Some “experts” derive Ukrainian almost from Sanskrit, others spread myths about imaginary Polish or even Hungarian influence, although most of them do not speak Polish, Ukrainian, or even less Hungarian.
Recently popular article I published about the formation of the Russian language aroused considerable interest among visitors to the UNIAN website. Readers sent us many reviews, comments, and questions from the field of linguistics. Having summarized these questions, I will try to answer them in “popular language”, without delving into the scientific jungle.
Why are there many words from Sanskrit in the Ukrainian language?
Comparing different languages, scientists came to the conclusion that some of them are very close to each other, others are more distant relatives. And there are those who have nothing in common with each other. For example, it has been established that Ukrainian, Latin, Norwegian, Tajik, Hindi, English, etc. are related languages. But Japanese, Hungarian, Finnish, Turkish, Etruscan, Arabic, Basque, etc. are in no way connected with Ukrainian or, say, Spanish.
It has been proven that several thousand years BC there was a certain community of people (tribes) who spoke similar dialects. We don't know where it was or at what exact time. Possibly 3–5 thousand years BC. It is assumed that these tribes lived somewhere in the Northern Mediterranean, perhaps even in the Dnieper region. The Indo-European proto-language has not survived to this day. The oldest written monuments that have survived to this day were written a thousand years BC in the language of the ancient inhabitants of India, which is called “Sanskrit”. Being the oldest, this language is considered the closest to Indo-European.
Scientists reconstruct the proto-language based on the laws of changes in sounds and grammatical forms, moving, so to speak, in the opposite direction: from modern languages to a common language. Reconstructed words are given in etymological dictionaries, ancient grammatical forms - in the literati from the history of grammars.
Modern Indo-European languages have inherited most of their roots from the time of their former unity. In different languages, related words sometimes sound very differently, but these differences are subject to certain sound patterns.
Compare Ukrainian and English words that have a common origin: day - day, nіch - night, sun - sun, matіr - mother, syn - son, eye - eye, tree - tree, water - water, two - two, could - might, cook – swear, velіti – will. Thus, Ukrainian, like all other Indo-European languages, has many words in common with Sanskrit and other related languages - Greek, Icelandic, Old Persian, Armenian, etc., not to mention close Slavic ones - Russian, Slovak, Polish...
As a result of migrations of peoples, wars, conquests of some peoples by others, language dialects moved away from each other, new languages were formed, and old ones disappeared. The Indo-Europeans settled throughout Europe and penetrated into Asia (which is why they got their name).
The Proto-Indo-European language family left behind, in particular, the following groups of languages: Romance (dead Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, Moldavian, etc.); Germanic (dead Gothic, English, German, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Danish, Dutch, Afrikaans, etc.); Celtic (Welsh, Scottish, Irish, etc.), Indo-Iranian (dead Sanskrit, Hindi, Urdu, Farsi, Tajik, Ossetian, Gypsy, possibly also dead Scythian, etc.); Baltic (dead Prussian, Lithuanian, Latvian, etc.), Slavic (dead Old Church Slavonic, or “Old Bulgarian”, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Polish, Great Russian, Belarusian, etc.). Separate Indo-European branches developed Greek, Armenian, Albanian languages, which have no close relatives. Quite a few Indo-European languages did not survive into historical times.
Why are Indo-European languages so different from each other?
As a rule, the formation of a language is associated with the geographical isolation of its speakers, migration, and the conquest of some peoples by others. Differences in Indo-European languages are explained by interactions with other – often non-Indo-European – languages. One language, displacing another, received certain characteristics of the defeated language and, accordingly, differed in these characteristics from its relative (the displaced language that left its traces is called the substrate), and also experienced grammatical and lexical changes. Perhaps there are certain internal patterns of language development that, over time, “distance” it from related dialects. Although, apparently, the reason for the appearance of any internal patterns is the influence of other (substrate) languages.
Thus, in ancient times, numerous languages were widespread in Europe, the influence of which led to the current motley linguistic picture. The development of the Greek language was influenced, in particular, by Illyrian (Albanian) and Etruscan. Into English - Norman and various Celtic dialects, into French - Gaulish, into Great Russian - Finno-Ugric languages, as well as “Old Bulgarian”. The Finno-Ugric influence in the Great Russian language weakened unstressed vowels (in particular akanye: milk - malako), strengthened g on site G, deafening of consonants at the end of a syllable.
It is believed that at a certain stage of linguistic evolution, before the formation of separate Slavic and Baltic languages, there was a Balto-Slavic unity, since these languages have a huge number of common words, morphemes and even grammatical forms. It is assumed that the common ancestors of the Balts and Slavs inhabited the territories from the Northern Dnieper region to the Baltic Sea. However, as a result of migration processes, this unity disintegrated.
At the linguistic level, this was reflected in a surprising way: the Proto-Slavic language emerged as a separate language (and not a Balto-Slavic dialect) with the onset of the so-called law of the open syllable. The Proto-Slavs received this linguistic law by interacting with some non-Indo-European people, whose language did not tolerate the combination of several consonant sounds. Its essence boiled down to the fact that all syllables ended with a vowel sound. Old words began to be rearranged in such a way that short vowels were inserted between consonants, or vowels changed places with consonants, final consonants were lost, or short vowels appeared after them. So, “al-ktis” turned into “lo-ko-ti” (elbow), “kor-vas” into “ko-ro-va” (cow), “med-dus” into “me-do” (honey ), “or-bi-ti” to “ro-bi-ti” (work), “drau-gas” to “dru-gi” (other), etc. Roughly speaking, an idea of the “pre-Slavic” linguistic period is given by the Baltic languages, which were not affected by the law of the open syllable.
How do we know about this law? First of all, from the most ancient monuments of Slavic writing (X - XII centuries). Short vowel sounds were represented in writing by the letters “ъ” (something between the short “о” and “ы”) and “ь” (short “i”). The tradition of writing “ъ” at the end of words after consonants, which passed into the Great Russian language according to the Kyiv tradition of transmitting Church Slavonic, survived until the beginning of the twentieth century, although, of course, these vowels were never read in Great Russian.
What language did the Proto-Slavs speak?
This language has existed since the 1st millennium BC. until the middle of the 2nd millennium AD. Of course, there was no coherent language in the modern understanding of this word, much less its literary version. We are talking about close dialects that were characterized by common features.
The Proto-Slavic language, having adopted the law of the open syllable, sounded something like this: ze-le-n lie-s shu-mi-t (read “ze-le-ni lie-so shu-mi-to” - the green forest is noisy); where do i-don-t honey-vie-d and vl-k? (reads “ko-de i-dou-to me-do-vie-do and vly-ko? (Where are the bear and the wolf going?) Monotonously and evenly: tra-ta-ta-ta... tra-ta-ta... tra-ta-ta... Our modern ear could hardly recognize familiar words in this stream.
Some scientists believe that the substrate language for the Proto-Slavs, which “launched” the law of the open syllable, was the non-Indo-European language of the Trypillians, who inhabited the current Ukrainian lands (the substrate language is an absorbed language that left phonetic and other traces in the victorious language).
