of this language already testify to a long period of interaction with non-Indo-European linguistic elements, which took place on the territory of Asia Minor. At the same time, even if we took the point of view of those scientists who dispute the belonging of the cuneiform Hittite (non-Sit) language to the Indo-European family, then the situation will not change, since significant Indo-European elements undoubtedly existing in it show that some Indo-European dialects must were separated from the original linguistic community no later than the middle of the 3rd millennium BC. and as a result of the migration of their speakers to appear in Asia Minor, which could not be the territory of the original Indo-European linguistic community. On the other hand, the formation of groups such as the Baltic, Slavic and Germanic cannot be pushed further inland beyond the boundary between the 2nd and 1st millennium BC. Thus, we get a gap of at least one and a half thousand years (2500-1000) or, perhaps, much more: the point of view according to which the Slavs became isolated much later (up to the last centuries BC) can also be seriously reasoned. In the interval between these two extreme periods, the separation of the Indo-Iranian, Greek, Italic, Celtic and other branches of the Indo-European language family should be attributed.
One can dispute any absolute dating of individual stages of the disintegration of the Indo-European linguistic community. These datings can become more accurate only when the methods of matching linguistic data with the data of the history of material culture are improved, which is not yet and could not be under the dominance of Marrian attitudes among archaeologists. Therefore, for the time being, all absolute dates remain guesswork, and only the relative chronology of the stages of disintegration is more solid. However, even here, even in the field of Indo-European languages, there are completely unclear questions (for example, the time of separation of the Tocharian group), and for the Finno-Ugric-Samoyedic family, the relative chronology has not yet been outlined.
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23 I. Stalin, Marxism and Questions of Linguistics, p. 26,

As has already been pointed out, the relationships between related languages ​​within a language family can be extremely complex; how they reflect the originality of the historical path made by the speakers of these languages ​​after their separation from the original community. So, groups of dialects of the base language that emerged at different times, which did not have time to diverge very far in their grammatical structure and the root part of the main vocabulary, could again approach each other and survive a period of joint life, and then break up again, and the newly broken teats could either correspond or not correspond to adjacent parts. Some researchers (I. M. Endzelin and others) define the nature of the Slavic-Baltic relations and the formation of the Slavic-Baltic community in precisely this way.
In the field of Slavic-Iranian lexical and partly grammatical similarities, it is also possible to separate with a certain probability the convergences related to the ancient era of contact of the Proto-Slavic dialects with the periphery of the Indo-Iranian language world, which was just beginning to separate, from similarities, which can be attributed to a time much later, the second, meetings of the Slavs, who had already separated from the Baltics, with part of the Iranians (Scythians and Sarmatians). Even more difficult is the question of the relationship between the Italic and Celtic languages ​​and the relationship of both of these groups to the so-called "Illyrian" languages ​​that have almost not come down to us.
It would be possible to indicate other possible relationships between related languages, but this does not fit into the scope of this article.
The main obstacle on the way to determining the degree of closeness of kinship between individual languages ​​and groups of related languages ​​is the lack of factual data: the absence of early monuments for some languages ​​and entire groups, insignificant linguistic remnants from some languages ​​and entire groups, and, finally, the complete disappearance of entire language groups , about which we sometimes know only by ethnic names, and sometimes we know absolutely nothing, although we have serious grounds to assume their existence. In the linguistic literature, it has been said more than once that if the ancient Greeks or Romans would have preserved for us, for example, such data about the Thracian, Phrygian and Celtic languages, which their translators should have had in their respective geographical areas, then the comparative grammar of the Indo-European languages ​​\u200b\u200bwould have such a degree of precision it will never have. In fact, from the Celtic languages, spread over a vast area from the Atlantic Ocean to the northern Black Sea region and Asia Minor, only a few ancient monuments of those Celts who migrated relatively late to Britain and Ireland have come down to us. Perhaps even more significant is the loss of accurate data on the phonetic and grammatical structure and vocabulary of the Thracian languages, which not only occupied a vast territory, but were undoubtedly an intermediate link between a number of related language groups, which are now far separated from each other for us. We can speak about the very existence of the so-called "Illyrian" languages ​​as a special group only hypothetically on the basis of traces of a conditionally "Illyrian" stratification in other languages, representing an analogy with the facts that give us the meager remains of the Venetian and Messapian languages.
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24 Wed. THEM. Endzelin, Slavic-Baltic Etudes, Kharkov, 1911, p. 201. The point of view expressed by the author in this early work is still of interest.

