From the 1920s until early 1950s, Soviet linguistics was dominated by Nikolai Marr (1864-1934). His teaching, known as Marrism, was the linguistic adaptation of the Marxist materialist principles and represented the official linguistic policy in the Soviet Union.

1/7 #Histlx One aspect of Marrism was the so-called Japhetic Theory. Following Marr, a pre-Indo-European substrate of Japhetic languages, based on four syllabic exclamations "sal", "ber", "yon", and "rosh", had existed in Europe before the Indo-European languages arrived.

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Today marks the 117th anniversary of the first World Esperanto Congress that took place in Boulogne-sur-Mer in 1905. We use this opportunity to take a look at the international language movement leading to this congress and contrast it with later conlang projects.

#Histlx 1/10 The aim of the movement was the adoption of a common medium (based on natural languages, but improved) to achieve progress and peace. The movement begins with Volapük (1879), ends with Interlingua (1951), but contains also Latino sine flexione, Ido, Novial or Basic.

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In his Syntactic Structures (1957: 15), Noam Chomsky showed the independence of grammar by referring to the meaningless, yet grammatically well-formed (and famous) utterance below.

👉 Colorless green ideas sleep furiously

He was however not the first one to do that. 1/8
#histlx Similarly, Lucien Tesnière (1893-1954) used the French sentence below as evidence for the independence of semantics and (syntactical and morphological) well-formedness.

👉 Le silence vertébral indispose la voile licite 'The vertebral silence indisposes the licit sail'

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