Background
Marr was born in Kutaisi, Georgia (then part of the Russian Empire), in the family of the Scot James Marr (aged 71) who founded the botanical garden of the city, and a young Georgian woman (Agrafina Magularia).
anthropologist archaeologist historian linguist university professor
Marr was born in Kutaisi, Georgia (then part of the Russian Empire), in the family of the Scot James Marr (aged 71) who founded the botanical garden of the city, and a young Georgian woman (Agrafina Magularia).
Having graduated from the Street St. Petersburg University, he taught there beginning in 1891, becoming dean of the Oriental faculty in 1911 and member of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1912.
Marr"s hypotheses was used as a rationale in the campaign during the 1920-1930s in the Soviet Union of introduction of Latin alphabets for smaller ethnicities of the country. In 1950, the "" fell from official favour, with Joseph Stalin denouncing it as anti-Marxist. Between 1904 and 1917 he undertook yearly excavations at the ancient Armenian capital of Ani.
Marr earned a reputation as a maverick genius with his, postulating the common origin of Caucasian, Semitic-Hamitic, and Basque languages.
In 1924, he went even further and proclaimed that all the languages of the world descended from a single proto-language which had consisted of four "diffused exclamations": sal, ber, yon, rosh. Although the languages undergo certain stages of development, his method of linguistic paleontology claims to make it possible to discern elements of primordial exclamations in any given language.
Russian Academy of Sciences. Academy of Sciences of the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics. Russian Academy of Sciences.