It was he who did not tolerate clusters of consonants; the syllables in it ended only with vowels. And it was allegedly from the Trypillians that such words of unknown origin came to us, characterized by open syllables and a strict order of sounds (consonant - vowel), such as mo-gi-la, ko-by-la and some others. They say that from the Trypillian language, Ukrainian - through the mediation of other languages and Proto-Slavic dialects - inherited its melody and some phonetic features (for example, the alternation u-v, i-y, which helps to avoid dissonant clusters of sounds).
Unfortunately, it is impossible to either refute or confirm this hypothesis, since no reliable data about the language of the Trypillians (as, by the way, of the Scythians) has been preserved. At the same time, it is known that the substrate in a certain territory (phonetic and other traces of a defeated language) is indeed very tenacious and can be transmitted through several linguistic “epochs,” even through the mediation of languages that have not survived to this day.
The relative unity of the Proto-Slavic dialects lasted until the 5th–6th centuries of the new era. It is not known exactly where the Proto-Slavs lived. It is believed that somewhere north of the Black Sea - in the Dnieper, Danube, Carpathian Mountains or between the Vistula and Oder. In the middle of the first millennium, as a result of rapid migration processes, the pre-Slavic unity disintegrated. The Slavs settled all of central Europe - from the Mediterranean to the North Sea.
Since then, the proto-languages of modern Slavic languages began to form. The starting point for the emergence of new languages was the fall of the law of the open syllable. As mysterious as its origin. We do not know what caused this fall - another substrate or some internal law of linguistic evolution, which began to operate during the times of Proto-Slavic unity. However, not a single Slavic language has survived the law of the open syllable. Although he left deep traces in each of them. By and large, the phonetic and morphological differences between these languages come down to how different the reflexes caused by the fall of the open syllable are in each of the languages.
How did modern Slavic languages appear?
This law declined unevenly. In one dialect, the melodic pronunciation (“tra-ta-ta”) was preserved longer, while in others the phonetic “revolution” took place faster. As a result, the Proto-Slavic language gave rise to three subgroups of dialects: South Slavic (modern Bulgarian, Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian, Slovenian, etc.); Western Slavic (Polish, Czech, Slovak, etc.); East Slavic (modern Ukrainian, Great Russian, Belarusian). In ancient times, each of the subgroups represented numerous dialects, characterized by certain common features that distinguished them from other subgroups. These dialects do not always coincide with the modern division of Slavic languages and the settlement of the Slavs. The processes of state formation, the mutual influence of Slavic dialects, as well as foreign language elements played a major role in linguistic evolution in different periods.
Actually, the collapse of the Proto-Slavic linguistic unity could occur in the following way. First, the southern (Balkan) Slavs “broke away” territorially from the other tribes. This explains the fact that in their dialects the law of the open syllable lasted the longest - until the 9th–12th centuries.
Among the tribes that were the ancestors of the Eastern and Western Slavs, unlike the Balkan ones, the language experienced dramatic changes in the middle of the first millennium. The fall of the open syllable law gave rise to the development of new European languages, many of which have not survived to our time.
The speakers of the Proto-Ukrainian language were disparate tribes, each of which spoke its own dialect. The Polyany spoke in Polyansky, the Derevlyans spoke in Derevlyansky, the Siveryans spoke in Siveryansky, the Ulichi and Tivertsy spoke in their own way, etc. But all these adverbs were characterized by common features, that is, the same consequences of the fall of the open syllable, which even now distinguish the Ukrainian language from other Slavic languages.
How do we know about how people spoke in Ukraine in ancient times?
There are two real sources of our current knowledge about ancient Ukrainian dialects. The first is written monuments, the oldest of which were written in the 10th–12th centuries. However, unfortunately, no records were kept at all in the language our ancestors spoke. The literary language of Kyiv was the “Old Bulgarian” (Church Slavonic) language, which came to us from the Balkans. This is the language into which Cyril and Methodius translated the Bible in the 9th century. It was not understandable to the Eastern Slavs, since it retained the ancient law of the open syllable. In particular, it contained short vowels after consonant sounds, denoted by the letters “ъ” and “ь”. However, in Kyiv this language was gradually Ukrainized: short sounds were not read, and some vowels were replaced with their own - Ukrainian. In particular, nasal vowels, which are still preserved, say, in Polish, were pronounced as usual, “Old Bulgarian” diphthongs (double vowels) were read in the Ukrainian manner. Cyril and Methodius would have been very surprised to hear “their” language in the Kyiv church.
Interestingly, some scientists tried to reconstruct the so-called “Old Russian” language, which was supposedly common to all Eastern Slavs, based on ancient Kievan texts. And it turned out that in Kyiv they spoke almost the “Old Bulgarian” language, which, of course, in no way corresponded to the historical truth.
Ancient texts can be used to study the language of our ancestors, but in a very unique way. This is what Professor Ivan Ogienko did in the first half of the twentieth century. He investigated the slips and mistakes of Kyiv authors and copyists who, against their will, were influenced by the living folk language. At times, ancient scribes “remade” words and “Old Bulgarian” grammatical forms deliberately - to make it “more understandable.”
The second source of our knowledge is modern Ukrainian dialects, especially those that remained isolated for a long time and were almost not subject to external influence. For example, the descendants of the Derevlyans still inhabit the north of the Zhitomir region, and the descendants of the Siveryans still inhabit the north of the Chernigov region. In many dialects, ancient Ukrainian phonetic, grammatical, and morphological forms have been preserved, coinciding with the clerical notes of Kyiv clerks and writers.
In the scientific literature you can find other dates for the fall of short vowels among the Eastern Slavs - the 12th - 13th centuries. However, such a “life extension” of the open syllable law is hardly justified.
When did the Ukrainian language appear?
The countdown, apparently, can begin from the middle of the first millennium - when short vowels disappeared. This is what caused the emergence of Ukrainian linguistic characteristics proper - as, ultimately, the characteristics of most Slavic languages. The list of features that distinguished our proto-language from other languages may turn out to be somewhat boring for non-specialists. Here are just a few of them.
Ancient Ukrainian dialects were characterized by so-called full-vocality: instead of the South Slavic sound combinations ra-, la-, re-, le - in the language of our ancestors the sounds were -oro-, -olo-, -ere-, -ele-. For example: licorice (in “Old Bulgarian” – sweet), full (captivity), sereda (Wednesday), morok (darkness), etc. The “coincidences” in the Bulgarian and Russian languages are explained by the enormous influence of “Old Bulgarian” on the formation of the Russian language.
The Bulgarian (South Slavic) sound combination at the beginning of the root ra-, la - answered the East Slavic ro-, lo-: robota (work), rosti (grow), ulovluyu (I catch). In place of the typical Bulgarian sound combination -zhd - Ukrainians had -zh-: vorozhnecha (enmity), kozhen (everyone). The Bulgarian suffixes -ash-, -yushch – were answered by the Ukrainian -ach-, -yuch-: viyuchy (howling), sizzling (sizzling).
When short vowel sounds fell after voiced consonants, in Proto-Ukrainian dialects these consonants continued to be pronounced voiced, as they are now (oak, snow, love, blood). Stunning has developed in Polish, and in Great Russian too (dup, snek, lyubof, krof).