We usually do not use this term without quotation marks. Meanwhile, in all almost ethno-Hevetic works of recent times, their authors extremely freely operated with all such groups, or rather, with their names alone, arbitrarily establishing their connections both with historically attested languages, and between these linguistic units themselves lost to us. We encounter in these works the following terms: "Scythian-Slavic", "Slavic-Thracian", "Illyro-Thracian", "Kimero-Thracian", "Thracian-Tocharian", etc. All this borders on the most real fantasy and is one of the consequences of the passion for Marr's "Japhetic tales". Of course, one cannot blame all the authors of ethnogenetic works for using all these ethnic terms in the same sense that has nothing to do with science, as N.Ya. Marr and N.S. Derzhavin, in whom all these ethnonyms were associated with the notorious "four elements". But from Marr to his followers in the field of ethnogenesis, a certain ease in handling ethnic terms was transmitted, which were mixed with historical-linguistic classificatory terms. The value of ancient ethnic terms, even in cases where they were approached more realistically, was greatly overestimated. For example, the works of A.D. Udaltsov, who cannot be reproached for unconditionally accepting all Marr’s constructions and who himself has repeatedly spoken out against “paleontological” exercises with ancient ethnonyms, still have one of their main shortcomings, a reassessment of the very significance of ethnonyms not only for questions of ethnogenesis, but also for the problem of group formation. related languages.
However, even in those cases when a particular group, numbering a number of its constituent languages, is represented from a certain time by a huge number of monuments (for example, the Germanic, Slavic, Baltic languages), we still find it very difficult to determine the historical correlations of the development of these language groups with those groups whose oldest written monuments arose one or two millennia earlier. Establishing a relative chronology of linguistic phenomena in the development of an entire language family is extremely difficult because the facts of the ancient Indian language of the 2nd millennium BC. or Greek of the middle of the 1st millennium BC. we have to compare with the data of the Germanic languages ​​of the middle of the 1st millennium AD, Slavic monuments of the X-XI centuries. or Lithuanian XVI-XVII centuries. About what the Indo-European languages, for example, Central Europe, were, at least by the beginning of our era, we have no idea.
The comparative-historical method made it possible to establish the genetic commonality of a number of very large language groups (families) with greater or lesser complexity of family relationships within them. Such long-established communities are the Indo-European, Semitic, Finno-Ugric, Turkic, Dravidian, Malayo-Polynesian, and Bantu families. Recently, the same method has made it possible to raise the question of some new families. Thus, one can point to the results of the work of the Soviet Caucasian scholars of the Tbilisi school, headed by prof. A.S. Chikobava, establishing the genetic unity of the Iberian-Caucasian languages.
In other cases, the genetic character of the languages ​​traditionally grouped into groups is still very unclear, and in some cases one can already say without any hesitation that the traditional grouping of some languages ​​into one group in science is not based on the unity of their origin. Such, for example, is the group of Paleoasiatic languages. Before our eyes, the hypothesis of a single "Ural-Altaic" language family, consisting of five groups, collapsed, but some researchers put forward the position of two families instead of five groups - "Ural" (Finno-Ugric-(Amodsh) and "Altaic" (Turkic- Some modern Hamitologists raise the question that the origin of the so-called Hamitic languages ​​\u200b\u200bcannot be reduced to a common source and that we should talk about three independent groups - Berber, Nilotic and Cushitic, which, together with the Semitic languages, constitute a single Semitic language. Hamitic language family.
The isolation of a part of the collective that spoke the base language is usually accompanied by mixing with foreign-speaking human groups - natives of newly settled territories or newcomers, as a result of which the ethnic composition of peoples and their anthropological type become more complicated. This, however, does not introduce any fundamental changes in the process of formation of language families. I.V. Stalin developed the position that “it would be completely wrong to think that as a result of crossing, say, two languages, a new, third language is obtained, not similar to any of the crossed languages ​​and qualitatively different from each of them. In fact, when crossed, one of the languages ​​usually comes out victorious, retains its grammatical structure, retains its basic vocabulary and continues to develop according to the internal laws of its development, while the other language gradually loses its quality and gradually dies off. It is important to emphasize that the crossing of two languages ​​does not mean the end of the history of both of these languages, does not mean a break in ties with the state preceding the crossing. Leading to the gradual death (in a certain territory) of one of the crossed languages, to its oblivion by its speakers, crossing does not lead to the loss of the originality of the victorious language, which has become a means of communication for the descendants of the speakers of the defeated language.
Therefore, if an isolated population acquires the language of the people with which it mingles, and its language is thus defeated, we no longer have the right to speak of this language as a member of a language family that goes back to the language from which it emerged. If the language of interest to us turns out to be the winner and continues to develop according to the internal laws of its development, it remains the same member of the language family, connected by a genetic connection with its base language, as if its isolation was not accompanied by crossing with other languages; it only expands the scope of its use, spreading to new peoples and tribes, which, thus, without physically disappearing, acquire a foreign language. For example, the ancient population of the Balkan Peninsula (Thracians, Illyrians), being one of the ethnic elements of modern Bulgarians and Serbs, learned the language of the Slavs, who appeared in the Balkans only in the 6th-7th centuries. The inclusion and composition of the Balkan Slavs of the Turkic tribes who came here later, complicating the ethnic composition of modern Bulgarians, also did not interrupt the genetic ties of the Bulgarian language with its common Slavic language-base. In the same way, among the ancestors of the Russian people, one can find many heterogeneous ethnic formations that differed from each other either in phonological type, level of culture, or long-established and wild, but only the language of one of these groups, which was part of the Slavic language family, can be considered the ancestor of Russian language.
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25 I. Stalin, Marxism and Questions of Linguistics, pp. 29-30.

However, since the winning language can sometimes still perceive some features of the defeated language, then as a result of crossing with a foreign-speaking population, a new language that has become isolated from the base language receives some such differences from related languages ​​that might not have developed in it without the influence of a foreign language. substrate (or superstratum) 26 .
Thus, different languages ​​that emerged from the same linguistic community could interact with different languages ​​of other families and, in cases where they were not absorbed by these languages, could retain traces of different substrates, and a related language could also be a substrate. , even earlier far diverged from that language, which then defeated him when crossing.
For the most ancient stages of the disintegration of the Indo-European language family, an example of the impact of a foreign language substrate can be the cuneiform Hittite (Nesit) language. The study of this language, which, by the date of its written monuments, is older than all other Indo-European languages, gave the beginning of the 2nd millennium BC. a picture that is very different from the language system that was reconstructed as a “proto-language” before the discovery and decoding of the Hittite monuments. The followers of Marr liked to cite this indisputable fact in itself to defame the reconstruction of the "Indo-European proto-language." Meanwhile, there is no reason to consider all the facts of the Hittite (Nesit) language, diverging from the previous reconstructions of the Indo-European language-base, to be considered more archaic on the sole ground that the monuments of this language are older than all the others. This mistake was made by all linguists until the 70s of the 19th century. in relation to the ancient Indian language, the monuments of which were then the most ancient. Supporters of the "new doctrine" of language repeated the mistakes of Bopp, Benfey and other linguists of the 19th century, ending with Schleicher and H. Curtius. In fact, only a small number of facts of the Hittite (non-English) language (for example, the preservation of laryngeal sounds, the disappearance of which changed the quality of neighboring vowels) can be used for absolutely necessary corrections in previous reconstructions, in particular in the doctrine of the structure of the most ancient Indo-European roots. Another part of the facts of the Hittite (non-Sit) language is undoubtedly new formations, and a number of other Indo-European languages ​​​​(both Greek, and Indo-Iranian, and Baltic, and Slavic) give us more archaic forms. Finally, the third is most likely due to the very strong influence of the substratum of the autochthonous languages ​​of Asia Minor, apparently related to the Iberian-Caucasian languages, which the followers of Marr tried to use to confirm the conjectures of their teacher about the "Japhetic stage" in the development of the Indo-European languages ​​27 . The same Iberian-Caucasian substratum is also revealed in the Armenian language, where it received a completely false interpretation in the works of N.Ya. Marr (“transitivity” of the Armenian language) and more correct (but still controversial) - in the works of prof. G. Ghapantsyan 28 . The effect of the substratum is convincingly revealed in the development of a number of other groups of Indo-European languages ​​and individual languages ​​and even their individual dialects.
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26 The term “substrate” refers to traces of the impact of the former language of the population that has learned a new language (for example, the so-called “clatter”, as an alleged trace of the Finnish phonetic system in some Russian dialects), the term “superstratum” refers to the impact of the language of the newcomer population, which was able to assimilate the language of the indigenous population, but has had an impact on it (for example, the Romance element in English).
27 See articles by A.D. Udaltsova, S.P. Tolstov and M.I. Artamonov on the origin of the Indo-Europeans (“Kr. Communication of the Institute of Hagiography of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR”, issue I (1946) and “Vesta. Levingr, State University”, 1947, No. 2).
28 Wed. G. Ghapantsyan, Hayasa is the cradle of Armenians.

