Global Voices Online

De Rebus Antiquis Et Novis shares an extraordinary story of the life and work of Nikolay Yakovlevich Marr: “He became a great polyglot and could have become a great linguist, had it not been for the passion and obsession with his own unsubstantiated theories. He never even completed a single course in theoretical linguistics. He was a brilliant dilettante, a bit like Schliemann in archaeology. Unlike Schliemann, though, Marr was not successful.”