Academician Potebnya discovered that the disappearance of short sounds (ъ and ь) in some places “forced” the pronunciation of the previous vowels “o” and “e” to be prolonged in a new closed syllable in order to compensate for the “shortening” of the word. So, stol-l (“sto-lo”) turned into “stіel” (the final ъ disappeared, but the “internal” vowel became longer, turning into a double sound - a diphthong). But in forms where the final consonant is followed by a vowel, the old sound has not changed: sto-lu, sto-li. Most (“mo-sto”) turned into mіest, muest, mіist, etc. (depending on the dialect). The diphthong eventually transformed into a regular vowel. Therefore, in modern literary language, “i” in a closed syllable alternates with “o” and “e” - in an open one (kit - ko-ta, popil - po-pe-lu, rig - ro-gu, mig - mo-zhe and etc.). Although some Ukrainian dialects store ancient diphthongs in a closed syllable (keet, popiel, rieg).
Ancient Proto-Slavic diphthongs, in particular in case endings, denoted in writing by the letter “yat”, found their continuation in the ancient Ukrainian language. In some dialects they have been preserved to this day, in others they have been transformed into “i” (as in the literary language): lie, na zemlie, mieh, beliy, etc. By the way, Ukrainians, knowing their language, never confused the spelling of “yat” and “e” in pre-revolutionary Russian spelling. In some Ukrainian dialects, the ancient diphthong was actively replaced by the vowel “i” (lis, on the ground, mikh, biliy), becoming entrenched in the literary language.
Some of the phonetic and grammatical features of the Proto-Slavic language were continued in Ukrainian dialects. Thus, Proto-Ukrainian inherited the ancient alternation k–ch, g–z, x–s (ruka – ruci, rig – rozi, fly – musi), which has been preserved in the modern literary language. The vocative case has been used in our language for a long time. In dialects, the ancient form of the “pre-future” tense (I will brav), as well as the ancient indicators of person and number in past tense verbs (I - go, we - walked, you - walked, you - walked), are active in dialects.
The description of all these signs takes up entire volumes in academic literature...
What language was spoken in Kyiv in prehistoric times?
Of course, not in modern literary language.
Any literary language is to a certain extent artificial - it is developed by writers, educators, and cultural figures as a result of rethinking a living language. Often the literary language is foreign, borrowed, and sometimes incomprehensible to the uneducated part of the population. Thus, in Ukraine from the 10th to the 18th centuries, the literary language was considered an artificial - Ukrainianized “Old Bulgarian” language, in which the majority of literary monuments were written, in particular “Svyatoslav’s Selections”, “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign”, “The History of Time Literatures”, the works of Ivan Vishensky , Grigory Skovoroda, etc. The literary language was not frozen: it constantly developed, changed over the centuries, was enriched with new vocabulary, its grammar was simplified. The degree of Ukrainization of texts depended on the education and “free-thinking” of the authors (the church did not approve of the penetration of the vernacular language into writing). This Kievan literary language, created on the basis of “Old Bulgarian,” played a huge role in the formation of the Great Russian (“Russian”) language.
The modern literary language was formed on the basis of the Dnieper dialects - the heirs of the dialect of the chronicle glades (as well as, apparently, the Anta union of tribes, known from foreign historical sources) - in the first half of the 19th century thanks to the writers Kotlyarevsky, Grebinka, Kvitka-Osnovyanenko, as well as Taras Shevchenko .
Consequently, before the formation of a national language, Ukrainians spoke different Ukrainian dialects, using the Ukrainized “Old Bulgarian” in writing.
During the princely era in Kyiv they spoke a language “commonly understood” by the residents of the capital city (koine), which was formed on the basis of various ancient Ukrainian tribal dialects, mainly Polans. No one ever heard it, and it was not recorded. But, again, the notes of ancient chroniclers and copyists, as well as modern Ukrainian dialects, give an idea of this language. To imagine it, it is apparently necessary to “cross” the grammar of Transcarpathian dialects, where the ancient forms are best preserved, Chernigov diphthongs in place of “yat” and the modern “i” in a closed syllable, the peculiarities of the “deep” pronunciation of vowel sounds among the current inhabitants of the south of the Kiev region , as well as Cherkasy and Poltava regions.
Were modern Ukrainians able to understand the language spoken by the people of Kiev, say, in the first half of the 13th century (before the horde)?
Undoubtedly, yes. To a “modern” ear it would sound like a peculiar Ukrainian dialect. Something like what we hear on trains, at bazaars and construction sites in the capital.
Is it possible to call an ancient language “Ukrainian” if the word “Ukraine” itself did not exist?
You can call the language whatever you want - the essence does not change. The ancient Indo-European tribes also did not call their language “Indo-European”.
The laws of linguistic evolution in no way depend on the name of the language that is given to it at different periods of history by its speakers or outsiders.
We do not know what the Proto-Slavs called their language. Perhaps there was no generic name at all. We also do not know what the Eastern Slavs called their dialect in prehistoric times. Most likely, each tribe had its own self-name and called its dialect in its own way. There is an assumption that the Slavs simply called their language “their”.
The word “Russian” appeared relatively late in relation to the language of our ancestors. This word first denoted a simple folk language - as opposed to written “Slavic”. Later, “Ruska Mova” was contrasted with “Polish”, “Moscow”, as well as non-Slavic languages spoken by neighboring peoples (in different periods - Chud, Muroma, Meshchera, Polovtsy, Tatars, Khazars, Pechenegs, etc.). The Ukrainian language was called “Russian” until the 18th century.
In the Ukrainian language, the names are clearly distinguished - “Rusky” and “Russian”, in contrast to Great Russian, where these names are groundlessly confused.
The word “Ukraine” also appeared relatively late. It has been found in chronicles since the 12th century, therefore, it arose several centuries earlier.
How did other languages influence the formation of Ukrainian?
The Ukrainian language belongs to the “archaic” languages in its vocabulary and grammatical structure (like, say, Lithuanian and Icelandic). Most Ukrainian words are inherited from the Indo-European proto-language, as well as from Proto-Slavic dialects.
Quite a lot of words came to us from the tribes that neighbored our ancestors, traded with them, fought with them, etc. - Goths, Greeks, Turks, Ugrians, Romans, etc. (ship, bowl, poppy, Cossack, hut etc.). Ukrainian also has borrowings from “Old Bulgarian” (for example, region, benefit, ancestor), Polish (crib, funny, saber) and other Slavic. However, none of these languages influenced either the grammar or phonetics (sound structure) of the language. Myths about Polish influence are spread, as a rule, by non-specialists who have a very distant understanding of both the Polish and Ukrainian languages, and the common origin of all Slavic languages.
Ukrainian is constantly updated with English, German, French, Italian, and Spanish words, which is typical for any European language.
Name UKRAINIAN language
Let's deal with the title issue first. Ukrainian language, which brings us back to the history of the name Ukraine.It was the Austrian authorities who were the first to use the term Ukrainian, which previously had only a geographical meaning, in a racial sense in relation to the Galicians who had renounced their kinship with the Russian people. However, it was impossible to create Ukrainianness and all the attributes of the invented nation of Ukrainians by the forces of the Galician intelligentsia, since they were the most faithful adherents of the concept of the triune Russian people, which is why among the founding fathers of Ukrainianism there are so many non-Ukrainians - primarily Poles, offended by Russia, yes and Russians who considered themselves fighters against serfdom in Little Russia.