Thus, we can mention the "Pict" substratum in the Old Irish language, which manifested itself mainly in the field of syntax. The phenomena of clattering in the North Russian dialects are presumably explained by the traces of the phonetic structure of the absorbed Finnish languages ​​among the Slavized Finnish tribes, but on the other hand, there is no reason to explain such a phenomenon of the South Russian and Central Russian dialects as akanye with Finnish or any other substratum.
The Eastern Finnish substratum explains some of the features of the Chuvash language. A number of phenomena in the vocabulary of the English language, which is part of the group of West Germanic languages, is explained by the successive influences of the Celtic language, Scandinavian dialects, French (the latter was introduced by the Normans - Scandinavians by origin, but speakers of French speech), which, however, does not mean that English ceased to be a Germanic language, since its grammatical structure and main vocabulary retains its historical continuity with the common Germanic base language.
The influence of a foreign language substrate is usually limited to vocabulary, some word-forming elements, it is insignificantly reflected in the quality of sounds, accentology, in the intonational structure of a sentence, word order, but, as a rule, does not affect either the main vocabulary fund 29 or the grammatical structure. Consequently, the substratum does not introduce significant changes into the system of the winning language, does not pull it out of the language family, although sometimes it contributes to the isolation of related languages, deepening the difference between them. The explanation of language changes by the action of the substrate must be approached very carefully, and in many cases such an explanation is very guesswork. Thus, it is controversial to explain the action of the substrate of the so-called "movement of consonants" in the Germanic languages. This phenomenon is observed in other Indo-European languages, although nowhere is it carried out with such consistency. The closest to the Germanic "movement" is the change of the ancient Indo-European consonantism in the Armenian language. N.Ya. Marr explained both phenomena, first by the influence of the “Japhetic” substratum, and then by the “transition” of both the Germanic and Armenian languages ​​from the “Japhetic” state to the Indo-European. (F. A. Brown, Bartoli). The "Kartvelian" character of this substratum in the Germanic languages ​​continues to be defended by T.A. Degtereva in her doctoral dissertation 30 . The “substrate theory” should not be discarded entirely, but it should be applied as a hypothesis only in those cases when all the possibilities of explanation from the internal laws of language development have been exhausted. Passion for "crossings" and "mixings" was characteristic not only of the supporters of the "new doctrine" of language in the USSR 31 . It is now very widespread among foreign linguists and requires a wary, critical approach. Even with a correct understanding of the essence of the process of crossing, resorting to this way of explaining the emergence of this or that fact of the language can be completely unreasonable.
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29 The only borrowings that replace individual words of the original main vocabulary (for example, the words Hand and Bein in German, etc.) do not play a role.
30 G.A. Degterev. To the question of the Slavic linguistic community and the origin of the ancient common Slavic writing (author's abstract), M., 1951.
31 See above (pp. 44-45) about D.V. Bubrakha.

Meanwhile, in the West (at the 3rd International Linguistic Congress in Rome in 1933) the question of the interaction of languages ​​as the main cause of language changes was posed in an organized manner. This way of putting the question is completely wrong. It essentially means the denial of the dominant role of the internal laws of language development and is incompatible with the main provisions of Marxist linguistics, set forth in the brilliant work of I.V. Stalin.
Perhaps not a single scientific proposition provoked such a vehement denial on the part of the Marrapists as the proposition that the kinship of languages ​​is determined by their origin from a common source. And perhaps this question was the only one on which among the followers of N.Ya. Marr never had any discrepancies. Rejecting sometimes one, sometimes another Marrian proposition, not one of the representatives of the "new doctrine" about language rejected the proposition that the kinship of languages ​​is a secondary phenomenon, not ascending to an origin from a common source. The kinship of languages ​​was explained by “typological” similarity as a result of the action of similar social conditions, explained by “synstadiality”, explained by multiple crossings, explained by indefinite, it is not known why and when the “historical connections” that arose, explained by “primitive linguistic continuity”, explained, finally, by connected by the action of all these "factors" - by anything, but not by origin from a common source. Acad. I.I. Meshchaninov, in his discussion article in the Pravda newspaper, 33 repeated in the most general form the wording that was one of the starting points for any Marrist: "...Kinship of languages ​​is not an original phenomenon." This is illustrated by the author right there with a specific example: “... If the Romance languages, including French and Spanish, were formed as a result of the displacement of a number of other languages ​​​​and gave many moments of convergence, then similar components participated in these converging languages, called Romance, as well as they participated in the formation of the respective peoples, later nations. This justifies the historically formed convergence of languages ​​classified by groups” 34 . Modern Romance languages ​​are not considered here as the result of the absorption of local languages ​​by "Vulgar Latin", but as the result of the transformation of these local languages ​​(Celtic, Iberian, etc.) in the process of their crossing with Latin.
It should be noted that Marr and his students distorted Stalin's position on the mixed nature of modern nations, mechanically transferring this position into language. So, I.I. Meshchaninov, in the same discussion article in Pravda, wrote: “If every nation and every people are a mixture of different terms, then in all languages ​​they are historically formed formations of the same kind.”
Enough has already been said and written about the cosmopolitan nature of the conclusions that logically followed from the denial by the "disciples" of Marr of the genetic nature of linguistic kinship, from the recognition of the possibility of "stage" transformations of Iberians into Celts, Cimmerians into Scythians, Scythians into Slavs, etc. Let some researchers of the issues of ethnogenesis (A.D. Udaltsov, S.P. Tolstov and others) reject the primitive schemes of these stage transformations in the form in which they were presented to us by V.I. Ravdonikas or N.S. Derzhavin, the essence of the matter changed little from this.
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32 See Atti del III Congresso internationale dei linguisti (1933). Firenze, 1935. Pp. 23-51 of the "Proceedings" of this congress are occupied with the communication of van-Gynveken, Bartoli, Pisanne, Terracini and other linguists, devoted to this issue. Separate statements of these linguists can be brought together to a certain extent with the provisions of the so-called "new doctrine" about language, concerning the role and nature of the crossing of languages.
33 I.I. Meshchaninov. For the creative development of the heritage of academician N.Ya. Marra, Pravda, May 16, 1950.
34 Wed. also I.I. Meshchaninov, New teaching about language at the present stage of development, L., 1947.

