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Nikolai Marr
Nikolai Yakovlevich Marr (, ''Nikolay Yakovlevich Marr''; , ''Nikoloz Iak'obis dze Mari''; — 20 December 1934) was a Georgian-born historian and linguist who gained a reputation as a scholar of the Caucasus during the 1910s before embarking on his "Japhetic theory" on the origin of language (from 1924), now considered as pseudo-scientific, and related speculative linguistic hypotheses. Marr's hypotheses were used as a rationale in the campaign during the 1920–30s in the Soviet Union of introduction of Latin alphabets for smaller ethnicities of the country. In 1950, the "Japhetic theory" fell from official favour, with Joseph Stalin denouncing it as anti-Marxist. Biography Marr was born on in Kutaisi, Georgia (then part of the Russian Empire). His father, James Montague Marr (1793–1874), was an Englishman of Scottish descent, had originally moved to the Caucasus in 1822 to work as a trader, before moving into horticulture and worked with the Gurieli family of Guria. His ...
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Kutaisi
Kutaisi (, ka, ქუთაისი ) is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world and the third-most populous city in Georgia, traditionally, second in importance, after the capital city of Tbilisi. Situated west of Tbilisi, on the Rioni River, it is the capital of the western region of Imereti. Historically one of the major cities of Georgia, it served as political center of Colchis in the Middle Ages as capital of the Kingdom of Abkhazia and Kingdom of Georgia and later as the capital of the Kingdom of Imereti. From October 2012 to December 2018, Kutaisi was the seat of the Parliament of Georgia as an effort to decentralise the Georgian government. History Archaeological evidence indicates that the city functioned as the capital of the Colchis in the sixth to fifth centuries BC. It is believed that, in ''Argonautica'', a Greek epic poem about Jason and the Argonauts and their journey to Colchis, author Apollonius Rhodius considered Kutaisi their final d ...
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Guria
Guria ( ka, გურია) is a region (''mkhare'') in Georgia, in the western part of the country, bordered by the eastern end of the Black Sea. The region has a population of 113,000 (2016), with Ozurgeti as the regional capital. Geography Guria is bordered by Samegrelo to the north-west, Imereti to the north, Samtskhe-Javakheti to the east, Ajaria to the south, and the Black Sea to the west. The province has an area of . Guria is traversed by the northeasterly line of equal latitude and longitude. Administrative divisions Guria is divided into 4 entities (3 municipalities and 1 city), including : * City of Ozurgeti * Ozurgeti Municipality * Lanchkhuti Municipality * Chokhatauri Municipality History The territory that is now Guria was part of the kingdom of Colchis, best known in the West for the tale of the Golden Fleece. Following the collapse of the Colchian Kingdom it became part of the Kingdom of Lazica in the first century BC. In antiquity the area was a signi ...
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Pravda
''Pravda'' ( rus, Правда, p=ˈpravdə, a=Ru-правда.ogg, "Truth") is a Russian broadsheet newspaper, and was the official newspaper of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, when it was one of the most influential papers in the country with a newspaper circulation, circulation of 11 million. The newspaper began publication on 5 May 1912 in the Russian Empire, but was already extant abroad in January 1911. It emerged as a leading newspaper of the Soviet Union after the October Revolution. The newspaper was an organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Central Committee of the CPSU between 1912 and 1991. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union ''Pravda'' was sold off by President of Russia, Russian President Boris Yeltsin to a Greek business family in 1996, and the paper came under the control of their private company Pravda International. In 1996, there was an internal dispute between the owners of Pravda International and some of ...
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Arnold Chikobava
Arnold Chikobava ( ka, არნოლდ ჩიქობავა) (March 14, 1898 – November 5, 1985) was a Soviet Georgian linguist and philologist best known for his contributions to Caucasian studies and for being one of the most active critics of Nicholas Marr's controversial monogenetic "Japhetic" theory of language. Chikobava was born in the small village of Sachikobavo in Samegrelo, western Georgia (then part of Imperial Russia). He graduated from the recently established Tbilisi State University in 1922 and earned a degree there, later serving as a docent (1926–33) and professor (1933-85). For years, he headed the Department of Caucasian Studies at Tbilisi State University (1933–60), and the Department of Ibero-Caucasian languages at the Institute of Linguistics in Tbilisi (1936–85). The institute, briefly directed by Chikobava from 1950 and 1952, now bears his name. In 1941, he became one of the founding members of the Georgian Academy of Sciences and was e ...
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Valerian Borisovich Aptekar
Valerian Borisovich Aptekar (Russian: Валериа́н Бори́сович Апте́карь, 24 October 1899 – 29 July 1937) was a Russian linguist and a propagandist of Nicholas Marr's New Theory of Language. In 1937, he was accused of anti-Soviet activity, arrested and shot. Life Aptekar was born in Warsaw in 1899, the son of a dentist. From 1910 to 1918, he studied at the Zolotonosha gymnasium. In 1918, he became a clerk at the local labour exchange and joined the trade union member. In 1918, he joined the Communist Party. During the Russian Civil War, he was a political commissar. After being wounded, he moved to Poltava, where he worked as a Special Section investigator. In 1919, he went to Moscow and entered the military engineering course for Red Army leaders, but he was soon recalled to work in the Political Department of the internal security forces. From August 1922 to October 1925, he studied foreign relations in the Moscow State University Social Sciences Dep ...