Actually, previously the question of the language of the local population was not of any interest to the elite of the territories of South-Eastern Rus', since it consisted mostly of Poles who revered their language and a small Ruthenian intelligentsia who shunned their fellow tribesmen and preferred the culture of Tsarist Russia. But the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars gave rise to a fashion for national attributes, so that the first studies of local dialects appeared, on the basis of which a system for recording the Ukrainian language in the unmodified Russian alphabet, called “yaryzhka”, was created. The cultural gap between the landowners and their serfs was so great that speakers of local dialects began to be despised, since local languages were considered a sign of savagery and backwardness.
Here we should also note a change in attitude towards the word Ukrainian, since the old Russian part of the elite knew about the derogatory meaning that the Poles put into the word Ukrainian, which they considered synonymous with hillbilly. But in the middle of the 17th century, the seizure of Little Russian lands by the Sich Cossacks began, who took the outlying part of the Kingdom of Poland, whose subjects at that time were the Cossacks, as a slogan of separatism. In the circles of this new Little Russian elite from the Cossacks, the word Ukrainian acquired the meaning of an inhabitant of the territories they captured, marked on maps with the word Ukraina, therefore not yet existing Ukrainian language could not be called anything other than Ukrainian language.
For many reasons, the words “Ukraine” and “Ukrainian” were banned in the Russian Empire, as evidenced by the arrest of Taras Shevchenko. Without any support from the groans of the population, who preferred the name “Little Russia” and Little Russia,” the adjective “Ukrainian” as a derivative of the word Ukraine could only be used outside the Russian Empire. At the same time, in Poland, the words “Ukraine” and “Ukrainian” were also considered unacceptable, so their open use became possible in Western Ukraine only after Galicia became part of Austria-Hungary.
However, explanations of the name of the language cannot replace the history of the Ukrainian language itself, for which we will make a brief excursion into the history of the Eastern Slavs.
Today we can only assume that the ancient Slavs came to the East European Plain already as part of MILITARY-POLITICAL UNIONS, since the abundance of free lands did not contribute to their appearance. This allowed the Slavs to immediately take a dominant position over the local population of the Balts, but the Finno-Ugric peoples were representatives of the Trans-Volga peoples who carried out their movement from the Urals, most likely also as part of MILITARY-POLITICAL UNIONS. Actually, the formation - a territorial military-political union of tribes - as a community of people created for defense and attack - requires some kind of common identification, the core of which naturally becomes a common language for members of one UNION of tribes. We do not know what dialectal fragmentation was like among the Eastern Slavs before the formation of proto-states with centers in Novgorod and Kiev, but we can only assume that the language of communication became the language of the UNION of tribes that created these proto-states through the military subordination of neighboring UNIONS .
Old Russian language
Therefore, with reservations, only the Belarusian language is considered the closest to the Old Russian language, which remained the language of the common people, while modern Russian is the language of the elite of the Russian state, striving to become the new center of Orthodoxy, and history of the Ukrainian language- how constructed newspeak fits into a couple of centuries.
The first Russian princes made a lot of efforts to bring the former center of their Ecumene closer to Constantinople, but the language of worship was not Greek, but the Bulgarian language of Cyril and Methodius. Worship in this language throughout the territory of Rus' allowed the elites of a huge state to communicate in one language, while commoners continued to speak different dialects, which can be divided into territorial dialect zones: southwestern (Kiev and Galician-Volyn dialects), western (Smolensk and Polotsk dialects), southeastern (Ryazan and Kursk-Chernigov dialects), northwestern (Novgorod and Pskov dialects), northeastern (Rostov-Suzdal dialects).
As a result of the Mongol-Tatar invasion, the territory of Udelnaya Rus was divided into three pieces: - (1) the Galician-Volyn principality, whose population spoke southwestern dialects, (2) the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which included the western zone of dialects and ( 3) North-Eastern Rus'.
It is believed that the Old Ukrainian and Old Belarusian dialects of the Old Russian languages were very close, which is explained by the common history, since the Galician princes considered the Russian lands of the Principality of Lithuania their property. Even in the language in which the first documents of the Principality of Lithuania were written, dialectal features of the Ukrainian type predominate, which only by the end of the 15th century. they are replaced by Belarusian ones. At the same time, both the language of the Glitsko-Volyn principalities and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Russia have retained their name - “Russian language” since the times of Quevian Rus. Separated from the main body of Russian principalities, the language of the population of Galicia-Volyn was strongly influenced by the Polish language, not to mention the Principality of Lithuania, which, after Jaagailo became the Polish king, strategically chose a union with the Kingdom of Poland, which ended in unification into one state.
The result of those historical events - in terms of language- became the fact that no official state language developed on the territory of South-Western Rus'. After becoming part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the Western Russian language, which was the official language of Lithuania, became the written language.
However, we also need to know that the Western Russian language itself did not become the predecessor of even the Belarusian language, since the new Belarusian appeared from oral speech - that is, from the folk dialects of the Litvins of White Rus'.
The reason for the oblivion of the Western Russian language was the entry of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania into the Polish Polish Republic, in which the Russian-speaking elite of Lithuania began to dissolve among the Polish gentry. At the same time, the Russian spoken language remained almost mandatory for the gentry, both Polish and Lithuanian, but after the start of the struggle of the Sich Cossacks for liberties (and the elders for equality with the Polish gentry), the written Western Russian language was banned and the Polishization of the population of South-Western Rus' began.
Ukrainian language close to Belarusian and Russian, with whom it is united in the East Slavic group. Distributed mainly in Ukraine, as well as in Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Poland, Slovakia, Romania, Moldova, Hungary, Serbia and among the descendants of emigrants in Canada, USA, Argentina, Australia and other countries. It is the state language of Ukraine. In a number of countries of Central and Eastern Europe, in which Ukrainians, as a rule, are compactly settled (Poland, Slovakia, Serbia, Romania and other countries), Ukrainian has the status of a national minority language or a regional language
.
The dialects of the Ukrainian language are traditionally grouped into three dialects: the southwestern (including Volyn-Podolian, Galician-Bukovinian and Carpathian dialects), the northern and the southeastern dialect, which has become the basis of the modern literary language.
Like all East Slavic languages, Ukrainian was formed on the basis of dialects of the Old Russian language. There are two main periods in the history of the literary language: the Old Ukrainian language (XIV - mid-XVIII century) and the modern Ukrainian language (from the end of the 18th century). I. P. Kotlyarevsky is considered the founder of the literary language; the work of T. G. Shevchenko played a significant role in the formation of the norms of the literary language. The writing system is based on the Cyrillic alphabet (Ukrainian alphabet). The most ancient monuments: legal acts of the XIV-XV centuries, the Peresopnytsia Gospel (1556-1561); “The Key of the Kingdom of Heaven” by M. Smotritsky (1587), “A Brief Notice of Latin Delights” by I. Vishensky (1588), “Mirror of Theology” by K. Stavrovetsky (1618) and others.