After all, if, for example, it was recognized that in the first centuries A.D. tribes of various origins were "Slavicized" - not in the sense of their assimilation of Slavic speech (which is quite possible, and in some cases indisputable), but in the sense of the emergence of several independent centers of Slavism, not initially connected with each other, then such views, in fact , led to a complete denial of the very fact of linguistic kinship. Unfortunately, such views were also expressed after the linguistic discussion in Pravda and the publication of the works of I.V. Stalin in linguistics. As an example, we can cite the abstracts of the report by A.V. Artsikhovsky, who has never been a supporter of the "new doctrine" of language. Nevertheless, his report, read at a session of the Institute of the History of Material Culture of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR in 1951, spoke of the emergence of ethnic unity of both Germans and Slavs only in the process of the struggle of these peoples against the Western Roman or Eastern Roman Empire 35 . You can specify the second edition of the abstract of the doctoral dissertation of T.A. Degtereva, where, just as in the first edition (printed before the discussion), the author forces the Germanic languages ​​to go through a number of stages of development - Hunno-Turkic, Kartvelian, Slavic-Scythian and, finally, proper Germanic 36 .
Such facts, which took place in the most recent time, as well as the “theory of primitive linguistic continuity” mentioned above, which is widespread among Soviet ethnographers, prof. S.P. Tolstova, who essentially denies the origin of language families from a single source, force Soviet linguists to raise the question of the formation and development of language families with all their urgency. The development of this problem can be carried out only on the basis of the recognition of the fact that there are related languages ​​(closely related or more or less distantly related) and there are unrelated languages, languages ​​that are different in their origin. There are no intermediate phenomena and cannot be. The concept of "language hybrid" is a fiction. It is incompatible with the Stalinist position that “when crossed, one of the languages ​​usually comes out victorious, retains its grammatical structure, retains its basic vocabulary and continues to develop according to the internal laws of its development, while the other language gradually loses its quality and gradually dies off” 37 .
So, for example, it is still possible, in the current state of science, to argue about whether the Hittite (non-Sit) language is Indo-European or not Indo-European. But the Hittite (Non-Sit) language must be recognized as either the same Indo-European language as Greek or Sanskrit, if the Indo-European elements of its structure won and forced it to develop according to the internal laws of languages ​​of this type, or it must be recognized as a non-Indo-European language, despite all its indisputable Indo-Europeanisms. He could not be any semi-Indo-European or "Indo-Caucasoid".
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35 In his speech at the Joint Session on the Methodology of Ethpogenetic Research (October 29 - November 3, 1951), prof. A.V. Artsikhovsky acknowledged the failure of his formulations, which give rise to anti-historical conclusions.
36 T.A. Degtereva. To the question of the Slavic linguistic community and the origin of the ancient common Slavic writing, M., 1951.
37 I. Stalin, Marxism and Questions of Linguistics, pp. 29-30.

N.Ya. Marr was partially right when he found Ibero-Caucasian (“Japhetic” in his terminology) elements in the Armenian language (he partially identified them incorrectly), 38 but he was completely wrong when he considered the Armenian language as a “hybrid language” on this basis. . The Armenian language, with all its "Japhetidisms", is such an Indo-European language as Latin or Lithuanian.
Followers of N.Ya. Marr was sometimes told that they were not against the language families themselves, but only against the recognition of their isolation. This point of view was developed, for example, by Prof. A.V. Desnitskaya, who spoke about "different degrees of entry" of individual languages ​​into the Indo-European language family 39 . However, there can be no “open” language family if we include in it only languages ​​that originated from a common source and which, when crossed with languages ​​of a different origin, turned out to be winners and continued to develop according to their internal laws. It goes without saying that isolation is understood here not as isolation from any foreign language influence in the development of a language family. It should be understood not in terms of structural, but only in terms of genetics, as a statement of the fact of the origin of all the languages ​​of a given language family from a common source, from a common base language.
In the current state of science, we have no reason to assert that, for example, the Indo-European languages ​​are related to the Finno-Ugric or Semitic languages, but there are no grounds to categorically reject this relationship, since some facts indicating the possibility of genetic ties of these families in distant past, there are. We cannot yet reduce these language families to a single source (and may never be able to) and therefore we must consider them unrelated. Each of these three language families remains in this sense, at least at the present stage of development of comparative historical linguistics, closed. Denying this inevitable isolation of language families, the supporters of the “new doctrine” about language tried to distort its opponents’ understanding, replacing it with the mythical “racial isolation” of language families, which is denied even by a significant part of bourgeois linguists and which was never defended by any of the Soviet scientists. This unscrupulous demagogic falsification of the Marrists brought great harm to the Soviet science of language, hindering the study of linguistic kinship, thereby weakening the possibility of studying the internal laws of the development of individual languages. The assimilation of this point of view by archaeologists and ethnographers who dealt with the issues of ethnogenesis has given an anti-scientific character to all ethnogenetic studies of recent years.
So, it is necessary to emphasize with all decisiveness that the language family is closed. This follows from the teachings of I.V. Stalin about the nature of the crossing of languages, about the winning language. The slightest compromise on this issue leads to a revival in one form or another of Marr's doctrine of the unity of the glottogonic process. The “theory of primitive linguistic continuity” (S.P. Tolstov) and the “contact theory” (D.V. Bubrich) also lead there, if we approach them as “theories”. The facts of "linguistic continuity" and the facts of "contact" were and are and have long been well known to linguists. These facts always arise under definite historical conditions, and within the framework of these conditions they play their historical role. But to universalize these facts, to elevate them to a “theory” is possible only if we accept Marr’s thesis that the dominant path in the development of languages ​​is the path from plurality to unity (by the way, the thesis put forward even before Marr by K. Kautsky) .
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38 These mistakes N.Ya. Marr were criticized in the thesis of R.O. Santadze “The main stages of the history of Armenian studies”, Yerevan, 1951 (see alogepherat, pp. 18-20).
39 A.V. Desnitskaya. On the problem of the historical community of the pre-European languages, Izv. USSR Academy of Sciences, Dep. literature and language”, 1948, p. 250.

