The origins and genuine, or myths with which we live

With this publication, we open a series of linguist columns Sergei Lyozov , professor of the Institute of the Classical East and Antiquity of the Higher School of Economics, which is engaged in the documentation of threatened dialects of the Aramaic language.

I will talk about the studies of the Aramaic language-that, in my opinion, could turn out to be interesting to different readers of the TRV-hunger, but at first I want to share some general considerations, intuitive and therefore, perhaps vaguely. Have you ever thought about what place in our intellectual life is occupied by the myth of the origins? This is "Do you remember how it all began?"

For example, the author of these lines at the turn of the 1970-1980s became a Christian. And he soon found himself to study the ancient Greek, in order to read the gospel in the original . From the literature about the New Testament, I learned that the earliest of the canonical gospels - from Mark, and took up it. As a result, I published my translation of this text with comments, putting me in front of myself, most likely, an unresolved (apparently, incorrectly set) task - so that my translation reproduces the perception of the text by a community for which Mark wrote this small book that turned the history of Western humanity. (It is funny that the first word in the brand is ἀρχή, the beginning : “The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.” And the first word in the Old Testament is בראשית : “ At the beginning, God was created.”) Then I got to the theme of the theme of the newspaper in the New Testament and “Jesus as a Jew”. This topic was called somehow like Die Heimkehr Jesu Insu Jüdische Volk-"Jesus's repatriation to the Jewish people." Then I learned the foundations of the Hebrew language and Israeli Hebrew, began to read the Old Testament in the original and think about the fact that Judaism is more likely than Christianity. I never became a Jew, the case was limited to flirting. However, I know colleagues - Christian theologians who, in search of genuine sources, turned to Judaism and “repatriated” to Israel. I even met those in Jerusalem when I worked there in the mid -nineties.

Then I was disappointed in religion and fell into anticlerricism, but the desire to get to the origins did not leave me. From Hebrew, I spread to Akkadsky, on which the most ancient samples of Semitic speech are recorded. He wrote with a dozen work on the Akkadsky verb. Why exactly according to the verb? Because the verb is the “living heart of the tongue”, das lebendige herz der sprache, according to Wilhelm Humboldt. Therefore, I have been engaged in the Akkadsky verb to this day.

And at the beginning of 2000, I found myself, together with a five -year -old son, at Oxford - at the Eastern Institute, I studied Sumerian storage at the Eastern Institute, the language of almost the most ancient written monuments on the planet, and we also read the "bulls" - pieces of clay with dents for the number of sheep, or control in Mesopotamia IV millennium BC. e. These are the origins of writing itself, there is nowhere to dig in this direction. That is, I - like many colleagues - proceeded from the implicit (pre -scientific, "existential") identification of the archaic itself with genuine . Not to the end, perhaps, reflected identification. But in other things that are important to us, we do not always risk sorting out in the light of reason.

Then I began to think about the fact that there is further down to the well of time - tens of thousands of years of human languages, no worse than ours - but they are no longer there, and there are no reliable data for a deep reconstruction. In other words, my first myth, identifying the origins with genuine , slowly faded. But what a life without a myth ...

And here somehow, imperceptibly, almost twenty years ago, the search for genuine began to unfold the author of these lines in the opposite direction. At the end of the fifth dozen, dreams of the Gumilyovsky “Lake Chad” began to appear, where I will find a language that is not described yet, not necessary and doomed to anyone, I will love him and describe from scratch, bringing the case to the “Database - Grammar” triad. You see: the unwinded, radically “uncultured”, that is, without the corps of substantively interesting texts, but - lively and real. But - striving to be understood. But - in need of even my weak efforts. That is, the question is not that "who needs it." The fact is that he needs it. With this new myth, my everlasting feeling was especially good, according to which intellectual activity (in particular, science) should include an ambulance element. (Yes, we, unfortunately, are not gynecologists and not dentists, I say to myself, but still ...)

Do you know how a philologist works with texts in dead languages, which - unlike Latin or Greek - have not reached us along a chain of tradition, along with interpretations? This is a decryption, at first at the most elementary level and almost always - in a sense from scratch. To some extent, we learned to understand the Akkadian cuneiform texts already in the 1850s, but even now a person looks, say, in the photo of a cuneiform plate on Akkadsky and more or less freely understands only clicked phrases-what he had read a thousand times before: for example, a standard “hat” of letters. If you do not talk about the analysis of the graphics (the answer to the question: “What is this sign?”), Then the philologist deals with spelling: can such a word be written in this case. He is trying to understand the rules or come from them. It must be borne in mind that (unlike our spelling) the same Old Babylonian word form can be “correctly” recorded in more than one way. Here is the simplest case: “give it to him” in Starovalo can be recorded with syllabic signs as I-Di-Sham, I-Di-ISHIM, I-DI-In-EXUM, I-DI-In-EXU, but ID-I-EXUM is impossible. That is, decryption is, in particular, the analysis of spelling: what can be expected from this sequence of signs. And so I would like to describe that, excuse me, the breakup that I experienced when I had to decode my own field recording for the first time. Here is the confusion that I, the philologist of the dead written buildings, experienced when moving from spelling texts to a spontaneous stream of speech in a unwritten language, with which I had previously been familiar with the Sumerian - with what lives in books and out of time, as if outside, only in “spelling”. I'm afraid to get confused in metaphors: this stream knocks you down and drags you somewhere. You feel helplessness, but also delight - at the first glimpses of understanding.

And the case was in January 2018, during our first, intelligence, trip to Upper Mesopotamia, these are the origins of our work with the modern Aramaic language of Turuo. And of course, this is the beginning of a new myth in my life. I hope to talk about it in the next column .