The name Ukrainian language as a common name for the language throughout the Ukrainian ethnic territory spreads and is established only in the 20th century.
The name “Ukraine” has been known since the 12th century; initially it was used in relation to various kinds of border lands located around and outside the grand princely Kyiv lands, most often: Dnieper Ukraine and Zaporozhye Sich. Most of the territory of modern Ukraine (central and eastern regions) began to be called Ukraine only in the 17th century. All this time, the language spoken by the population of the Ukrainian ethnic territory retained the name “Russian”. This linguonym was applied not only to colloquial speech, but also to the written language - the so-called Western Russian - the language of the state chancellery of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (in modern terminology also - the Old Ukrainian language or the Old Belarusian language). In the XIV-XVI centuries, most of the territory of modern Ukraine was part of this state. In addition to the self-name “Ruska Mova”, the self-name of the Western Russian language was also known as “prosta Mova”. For the longest time - until the beginning of the 20th century - the linguonym “Russian” was preserved in Western Ukraine, which was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (the Great Russian language was called “Russian” or “Moscow”).
In the Russian Empire, the Ukrainian language was called the Little Russian language, and later - the Little Russian language. Since, according to the prevailing ideas of that time (until the beginning of the 20th century), all East Slavic dialects were a single language, the language of Ukraine was called the Little Russian dialect, just as the Belarusian language was called the Belarusian dialect, and the Great Russian language consisted of two dialects - Northern Great Russian and Southern Great Russian. Such linguonyms appeared in connection with the opposition between Little (that is, ancient, initial, Kievan) Rus' and Great (peripheral, primarily Moscow) Rus' that had developed since the 14th century. Over time, a rethinking of these concepts took place, boiling down to the opposition “great, more significant” - “small, less significant.”
In addition, in scientific works of the 19th century, such a name as “South Russian language” was used in relation to Ukrainian.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the status of the Little Russian dialect as an independent language was the subject of debate. Little Russian was considered as a separate language not only by representatives of the Ukrainian intelligentsia in the Russian Empire, but also by some linguists in other countries, in particular Franz Miklosic. Only after the collapse of the Russian Empire and the formation of the USSR, the Little Russian language received official recognition as an independent language under the name “Ukrainian language”; the term “Little Russian”, “Little Russian” gradually fell out of use.
The official language of present-day Ukraine, an East Slavic language descended from the Old Russian language.
The dialects of the Ukrainian language are divided into 3 groups: northwestern (Polesskian, close to the Belarusian language), southwestern (Galician, Bukovynian, Transcarpathian, most influenced by the Polish language) and southeastern, which are closest to the established literary norm. In Transcarpathia, which was part of Austria-Hungary, the Rusyn dialect is widespread, the speakers of which do not consider themselves Ukrainians.
A single Ukrainian language, even a spoken one, did not exist until the 20th century. - the dialects differed so much that residents of different parts of Ukraine did not understand each other.
The Ukrainian language has a number of insignificant differences from Russian in grammar (for example, in the verb system there is no final consonant for verbs of the first conjugation: bere - “takes”; the form of the future is formed by the suffix “-imu”: chitatimu - “will read”, etc. ). The original appearance of words was changed by such phonetic processes as the transition of “o” in a closed syllable and, in most cases, yatya in “i”: dim - “house”, did - “grandfather”. The unstressed “i” and “o” at the beginning of the word have disappeared (grati - “play”), etc.
However, the most significant changes occurred in the lexical component of the language. In the Ukrainian language there are more than 200 Tatar (Turkic-Polovtsian) borrowings (kurin, kurkul, kavun, bugay, maidan, kozak, nenka, gamanets, kokhana, etc.), as well as about 2000 (!) borrowings from the Polish language (rad, farbi, dakh, kulya, vypadok, chekati, nedelya, posada, parasolka, kava, tsukerka, papir, etc.). This is explained by the influence of two powerful factors: Polish domination and close contact with the Turkic-Polovtsian environment in the process of settling the territories beyond the Dnieper rapids by Russian people who fled from the Poles.
In the 13th century the southwestern principalities of Rus', which later received the name Little Rus' (and only in the 20th century - Ukraine), came under Lithuanian, and at the end of the 14th century. - under Polish domination. Until the beginning of the twentieth century. the entire population of these lands called themselves “Russians” and their national language - the Russian language. Polish lords ruled the captured Russian lands, communicating with the peasantry that had become serfs and disenfranchised through their numerous servants in the Polish language.
The illiteracy of the peasantry and the need to adapt to the language of the new owners contributed to the spread of the Polish language and the deformation of Russian under its influence, mainly in rural areas (on the contrary, in cities where many literate people lived, the Russian language retained its position). Those who fled from the Polish panshchina to the southern border, beyond the thresholds, joined the local Cumans and turned into Cossacks, enriching their language with Turkisms.
Polish cultural and linguistic expansion in southwestern Rus' became the main reason for the emergence and development of the main proto-Ukrainian dialect features of the language. After reunification with Russia (1654), the influence of the Polish language ceased, and the reverse process began: the gradual displacement of Polonisms.
This process was more active on the left bank of the Dnieper, where a certain averaged language emerged, which Ukrainian nationalists contemptuously call “Surzhik.” The Right Bank remained under the significant influence of the Polish elite even after Ukraine returned to the fold of the all-Russian state: back in 1850, about 5,000 Polish landowners owned 90% of the land in this region. And here the de-Polonization of the language proceeded slowly. In addition, in the 19th century. under the influence of Poland and Austria-Hungary and with their money, the formation of the Ukrainian nationalist movement began, among the tasks of which was to prove the thesis about the fundamental difference between Ukrainians and Russians, including on the basis of demonstrating the dissimilarity of languages.
Based on the common, mostly rural, dialects of the western regions of Little Rus', the independentists practically invented a new language and writing. A large number of forgeries of the “national epic” appeared, supposedly created in the Ukrainian language: “Duma about the gifts of Batory”, “Duma about the Chigirin victory won by Nalivaika over Zholkiewski”, “Song about the burning of Mogilev”, etc., the fact of falsification of which was confirmed even such a champion of the “Ukrainian idea” as Nikolai Kostomarov (1817–1885).
In turn, the Russian ruling elite treated the Little Russian language and works in this language with benevolence, as an interesting cultural phenomenon. In 1812, the first collection of ancient Little Russian songs was published in St. Petersburg, compiled by Prince. M. A. Tsertelev, in 1818 - the first “Grammar of the Little Russian dialect” by A. Pavlovsky.
The ideas of Ukrainian independence became fashionable in the capital's liberal environment and found support among the Decembrists and revolutionary democrats. In 1861, the poet P. Kulish (1819–1897), known for his scandalous, quotable translation (for example, “Hai dufae Srul na Pana” - “Let Israel trust in the Lord”) translation of the Bible, came up with the idea of publishing official documents on Ukrainian language. On March 15, 1861, he received the highest permission to translate the Manifesto of February 19 on the liberation of the peasants, but the resulting text turned out to be so poor and incomprehensible even for Little Russians that it was not approved by the State Council.
It turned out that there is no state-political terminology in the Ukrainian language. The “gap” was hastily eliminated, but not by borrowing from the Russian language, but by... introducing Polish words. This process continued until the 1920s.