This can be done only if we do not reject this Marrian thesis, but try to "specify" and reform it, if we assume that in a pre-class society, when the language families that exist today were formed, the crossing of languages ​​had no the character that I.V. Stalin, and that then, in contrast to historical eras, as a result of the crossing of unrelated languages, languages ​​of a new type could arise.
The provisions of I.V. Stalin, concerning the crossing of languages, are formulated quite clearly and clearly and do not allow any misunderstandings. Destructive criticism of I.V. Stalin is not directed against some theories “in general” concerning the mixing or merging of languages ​​that exist in science in a wide variety of ways, but against the anti-scientific point of view of N.Ya. Marr, who dealt primarily with the "twilight of prehistory" in the development of languages, and, therefore, this criticism shows the impossibility of "crossing" in the Arrian sense in any era, including the era of the existence of generic and tribal languages.
The “primitive linguistic continuity theory”, which, as stated above, denies the origin of related languages ​​from a single source, is an abstract scheme, not substantiated by mass facts, that adjusts the development of the languages ​​of the whole world to a single template.
As such a template, the creator of this theory, prof. S.P. Tolstov 40 took N.N. Miklouho-Maclay on the coast of New Guinea, who found that there are almost no differences in language between neighboring villages, and as they move away, such differences gradually increase. These facts must be clarified by new observations, and their genesis can be explained only when the nature of these differences is studied along with the nature of the observed similarity. In itself, such an observation cannot give anything, since the facts of such "continuity" are well known in the border zones between closely related languages ​​(for example, Romance, between Polish and Slovak in the western Carpathians, between Serbian and Bulgarian in Macedonia). Wherever these facts are known, they are explained by the concentration of dialects of one language group in the languages ​​of nationalities (and later nations) with the preservation of the phenomena of "transition" on the borders of the territories of established nationalities (nations), especially when political borders are not stable enough or when a nationality enters a multinational states (for example, the former Austria-Hungary, the former Ottoman Empire). No conclusions can be drawn from this for the origin of the linguistic groups themselves, on the borders of which such “continuity” is observed. Such facts are observed only between closely related languages, and the very fact of their kinship is due to the origin of a common source that existed many centuries before the individual languages ​​of this group became isolated as a result of the concentration of dialects.
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40 See Soviet Ethnography, 1950, No. 4, p. 19.
41 At the Joint Session of the Institutes of the Department of Literature and Language and the Department of History and Philosophy of the USSR Academy of Sciences, dedicated to the methodology of ethnogenetic research, in the report of H.A. Butinov "The Origin of Australians and Melanesians", an attempt was made to substantiate this theory on the material of all Australian languages ​​and to prove "continuity" in the relationship between all these languages. The speaker cited isolated facts, torn from the language system, which do not testify to the true title of these languages ​​and taken from various works about them. But if the picture drawn by the author of the linguistic relations of Australia turned out to be correct (which is very doubtful), then we would have to accept the position that all Australian languages ​​are related to each other, i.e. about their origin from a single source. In the report of N.A. Butinov (see his published theses) "theory" of S.P. Tolstova is brought to the point of complete absurdity, in which even the newcomer (with its own language) population "turns gradually into one of the intermediate (for the locally given links of primitive linguistic continuity" (abstracts, p. 4). N.A. Butinov's report aroused strong objections from the participants session and was not defended by anyone.

Therefore, linguistics cannot accept the "theories of primitive linguistic continuity" without abandoning its main provisions obtained as a result of the comparative historical study of related languages. And we have no reason to refuse these provisions.
Only with such a formulation of the question is it possible to fruitfully develop the problem of the formation and development of language families, although, of course, one must always remember that each language family did not arise from scratch, that something preceded it, that human speech existed for many millennia before the formation existing families of languages ​​and that none of these families can go back to the era of the emergence of sound speech.
The problems of ethnogenesis are not among the tasks of linguistics as a science. Linguistics should deal with the history of languages ​​in close connection with the history of peoples, their creators and bearers, but not with the history of peoples itself. However, ethnogenetic issues cannot be resolved without the involvement of linguistic data. Therefore, linguists should participate to the extent possible in the complex development of the problem of the origin and development of peoples. But the success of this comprehensive study with the participation of linguists requires the acceptance of the position that language is the most important feature of an ethnic community, but not its only feature. The people can change their language, submitting to the influence of another language and joining the people - the bearer of the victorious language. Consequently, the continuity traced by archaeologists in the development of material culture in any territory cannot serve as decisive evidence for the existence of a continuous linguistic tradition in the same territory, just as the historically attested fact of the appearance of any language in a certain territory does not mean that in education of the modern people speaking this language, the ancient foreign-speaking population of this territory, who mastered the language of newcomers, did not participate.

The comparative study of languages ​​and the construction of their genealogical classification is very important for the development of questions of ethnogenesis (the origin of peoples) and ethnic history, which considers the causes and conditions for the formation of ethnic communities of different orders, their development and settlement, interaction, fragmentation and merger. The problems of ethnogenesis and ethnic history are always complex, since the very concept of an ethnos, defined on the basis of many features, is complex. Apart from anthropologists, ethnographers and linguists, scientists of many other specialties are involved in the development of these problems, including history, studying written monuments, geographers and archaeologists, whose subject of study is the remains of the economic and cultural activities of ancient peoples. The role of archeology in illuminating the initial stages of human history is very great, since no written sources have come down to us.

We do not know exactly when the first ethnic communities arose, but many scientists suggest that they are as ancient as the ancient people themselves of the modern biological species Homo sapiens (“reasonable man”), which, according to the latest scientific data, was formed over 50-40 thousand years. . years before our time. During the period of the late, or upper, Paleolithic (Old Stone Age), which lasted several tens of thousands of years and ended approximately 16-15 millennia ago, people of the modern species had already firmly mastered a significant part of Asia (with the exception of the far north and high mountain regions), all of Africa and almost all of Europe, except for the northern regions, which were then covered with glaciers. In the same era, Australia was settled from Indonesia, as well as America, where the first people penetrated from Northeast Asia through the Bering Strait or the isthmus that existed in its place. We do not have any direct data on the ethnicity of the human groups of the Late Paleolithic. According to the hypothesis of "primitive linguistic continuity", proposed by the Soviet ethnographer S.P. Tolstov, at the dawn of its history, mankind spoke numerous languages, apparently gradually passing one into another in adjacent territories and forming, as a whole, as if a single continuous network (" linguistic continuity).

An indirect confirmation of the hypothesis of S. P. Tolstov is the fact that traces of ancient linguistic fragmentation in some countries have been preserved until recently. In Australia, for example, there were several hundred languages ​​between which it was not easy to draw clear boundaries. N. N. Miklukho-Maclay noted that among the Papuans of New Guinea, almost every village had its own special language. The differences between the languages ​​of neighboring groups of Papuans were very small. However, the languages ​​of more distant groups already differed significantly from each other. S.P. Tolstov believes that language families could take shape in the process of gradual concentration of individual languages ​​of small communities, their contraction into larger groups that inhabited large areas of the globe. Other Soviet and foreign linguists suggest that language families usually arose in the process of independent separation of one base language during the settlement of its speakers or in the process of assimilation when it interacted with other languages, which led to the formation of local dialects within the base language, which in the future could become independent languages

The question of the time of formation of language families is very important for the problems of ethnogenesis. Some Soviet researchers - archaeologists and ethnographers - admit that the formation of these families could have begun already at the end of the Late Paleolithic or in the Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age), 13-7 thousand years before our days. In this era, in the process of human settlement, groups of related languages, and possibly the languages ​​of the largest individual ethnic communities, could spread over very vast territories.

The linguist X. Pedersen at one time put forward a hypothesis about the genetic connection of the languages ​​of several large families, which were considered unrelated. He called these languages ​​"Nostratic". The studies of the Soviet linguist V. M. Illich-Svitych showed the scientific validity of the unification of Indo-European, Semitic-Hamitic, Uralic, Altaic and some languages ​​into a large Nostratic macrofamily of languages. This macrofamily, apparently, developed in the Upper Paleolithic "in the territory of Southwest Asia and the regions adjacent to it.