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Proto-language
In the tree model of historical linguistics, a proto-language is a postulated ancestral language from which a number of attested languages are believed to have descended by evolution, forming a language family. Proto-languages are usually unattested, or partially attested at best. They are reconstructed by way of the comparative method. In the family tree metaphor, a proto-language can be called a mother language. Occasionally, the German term ''Ursprache'' (from ''Ur-'' "primordial, original", and ''Sprache'' "language", ) is used instead. It is also sometimes called the ''common'' or ''primitive'' form of a language (e.g. Common Germanic, Primitive Norse). In the strict sense, a proto-language is the most recent common ancestor of a language family, immediately before the family started to diverge into the attested ''daughter languages''. It is therefore equivalent with the ''ancestral language'' or ''parental language'' of a language family. Moreover, a group of languages (su ...
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Afro-Asiatic
The Afroasiatic languages (or Afro-Asiatic), also known as Hamito-Semitic, or Semito-Hamitic, and sometimes also as Afrasian, Erythraean or Lisramic, are a language family of about 300 languages that are spoken predominantly in the geographic subregions of Western Asia, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and parts of the Sahara/ Sahel. With the exception of its Semitic branch, all branches of the Afroasiatic family are exclusively native to the African continent. Afroasiatic languages have over 500 million native speakers, which is the fourth-largest number of native speakers of any language family (after Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, and Niger–Congo). The phylum has six branches: Berber, Chadic, Cushitic, Egyptian, Semitic, and Omotic. The most widely spoken modern Afroasiatic language or dialect continuum by far is Arabic, a ''de facto'' group of distinct language varieties within the Semitic branch. The languages that evolved from Proto-Arabic have around 313 million ...
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Caucasian Languages
The Caucasian languages comprise a large and extremely varied array of languages spoken by more than ten million people in and around the Caucasus Mountains, which lie between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. Linguistic comparison allows the classification of these languages into several different language families, with little or no discernible affinity to each other. However, the languages of the Caucasus are sometimes mistakenly referred to as a ''family'' of languages. According to Asya Pereltsvaig, "grammatical differences between the three groups of languages are considerable. ..These differences force the more conservative historical linguistics to treat the three language families of the Caucasus as unrelated."Asya Pereltsvaig, Languages of the World - An Introduction, 2012, Cambridge University Press, p. 64. Families indigenous to the Caucasus Three of these families have no current indigenous members outside the Caucasus, and are considered indigenous to the are ...
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Ani (Armenia)
Ani ( hy, Անի; grc-gre, Ἄνιον, ''Ánion''; la, Abnicum; tr, Ani) is a ruined medieval Armenian city now situated in Turkey's province of Kars Province, Kars, next to the closed Armenia–Turkey border, border with Armenia. Between 961 and 1045, it was the Historic capitals of Armenia, capital of the Bagratid Armenian kingdom that covered much of present-day Armenia and eastern Turkey. The iconic city was often referred to as the "City of 1,001 Churches," though the number was significantly less. To date, 50 churches, 33 cave chapels and 20 chapels have been excavated by archaeologists and historians. Ani stood on various trade routes and its many Church architecture, religious buildings, palaces, and sophisticated fortifications distinguished it from other contemporary urban centers in the Armenian kingdom. Among its most notable buildings was the Cathedral of Ani, which is associated with early examples of Gothic architecture and that scholars argue influenced the g ...
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Armenia
Armenia (), , group=pron officially the Republic of Armenia,, is a landlocked country in the Armenian Highlands of Western Asia.The UNbr>classification of world regions places Armenia in Western Asia; the CIA World Factbook , , and ''Oxford Reference Online'' also place Armenia in Asia. It is a part of the Caucasus region; and is bordered by Turkey to the west, Georgia to the north, the Lachin corridor (under a Russian peacekeeping force) and Azerbaijan to the east, and Iran and the Azerbaijani exclave of Nakhchivan to the south. Yerevan is the capital, largest city and the financial center. Armenia is a unitary, multi-party, democratic nation-state with an ancient cultural heritage. The first Armenian state of Urartu was established in 860 BC, and by the 6th century BC it was replaced by the Satrapy of Armenia. The Kingdom of Armenia reached its height under Tigranes the Great in the 1st century BC and in the year 301 became the first state in the world to adopt ...
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Russian Academy Of Sciences
The Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS; russian: Росси́йская акаде́мия нау́к (РАН) ''Rossíyskaya akadémiya naúk'') consists of the national academy of Russia; a network of scientific research institutes from across the Russian Federation; and additional scientific and social units such as libraries, publishing units, and hospitals. Peter the Great established the Academy (then the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences) in 1724 with guidance from Gottfried Leibniz. From its establishment, the Academy benefitted from a slate of foreign scholars as professors; the Academy then gained its first clear set of goals from the 1747 Charter. The Academy functioned as a university and research center throughout the mid-18th century until the university was dissolved, leaving research as the main pillar of the institution. The rest of the 18th century continuing on through the 19th century consisted of many published academic works from Academy scholars and a few Ac ...
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