Professor S.P. Timoshenko, who in 1918 participated in the creation of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in Kyiv, wrote: “According to the statute, the scientific works of this academy had to be published in Ukrainian. But there is no science or scientific terminology in this language. To help matters, a terminology commission was formed at the academy and “Ukrainian language specialists” were sent from Galicia, who began producing scientific terminology. Terms were taken from any language except the related Russian, which had significant scientific literature.”
In 1862, the issue of introducing teaching in the local dialect in the public schools of Little Russia was practically resolved; in any case, it was supported by the Minister of Public Education A.V. Golovnin. However, during the Polish uprising that began soon, the rebels relied on Little Russian separatism and involved Ukrainophiles in distributing subversive brochures and proclamations in the common vernacular.
On July 18, 1863, on the initiative of the Minister of Internal Affairs P. A. Valuev and with the royal approval, the printing of spiritual books and school textbooks in the Little Russian language was temporarily limited. Valuev referred to the rejection of such literature by the majority of Little Russians, who “prove very thoroughly that there was, is not, and cannot be any special Little Russian language, and that their dialect, used by the common people, is the same Russian language, only spoiled by the influence of Poland on it; that the all-Russian language is just as understandable for Little Russians as it is for Great Russians, and even much more understandable than the so-called Ukrainian language now being composed for them by some Little Russians and especially Poles. The majority of the Little Russians themselves reproach the people of that circle, which is trying to prove the opposite, for separatist plans, hostile to Russia and disastrous for Little Russia.”
This restriction on freedom of the press in the Ukrainian language disappeared the very next year. However, Valuev is still considered by Ukrainian nationalists to be a “strangler of freedoms” and a “trampler of the Ukrainian language and culture.” Although no one, for example, from the Galicians spoke in a similar way about the conclusion of the Austrian government commission, which spoke in 1816 about the Galician dialect as completely unsuitable for teaching it in schools, “where educated people should be trained.”
From the middle of the 19th century. Ukrainophiles are beginning to abandon the Cyrillic alphabet. In 1856, P. Kulish first proposed a spelling option from which the Cyrillic letter “ы” was expelled (instead “and” was used), “i”, “g” and “є” were introduced, “хв” was used instead of “f” ", etc. "Kuleshovka" (with some changes) was used until it was banned by the Emsky Decree of 1876.
Later, instead of it, the system of E. Zhelekhovsky (“Zhelehovka”) spread, and was declared official in 1893 for the Ukrainian language in Austria-Hungary. Based on the “zhelekhovka” in the 1920s. the current Ukrainian spelling that replaced it was created.
Parallel to the formation of original writing in Ukraine, there was a process of inventing “centuries-old Ukrainian literature.” One of the tasks was to explain the complete gap between the new Ukrainian literature and the literature of Kievan Rus, which was brazenly declared “Ukrainian”. The difficulty was that philologists do not know a single ancient monument of writing in the “Ukrainian language.”
Author of the book published in Lvov 1887–89. O. Ogonovsky’s two-volume “History of Russian Literature” explained this by the fact that in Ancient Rus' there were 2 dissimilar languages - a “dead” official one, which developed “contrary to the cultural aspirations of illiterate people... not enlivened by the living speech that all living Rus' spoke” , and “living” folk - also known as Ukrainian, which was initially discriminated against by clerks and chroniclers who were “embarrassed” to write in their native language.
This concept causes nothing but laughter among scientists. The creators of “Russian writing” Cyril and Methodius had missionary goals, and naturally, their translations of the Gospel into the Slavic language (which is now called Church Slavonic) pursued only one goal: it should be understandable to those for whom these translations were carried out, i.e. to the common people. to the people. Writing in an “official and dead language” would be simply pointless! It was in this language that the first great works of ancient Russian literature were written: “The Tale of Law and Grace” by Hilarion, “The Tale of Bygone Years” by Nestor, “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign”, “Russian Truth” and so on.
This ancient Russian language, according to the unanimous recognition of philologists, has absolute similarity and kinship with the modern Russian language; these literary monuments lack precisely the features characteristic of the “Ukrainian language”.
If before the revolution the activities of Ukrainophiles were a mostly marginal phenomenon and existed on Polish and Austrian money, then under Soviet power the process of forced Ukrainization of the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine began.
In accordance with the course towards “nation building”, the Ukrainian language was declared the only means of communication in the Ukrainian republic, and the use of the Russian language in all areas of administrative, economic, cultural activity and in the education system was prohibited. If in 1930 68.8% of newspapers in Ukraine were published by Soviet authorities in the Ukrainian language, then in 1932 the figure was already 87.5%; in the Russian-speaking Donbass, by 1934, out of 36 local newspapers, only 2 were published in Russian!
In 1925–26 Of all the books published in Ukraine, 45.8% were published in Ukrainian, and already in 1932 this figure was 76.9%. And this cannot be explained by any “market demand”: book publishing at that time was a purely party, political sphere.
The issue of Ukrainization of educational institutions was resolved with particular persistence. In the same Donbass before the revolution there were 7 Ukrainian schools. In 1923, the People's Commissariat of Education of Ukraine ordered the Ukrainization of 680 schools in the region within three years. As of December 1, 1932, out of 2,239 schools in Donbass, 1,760 (or 78.6%) were Ukrainian, another 207 (9.2%) were mixed (Russian-Ukrainian). By 1933, the last Russian-language pedagogical technical schools had closed. In the 1932–33 school year, there was not a single Russian-language primary school class left in Russian-speaking Makeyevka.
Despite such an active introduction of the Ukrainian language in the republic, right up to the collapse of the USSR it continued to be considered, especially in large cities, as a predominantly rural language; people were ashamed of it; the intelligentsia communicated with each other exclusively in Russian.
In the early 1990s, when Ukraine became an independent state, the country launched a violent campaign to expel the Russian language, despite the fact that Ukrainian speakers accounted for about a third of the total population of Ukraine. Ukrainian was declared the only state language.
Delusional anti-scientific books and articles were published in large editions, in which the genetic opposition of the Ukrainian and Russian peoples, the primacy of the Ukrainian language in relation to... all world languages, was “proved”. It was argued that Ovid wrote poetry in the ancient Ukrainian language (E. Gnatkevich. “From Herodotus to Photius.” Evening Kiev, 01.26.93), that it was the basis of Sanskrit (B. Chepurko. “Ukrainians.” Osnova, No. 3, Kiev, 1993), that “already at the beginning of our chronology it was an intertribal language” (“Ukrainian language for beginners.” Kyiv, 1992).
The empty talk and deceitful propaganda was aimed at inciting ethnic hatred and ousting the Russian language. The recommendation issued in 1996 to the Cabinet of Ministers from the State Television and Radio and the Ministry of Information of Ukraine is typical: “Consider broadcasting and printed publications in a non-state language as an indicator that, in its negative consequences, constitutes a threat to national security no less than the propaganda of violence, debauchery, as well as various forms of anti-Ukrainian propaganda."