With the retreat of the last Wurm glaciation and climatic warming in the Mesolithic, Nostratic tribes settled over the vast territory of the Old World; they pushed back and partially assimilated the tribes that lived there earlier. In this historical process, the Nostratic tribes formed a number of isolated areas, where the formation of special language families began. The largest of them, the Indo-European linguistic community, began to form, according to Soviet linguists T.V. Gamkrelidze and Vyach. Sun. Ivanov, in Southwest Asia. As possible archaeological cultures that could be correlated with the region of the common Indo-European cultural complex, the authors name the Khalaf, Ubeid, Chatal-Khuyuk cultures in Southwest Asia and the Kura-Araks culture in Transcaucasia. The secondary intermediate ancestral home of the Indo-Europeans, according to these scientists, was the Northern Black Sea region, where their settlement dates back to the 3rd millennium BC. e.

To the south of the range of the Indo-European family, the core of the Semitic-Hamitic (Afrasian) language family may have formed. To the north of the Indo-Europeans lived, apparently, carriers of the Kartvelian proto-language, to the east - the Dravidian proto-language. The ancestral home of the Uralic (Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic) Turkic, Mongolian and Tungus-Manchu languages ​​was probably located on the northeastern periphery. This Nostratic macrofamily of languages ​​includes the Indo-European, Semitic-Hamitic, or Afroasian, Kartvelian, Uralic, Dravidian, Turkic, Mongolian, Tungus-Manchurian, Chukchi-Kamchatka, and possibly Eskimo-Aleut language families. The languages ​​of this huge macrofamily are now spoken by over 3/s of the world's population. Far from all the links of the concept of the Nostratic macrofamily of languages ​​are indisputable, but in general this concept has received quite wide recognition.

The spread of the Nostratic languages ​​went, probably, both through the settlement of ancient people of the modern type, and through contacts between their various tribal groups. There is reason to believe that another ancient language macrofamily (or trunk) was formed in southeast Asia at about the same time - the Pacific Ocean, the differentiation of which led to the development of Sino-Tibetan, Austroasiatic and Austropesian languages.

Other scientists (including many Soviet linguists) believe that the most likely time for the formation of language families is the later periods of history, corresponding to the Neolithic (New Stone Age) and the Bronze Age of archaeological periodization (VIII-II millennium BC). The formation of the oldest language families at that time was associated with the separation of mobile, mainly pastoral tribes and their intensive migrations, which intensified the processes of linguistic differentiation and assimilation. It should be noted, however, that the real differences between both points of view are not so great, since the formation of different language families did not occur simultaneously and was a very long process.

Ethnic communities probably formed earlier than others, speaking languages ​​that are currently preserved among small peoples living on the periphery of the primitive ecumene - a land area inhabited by people (Greek oikeo "to inhabit"). These languages ​​are distinguished by a great variety of phonetic composition and grammar, often forming imperceptible transitions among themselves, perhaps dating back to the era of primitive linguistic continuity. Such languages, which are very difficult to classify genealogically, include the languages ​​already known to us of the American Indians, the "Paleo-Asians of Siberia", the Australians, the Papuans of New Guinea, the Bushmen and Hottentots, and some peoples of West Africa.

Closer to the central regions of the ecumene, large language families developed, developing both through the differentiation of the original foundation languages ​​and through the assimilation of languages ​​of other origin. In Western Asia, in East and North Africa, at least from the 4th millennium BC. e. Semitic-Hamitic languages ​​became widespread, which included the languages ​​of the ancient Egyptians in the Nile Valley, Akkadians, Babylonians and Assyrians in Mesopotamia, ancient Jews and Phoenicians on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea, as well as the languages ​​of the North African Berbers, East African Cushites, Amhara and other Semites that developed later Ethiopia and, finally, the Arabs, who played a huge role in the socio-economic, cultural and ethnic history of the Mediterranean, North Africa, Western and partly South Asia in the Middle Ages. The neighbors of the Semito-Khayites in Africa were the peoples who spoke the Niger-Congo languages ​​(including the Bantu), which gradually spread throughout the southern half of the African continent. To the north of the Semitic-Hamitic languages, the Caucasian languages ​​were formed, which from ancient times were spoken by the population of Georgia and other countries of the Transcaucasus and the North Caucasus.

The Soviet linguist Academician N. Ya. Marr put forward a hypothesis according to which the Caucasian (or Japhetic, in his terminology) languages ​​were spoken by many ancient peoples of the Mediterranean and Western Asia, including the Etruscans in Italy, the Pelasgians in the south of the Balkan Peninsula and the Sumerians in Mesopotamia, created in the IV-III millennium BC. one of the earliest civilizations in the world.

In the steppe and forest-steppe zone of the Black Sea region, especially in the Danube basin and on the Balkan Peninsula, as well as in Asia Minor, many Soviet and foreign researchers are looking for the area of ​​formation of Indo-European languages, which in the III-II millennium BC. e. spread throughout Europe to the shores of the Atlantic, North and Baltic seas. In the eastern direction, the peoples who spoke the languages ​​of this family settled vast areas in the south of Eastern Europe, in Central Asia and South Siberia, as well as in Iran, reaching at the turn of the 2nd and 1st millennium BC. e. the Indus basin and later spread throughout the north of Hindustan. In addition to the languages ​​that exist today, many obsolete languages ​​belonged to the Indo-European family, including Italic (including Latin), the already mentioned Illiro-Thracian, Tocharian (in Central Asia) and Hitto-Luvian (among the peoples of Asia Minor in II millennium BC). In Northwestern India, Indo-European tribes entered into interaction with the peoples of the Dravidian family, who in the III millennium BC. e. created the high civilization of Harappa and Mohenjo Daro, later they settled the entire southern half of Hindustan and penetrated Sri Lanka. In Eastern Europe, the ancient Indo-Europeans already in the III-II millennium BC. e. came into contact with the tribes who spoke the Finno-Ugric languages, which, together with the related languages ​​of the Samoyeds, unite, as we know, into the Ural family. The area of ​​its formation, according to many linguists, was located in Western Siberia, from where the speakers of these languages ​​settled in the European North, up to Scandinavia and the Baltic. The famous Finnish scientist A. Kastren and some other linguists included the Uralic languages ​​in a larger linguistic community - the Ural-Altaic, to which they also included the Altaic languages, which undoubtedly developed in Central Asia. From here, the Tungus peoples, in connection with the development of reindeer husbandry, spread far to the north, up to the shores of the Arctic Ocean, and the Turkic and Mongolian nomadic pastoralists made distant migrations both to the west, up to Eastern Europe and Asia Minor, and to the southeast, up to Northern China. The ancestors of the Japanese, close to the ancient Altaians and their kindred Koreans, penetrated through Korea in the first centuries of the new era to the Japanese islands, where they met the Aip and Indonesian tribes of southern origin.

