Main Achievements of the Japhetic Theory

Abstract

In this retrospective essay we see Marr’s growing emphasis on questions of language origin, an area of enquiry which he claims his New Teaching is uniquely suited to broaching. This shift to the “long view” ultimately displaces the earlier genealogical questions. Although the Mediterranean still occupies a central place in Marr’s conception of prehistory, he suggests that language emerged simultaneously in multiple locales within this region. Furthermore, the process of crossing and hybridization is so endemic that it becomes impossible to reconstruct a linguistic family tree in the conventional sense: individual languages are far from homogeneous, and exhibit instead a variegated stratigraphy of layers deposited from multiple sources. This piece also contains suggestive remarks about the origin of the Japhetic theory in the context of a broader crisis in comparative linguistics which gave rise to similar substrate theories. © Anna Kurkova 2020. All Rights Reserved.

Keywords Creolization, Hominization, Indo-European languages, Japhetic, Marr