Ukrainization concerned both the official sphere (for example, the introduction of compulsory office work in the Ukrainian language) and the sphere of preschool education, primary and secondary education - with the expectation of forming a new generation of people speaking exclusively the state language. If in 1990 in Kyiv, out of 281 secondary schools, 155 schools (55%) taught in Russian, then already in 1997, out of 378 schools, 18 were Russian (less than 5% of their total number). There are not a single preschool educational institutions (kindergartens) left for Russian-speaking children, although Russians in Kyiv make up more than 22% of the population.
It is characteristic that the course of Russian literature in 86% of Ukrainian schools is taught in translation into Ukrainian. In a number of regions of Ukraine, not only the use of the Russian language was prohibited, but also the broadcast and performance of Russian-language songs (decision of the Lvov city council of June 16, 2000), Russian-language newspapers were closed, the import of Russian books into the country was limited, and from April 19, 2004, Ukrainian The National Council on Television and Radio Broadcasting has stopped registering media outlets using a language other than the state language.
The rights of Russian-speaking citizens began to be particularly infringed upon after the victory of “orange” democracy in 2004 (see “Velvet Revolutions”) and V. Yushchenko’s coming to power. In 2006, certain regions of the country at the level of local legislative assemblies began to give the Russian language official status. For example, in March 2006, the resolution on giving the Russian language the status of a regional language was adopted by the Kharkov City Council, in April 2006 - by the Lugansk Regional Council and the city councils of Odessa and Sevastopol, in May 2006 - by the city councils of Yalta and Dnepropetrovsk.
Tired of endless disputes over the status of the Russian language at the level of the Verkhovna Rada, local legislative authorities decided to independently meet the overwhelming number of their voters. However, these decisions also caused anger in Kyiv, where many politicians see the “Russian language” as a threat to Ukrainian statehood. Deputy Prime Minister of Ukraine for Social and Humanitarian Affairs V. Kirilenko said that in response to the decisions of the local councils of Crimea, Donbass and Novorossia, a resolution will be adopted according to which even an announcement in public transport in Russian will be a crime.
At the end of 2006 - beginning of 2007. Most of the decisions of local councils on the status of the Russian language were canceled. Meanwhile, the adoption by local authorities of the regional status of the Russian language is entirely within the constitutional space of Ukraine, since this decision complies with the provisions of the European Charter for Regional Languages, which Ukraine ratified on May 20, 2003.
In a number of Western countries, the second state language becomes not only the language spoken by the majority of the country's citizens (as in Ukraine), but even the languages of national minorities (in Finland, Finnish and Swedish are the state languages, in Canada - English and French, in Switzerland - German, French, Italian and Retto-Roman, etc.).
Deputies of local councils and the Verkhovna Rada of Crimea have repeatedly addressed the leadership of Ukraine with requests to give the Russian language the status of a state language, drawing attention to the fact that the population of Ukraine has difficulty using the Ukrainian language in legal proceedings, the field of advertising, as well as in public life, for example reading recipes, which are necessarily printed in Ukrainian. More than once attempts have been made to hold an all-Ukrainian referendum on this issue, the legality of which, however, was disputed by the leadership of Ukraine.
In April 2009, BYuT faction deputy Pavel Movchan introduced for discussion in the Verkhovna Rada a bill on the concept of state language policy, which not only obliges the use of exclusively Ukrainian in all spheres of public communication, but also provides for the creation of regulatory bodies to identify its violators. It is proposed to introduce disciplinary, administrative and judicial liability for the use of a non-state language in the workplace. The document was approved by the Committee on Culture and Spirituality.
According to a sociological study conducted by the FOM-Ukraine company in February 2007, 34.4% of Ukrainians believe that the Russian language should become the second official language in Ukraine, another 31.5% are in favor of granting the Russian language official status in those areas Ukraine, where the population supports such an idea. Only 26.4% of respondents admitted that they were in favor of eliminating the Russian language from official communication throughout Ukraine.
According to Western and Russian observers, Kyiv is pursuing a deliberate policy of open linguistic terror to infringe on the rights of the Russian and Russian-speaking population. The ban on the use of the Russian language in Ukraine is a blatant contradiction of European legislation and language practice, the adherence to which is actively declared by the “orange regime”.
Large up-to-date political encyclopedia. - M.: Eksmo. A. V. Belyakov, O. A. Matveychev. 2009.
Just for fun
The Ukrainian language was created in 1794 on the basis of some features of the southern Russian dialects, which still exist today in the Rostov and Voronezh regions and at the same time are absolutely mutually intelligible with the Russian language, existing in Central Russia. It was created through a deliberate distortion of common Slavic phonetics, in which instead of the common Slavic “o” and “ѣ” they began to use the sound “i” and “hv” instead of “f” for a comic effect, as well as by clogging the language with heterodox borrowings and deliberately invented neologisms.
In the first case, this was expressed in the fact that, for example, a horse, which sounds like a horse in Serbian, Bulgarian, and even Lusatian, began to be called kin in Ukrainian. The cat began to be called kit, and so that the cat would not be confused with a whale, kit began to be pronounced as kyt.
According to the second principle the stool became a sore throat, the runny nose became the undead, and the umbrella became a cracker. Later, Soviet Ukrainian philologists replaced the rozchipirka with a parasol (from the French parasol), the Russian name was returned to the stool, since the stool did not sound quite decent, and the runny nose remained undead. But during the years of independence, common Slavic and international words began to be replaced with artificially created ones, stylized as common lexemes. As a result, the midwife became a navel cutter, the elevator became a lift, the mirror became a chandelier, the percentage became a hundred percent, and the gearbox became a screen of hookups.
As for the declension and conjugation systems, the latter were simply borrowed from the Church Slavonic language, which until the mid-18th century served as a common literary language for all Orthodox Slavs and even among the Vlachs, who later renamed themselves Romanians.
Initially, the scope of application of the future language was limited to everyday satirical works that ridiculed the illiterate chatter of marginal social strata.
Inventor of the Little Russian dialect Ivan Petrovich Kotlyarevsky
The first to synthesize the so-called Little Russian language, was a Poltava nobleman Ivan Kotlyarevsky. In 1794, Kotlyarevsky, for the sake of humor, created a kind of padonkaff language, in which he wrote a humorous adaptation of “ Aeneids"by the greatest Old Roman poet Publius Virgil Maro.
Kotlyarevsky’s “Aeneid” in those days was perceived as macaroon poetry - a kind of comic poetry created according to the principle formulated by the then French-Latin proverb “ Qui nescit motos, forgere debet eos" - those who do not know words must create them. This is exactly how the words of the Little Russian dialect were created.
Inventor of the “Siberian language” Yaroslav Anatolyevich Zolotarev
The creation of artificial languages, as practice has shown, is accessible not only to philologists. So, in 2005, a Tomsk entrepreneur created the so-called Siberian language, “which has been around since the times of Velikovo Novgorod and reached our days in the dialects of the Siberian people”.
On October 1, 2006, an entire Wikipedia section was even created in this pseudo-language, which numbered more than five thousand pages and was deleted on November 5, 2007. In terms of content, the project was a mouthpiece for politically active non-lovers of “This Country.” As a result, every second SibWiki article was a non-illusory masterpiece of Russophobic trolling. For example: “After the Bolshevik coup, the Bolsheviks created Centrosiberia, and then completely pushed Siberia to Russia”. All this was accompanied by poems by the first poet of the Siberian dialect, Zolotarev, with telling titles. "Moskal bastard" And “Moskalski vy..dki”. Using administrator rights, Zolotarev rolled back any edits as written “in a foreign language.”