The neighbors of the ancient Turks, Mongols and Tungus-Manchus in Central and East Asia were the ancestors of the peoples of the Sino-Tibetan family, who originally lived most likely in Western and Central China to the Qinling Mountains in the south. From the III millennium BC. e. various tribes of this family began to settle to the south and gradually mastered the territory of Tibet, South China and parts of Indochina. Further south lived Austroasiatic and Austropesian tribes. The former probably originally occupied the southwest of China and the extreme north of Indochina, while the latter lived to the east, off the coast of the Pacific Ocean: ancient Chinese sources included them in the Yue tribes widely settled in southern East Asia. Already in the II millennium BC. e. the Austroasians spread throughout Indochina and reached East India, where they gave rise to the Munda peoples, and the Austronesians, who were excellent sailors, settled Taiwan, the Philippines and all of Indonesia, where they assimilated older tribes, possibly close to the Papuans. From Indonesia back in the 1st millennium BC. e. was settled, apparently, Madagascar. At the same time, the resettlement of Austronesians began on the countless islands of Oceania. Separate groups of these brave sailors, perhaps, reached the shores of America.

languages ​​and peoples. Today, the peoples of the world speak more than 3,000 languages. There are about 4000 forgotten languages, some of them are still alive in the memory of mankind (Sanskrit, Latin). By the nature of the language, many researchers judge the degree of kinship between peoples. Language is most often used as an ethno-differentiating feature. The linguistic classification of peoples is most recognized in world science. At the same time, language is not an indispensable feature that distinguishes one people from another. The same Spanish language is spoken by several different Hispanic peoples. The same can be said about Norwegians and Danes, who have a common literary language. At the same time, the inhabitants of North and South China speak different languages, but identify themselves as belonging to the same ethnic group.

Each of the great literary languages ​​of Europe (French, Italian, English, German) dominates a territory that is linguistically much less homogeneous than the territory of the Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian peoples (L. Gumilyov, 1990). Saxons and Tyroleans hardly understand each other, and Milanese and Sicilians do not understand each other at all. The English of Northumberland speak a language close to Norwegian, as they are descendants of the Vikings who settled in England. The Swiss speak German, French, Italian and Romansh.

The French speak four languages: French, Celtic (Breton), Basque (Gascon) and Provençal. Linguistic differences between them can be traced from the beginning of the Romanization of Gaul.

Taking into account their intra-ethnic differences, the French, Germans, Italians, British should not be compared with Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians, but with all Eastern Europeans at once. At the same time, such systems of ethnic groups as the Chinese or Indians do not correspond to the French, Germans or Ukrainians, but to Europeans in general (L. Gumilyov, 1990).

All the languages ​​of the peoples of the world belong to certain language families, each of which unites languages ​​similar in linguistic structure and origin. The process of formation of language families is associated with the separation of various peoples from each other in the process of human settlement around the globe. At the same time, peoples that are initially genetically separated from each other can enter into one language family. So, the Mongols, having conquered many peoples, adopted foreign languages, and the Negroes resettled by slave traders in America speak English.

Human races and language families. According to biological characteristics, people are divided into races. The French scientist Cuvier singled out at the beginning of the 19th century three human races - black, yellow and white.

The idea that the human races came from different centers was established in the Old Testament: "Can an Ethiopian change his skin and a leopard his spots." On this basis, among the English-speaking Protestants, the theory of the "Nordic, or Indo-European God's chosen man" was created. Such a man was put on a pedestal by the French Comte de Gobineau in a book with the provocative title A Treatise on the Inequality of the Human Races. The word "Indo-European" eventually transformed into "Indo-Germanic", and the ancestral home of the primitive "Indo-Germans" began to be sought in the region of the North European plain, which at that time was part of the kingdom of Prussia. In the XX century. ideas about racial and national elitism turned into the bloodiest wars in the history of mankind.

By the middle of the XX century. there were many classifications of human races - from two (Negroid and Mongoloid) to thirty-five. Most scientists write about four human races with such centers of origin: the Greater Sunda Islands - the birthplace of the Australoids, East Asia - the Mongoloids, South and Central Europe - the Caucasians and Africa - the Negroids.

All these races, their languages ​​and centers of origin are related by some researchers to different original hominids. The ancestors of the Australoids are the Javanese Pithecanthropes, the Mongoloids are the Sinanthropes, the Negroids are the African Neanderthals and the Caucasians are the European Neanderthals. The genetic connection of certain ancient forms with the corresponding modern races can be traced with the help of morphological comparisons of cranial boxes. Mongoloids, for example, are similar to Sinanthropus with a flattened face, Caucasians approach European Neanderthals with strongly protruding nasal bones, and broad-nosedness makes Negroids related to African Neanderthals (V. Alekseev, 1985). In the Paleolithic, people were as black, white, yellow as they are today, with the same differentiation of skulls and skeletons. This means that differences between civilizations date back to ancient times, to the beginning of the human race. These include interlingual differences.

The oldest finds of representatives of the Negroid race were discovered not in Africa, but in Southern France, in the Grimaldi cave near Nice, and in Abkhazia, in the Kholodny grotto. An admixture of Negroid blood is found not only among Spaniards, Portuguese, Italians, residents of the south of France and the Caucasus, but also among residents of the north-west - in Ireland (L. Gumilyov, 1997).

Classical Negroids belong to the Niger-Kordofanian language family, which began to populate Central Africa from North Africa and Western Asia quite late - somewhere at the beginning of our era.

Before the arrival of the Negroids (Fulbe, Bantu, Zulu) to Africa, the territory south of the Sahara was inhabited by the Capoids, representatives of a recently isolated race, which includes the Hottentots and Bushmen, belonging to the Khoisan language family. Unlike Negroes, capoids are not black, but brown: they have Mongoloid facial features, they speak not on exhalation, but on inhalation, and differ sharply from both Negroes and Europeans and Mongoloids. They are considered the remnant of some ancient race of the southern hemisphere, which was driven out of the main areas of its settlement by Negroids (L. Gumilyov, 1997) .. Then many Negroids were transported to America by slave traders

Another ancient race of the southern hemisphere is the Australoid (Australian family). Australoids live in Australia and Melanesia. With their black skin color, they have huge beards, wavy hair, and broad shoulders, exceptional responsiveness. Their closest relatives lived in southern India and belong to the Dravidian language family (Tamils, Telugu).

Representatives of the Caucasoid (white) race, belonging mainly to the Indo-European language family, inhabited not only, as now, Europe, Asia Minor and North India, but also almost the entire Caucasus, a significant part of Central and Central Asia and Northern Tibet.

The largest ethnolinguistic groups of the Indo-European language family in Europe are Romance (French, Italians, Spaniards, Romanians), Germanic (Germans, English), Slavic (Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Poles, Slovaks, Bulgarians, Serbs). They inhabit North Asia (Russians), North America (Americans), South Africa (immigrants from England and Holland), Australia and New Zealand (immigrants from England), a significant part of South America (Hispanic and Portuguese-speaking Latin Americans).

