1. Nikolai Marr's father, James Montague Marr, was an Englishman of possible Scottish descent who moved to the Caucasus in 1822 to work as a trader, before moving into horticulture, and worked with the Gurieli family of Guria.
10 Facts About Nikolai Marr
1. 2.
Nikolai Marr's mother was a young Georgian woman.
3.
Nikolai Marr's parents spoke different languages, and thus could hardly understand each other.
4.
When Nikolai Marr was 8 his father died, leaving the family in difficult circumstances.
5.
In 1874 Nikolai Marr was accepted into a Kutaisi boarding school, after his mother successfully secured funding from the local authorities for him.
6.
Nikolai Marr entered Department of Oriential Studies at St Petersburg University in 1884, where he specialized in Caucasian languages, and simultaneously studied Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Hebrew, Sanskrit, Syriac, among others.
7.
Nikolai Marr completed his master's degree in 1899, with his thesis titled The Collection of the Parables of Vardan.
8.
Nikolai Marr died from complications of these ailments in Leningrad on 20 December 1934.
9.
Nikolai Marr gained recognition with his Japhetic theory, postulating the common origin of Caucasian, Semitic-Hamitic, and Basque languages.
10.
In 1950 Nikolai Marr's theories were criticized in a discussion in Pravda, culminating in a June 20,1950 article by Stalin, "Marxism and Problems of Linguistics".