The largest representative of the Indo-European family is the Indo-Aryan group of the peoples of India and Pakistan (Hindustani, Bengalis, Marathas, Punjabs, Biharis, Gujars). This also includes the peoples of the Iranian group (Persians, Tajiks, Kurds, Balochs, Ossetians), the Baltic group (Latvians and Lithuanians), Armenians, Greeks, Albanians ..

The most numerous race is the Mongoloids. They are divided into sub-races belonging to different language families.

Siberian, Central Asian, Central Asian, Volga and Transcaucasian Mongoloids form the Altaic language family. It unites the Turkic, Mongolian and Tungus-Manchu ethnolinguistic groups, each of which, in turn, is divided into ethnolinguistic subgroups. So, the Turkic Mongoloids are divided into the Bulgar subgroup (Chuvash), southwestern (Azerbaijanis, Turkmens), northwestern (Tatars, Bashkirs, Kazakhs), southeastern (Uzbeks, Uighurs), northeastern (Yakuts) subgroups.

The most widely spoken language in the world, Chinese, belongs to the Sino-Tibetan language family (over 1 billion people). It is used in writing by North Chinese and South Chinese Mongoloids (Chinese or Han), who differ significantly in anthropological and colloquial speech. Tibetan Mongoloids belong to the same language family. The Mongoloids of Southeast Asia belong to the Paratai and Austroasiatic language families. The peoples of the Chukchi-Kamchatka and Eskimo-Aleut language families are also close to the Mongoloids.

There are also sub-races with which groups of certain languages ​​usually correspond, that is, the system of human races is arranged hierarchically.

The representatives of these races include 3/4 of the world's population. The rest of the peoples belong to small races or micro-races with their own language families.

At the contact of the main human races, mixed or transitional racial forms are encountered, often forming their own language families.

Thus, the mixing of Negroids with Caucasians gave rise to mixed-transitional forms of the peoples of the Afroasian, or Semitic-Hamitic family (Arabs, Jews, Sudanese, Ethiopians). The peoples speaking the languages ​​of the Uralic language family (Nenets, Khanty, Komi, Mordovians, Estonians, Hungarians) form transitional forms between Mongoloids and Caucasoids. Very complex racial mixtures have developed into the North Caucasian (Abkhazians, Adyghes, Kabardians, Circassians, Chechens, Ingush peoples of Dagestan) and Kartvelian (Georgians, Mingrelians, Svans) language families.

Similar racial mixing took place in America, only it went much more intensively than in the Old World, and, in general, did not affect linguistic differences.

Caucasoid tribes, on the one hand, and Africans, on the other, dispersed over long distances, began to experience significant communication difficulties at the extreme points of their new ranges. In places of interracial contact, languages ​​\u200b\u200bare mixed. The proportions of mixtures were determined by the percentage presence of a particular race. At the same time, the population of Asia remained low. All this led to the formation of several independent language families.

The method of glottochronology proposed in the middle of the 20th century by Morris Swadesh makes it possible to date the collapse of the Nostratic linguistic unity to a time later than 17 thousand years ago. However, the data of glottochronology for very remote periods give overestimated results, so the decay time is more correctly attributed to the 12th - 11th millennium BC. .

By this time, the Austrian family had formed from the mixing of the Paleo-Russian and Paleo-African languages ​​in the region of northwestern China. The carriers are the first Mongoloids with a small percentage of secondary admixture of Paleorus and African-Australoids.

At the same time, and in roughly the same area, the Elamo-Dravidian family developed. Its carriers were the tribes of Negroid-Elamites and Negroid-Veddites, diluted with an extremely small percentage of admixture of paleorusians. The population of these areas was extremely low, and, according to the calculations of some scientists, by the 10th millennium BC. the population is almost completely degraded.

By the 12th - 11th millennium BC. in the regions of northern India, a Sino-Caucasian family of languages ​​has developed, founded by speakers with a much larger percentage of the Caucasoid race. The range of ethnic composition is from the proto-Chinese (which is fixed in the part of the term "Sino-") to the Caucasoid race (the rest of the term).

By the 12th - 11th millennium BC. the Uralic family of languages ​​was formed. The speakers of these languages ​​were the result of the interaction of the Paleo-Russians (Caucasoids) on the eastern borders of their range with the Mongoloids. The Ural race occupies an intermediate position between the Caucasoid race and the Mongoloid race. The time of its formation is 10 - 5 thousand years ago. Historically, extremely sparsely populated areas of distribution of the languages ​​of the Ural family have given by now a poor range of languages, both in composition and in development.

A different picture was observed in the regions of Western Asia and Egypt. Here, by the 12th - 11th millennium, the Afroasian family of languages ​​was formed. An outdated theory claimed hypothetical North African peoples as speakers of Proto-Afrasian. After it became completely clear that such languages ​​simply did not exist at the designated time, the hypothesis of the origin of the Proto-Afrasian languages ​​​​from Asia prevailed - ancient Mesopotamia, Syria, Palestine, Lebanon and Arabia. The Proto-Afrasian speakers were tall blonds. Light-skinned Caucasians of the Atlantic type are actually attested in Egyptian paintings, in the Canary Islands, and among the blue-eyed brown-haired Berbers of the Atlas Mountains (northern Algeria and Morocco). Since the Eastern Sahara underwent a very early aridization, one should hardly look for the homeland of any significant population here. “Having in mind, probably, the European origin of light-skinned Caucasoids, it is more correct to assume that they got to the Eastern Sahara for the second time.”

By the 12th - 11th millennium BC. linguists attribute the formation and so-called. Indo-European family. But it is completely unreasonable, firstly, they give it such a name (especially in terms of "Indo-"). And, secondly, the areas of the Levant are indicated as the place of its formation, in which archaeological cultures of such antiquity are not attested. On the other hand, those groups of Paleo-Russians - speakers of the Paleo-Russian language - who settled from the territory of the Russian Plain and Europe and formed the above-mentioned language families, only slightly affected the population of their places of origin (Russian Plain). A significant number of monuments of the period 12-10 millennium BC discovered on the Russian Plain and in Europe. For example, the village of Mishenskoye (Russia, Tula region) with a population of 1300 people occupied an area of ​​0.13 km² - three times larger than the ancient Lebanese "city" Byblos of the middle of the 4th millennium BC in all respects. .

Against the background of numerous Paleo-Russian proto-cities and the transition of their population to a productive economy, the archaeological cultures of Negroid Africa and Vedic India at that time were formed by a person who still remained at the level of the Mousterian era. That is, a man of the Neanderthal (but not Indo-European) type. Possibly a descendant of a Rhodesian man (see above). This line of the proto-language - formed before the arrival of the Caucasoid man - is called by some scientists the Eastern Nostratic proto-language. This language existed in these territories 16-14 thousand years ago.