If this activity had not been shut down in its infancy, then by now we would have had a movement of Siberian separatists instilling in Siberians that they are a separate people, that they should not feed Muscovites (non-Siberian Russians were called that way in this language), but should trade oil on their own and gas, for which it is necessary to establish an independent Siberian state under American patronage.
“Ukrov” was invented by Tadeusz Czatsky
The idea of creating a separate national language based on the language invented by Kotlyarevsky was first taken up by the Poles, the former masters of Ukrainian lands: A year after the appearance of Kotlyarevsky’s “Aeneid” Jan Potocki called for calling the lands of Volynsha and Podolia, which recently became part of Russia, the word “Ukraine”, and calling the people inhabiting them not Russians, but Ukrainians. Another Pole, Count Tadeusz Czatski, deprived of estates after the second partition of Poland, in his essay “O nazwiku Ukrajnj i poczatku kozakow” became the inventor of the term " Ukr" It was Chatsky who produced him from some unknown horde of “ancient Ukrainians” who allegedly came out from beyond the Volga in the 7th century.
At the same time, the Polish intelligentsia began to make attempts to codify the language invented by Kotlyarevsky. So, in 1818 in St. Petersburg Alexey Pavlovsky“Grammar of the Little Russian dialect” was published, but in Ukraine itself this book was received with hostility. Pavlovsky was scolded for introducing Polish words, called a Lyakh, and in “Additions to the Grammar of the Little Russian dialect”, published in 1822, he specifically wrote: “I promise you that I am your fellow countryman”. Pavlovsky’s main innovation was that he proposed writing “i” instead of “ѣ” in order to aggravate the differences between the South Russian and Central Russian dialects that had begun to blur.
But the biggest step in the propaganda of the so-called Ukrainian language was a major hoax associated with the artificially created image of Taras Shevchenko, who, being illiterate, actually wrote nothing, and all his works were the fruit of mystifying work at first Evgenia Grebenki, and then Panteleimon Kulish.
The Austrian authorities viewed the Russian population of Galicia as a natural counterweight to the Poles. However, at the same time, they were afraid that the Russians would sooner or later want to join Russia. Therefore, the idea of Ukrainianism could not be more convenient for them - an artificially created people could be opposed to both the Poles and the Russians.
The first who began to introduce the newly invented dialect into the minds of Galicians was the Greek Catholic canon Ivan Mogilnitsky. Together with Metropolitan Levitsky, Mogilnitsky in 1816, with the support of the Austrian government, began to create primary schools with the “local language” in Eastern Galicia. True, Mogilnitsky slyly called the “local language” he promoted Russian.
Help from the Austrian government to Mogilnitsky, the main theoretician of Ukrainianism Grushevsky, which also existed on Austrian grants, was justified as follows:
“The Austrian government, in view of the deep enslavement of the Ukrainian population by the Polish gentry, sought ways to raise the latter in social and cultural terms.”
A distinctive feature of the Galician-Russian revival is its complete loyalty and extreme servility towards the government, and the first work in the “local language” was a poem Markiyan Shashkevich in honor of Emperor Franz, on the occasion of his name day.
On December 8, 1868, in Lviv, under the auspices of the Austrian authorities, it was created All-Ukrainian Partnership "Prosvita" named after Taras Shevchenko.
To have an idea of what the real Little Russian dialect was like in the 19th century, you can read an excerpt from the then Ukrainian text:
“Reading the euphonious text of the Word, it is not difficult to notice its poetic size; For this purpose, I tried not only to correct the text of the same in the internal part, but also in the external form, if possible, to restore the original poetic structure of the Word.”
Jews went further than ukrov
The society set out to promote the Ukrainian language among the Russian population of Chervona Rus. In 1886, a member of the society Evgeniy Zhelekhovsky invented Ukrainian writing without “ъ”, “е” and “ѣ”. In 1922, this Zhelikhovka script became the basis for the Radian Ukrainian alphabet.
Through the efforts of society, in the Russian gymnasiums of Lvov and Przemysl, teaching was transferred to the Ukrainian language, invented by Kotlyarsky for the sake of humor, and the ideas of Ukrainian identity began to be instilled in the students of these gymnasiums. The graduates of these gymnasiums began to train public school teachers who brought Ukrainianness to the masses. The result was not long in coming - before the collapse of Austria-Hungary, they managed to raise several generations of Ukrainian-speaking population.
This process took place before the eyes of Galician Jews, and the experience of Austria-Hungary was successfully used by them: a similar process of artificially introducing an artificial language was carried out by the Zionists in Palestine. There, the bulk of the population was forced to speak Hebrew, a language invented by Luzhkov’s Jew Lazar Perelman(better known as Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, Hebrew אֱלִיעֶזֶר בֶּן־יְהוּדָה).
In 1885, Hebrew was recognized as the only language of instruction for certain subjects at the Bible and Works School in Jerusalem. In 1904, the Hilfsverein Mutual Aid Union of German Jews was founded. Jerusalem's first teacher's seminary for Hebrew teachers. Hebrewization of first and last names was widely practiced. All Moses became Moshe, Solomon became Shlomo. Hebrew was not just intensively promoted. The propaganda was reinforced by the fact that from 1923 to 1936, the so-called language defense units of Gdut Meginei Khasafa (גדוד מגיני השפה) were snooping around British-mandated Palestine, beating the faces of everyone who spoke not Hebrew, but Yiddish. Particularly persistent muzzles were beaten to death. Borrowing words is not allowed in Hebrew. There's not even a computer in it קאמפיוטער
, A מחשב
, no umbrella שירעם
(from the German der Schirm), and מטריה
, but the midwife is not אַבסטאַטרישאַן
, A מְיַלֶדֶת
- almost like a Ukrainian navel cutter.
7 facts about the Ukrainian language that Ukrainians consider indisputable
(taken from the Ukrainian site 7dniv.info)
1. The oldest mention of the Ukrainian language dates back to 858. Slavic enlightener Konstantin (Kirill) Philosopher, describing his stay in the Crimean city of Chersonese (Korsun) during the journey from Byzantium to the Khazars, notes that: “To curse the man with Russian conversation”. And for the first time, the Ukrainian language was equated to the level of a literary language at the end of the 18th century after the publication in 1798 of the first edition of the Aeneid, authored by Ivan Kotlyarevsky. It is he who is considered the founder of the new Ukrainian literary language.
2. The oldest grammar in Ukraine called “Grammar of the friendly Hellenic-Slovenian language” was published by the Stavropegian printing house of the Lviv Brotherhood in 1651.
3. In the 2nd half of the 19th century. The letters ы, ь, е, ъ have dropped from the civil alphabet in Ukraine; The letters and i were assigned different sounds.
4. The Byzantine traveler and historian Priscus of Pania in 448, while in the camp of the Hunnic leader Attila, on the territory of modern Ukraine, wrote down the words “honey” and “grass”, this is a mention of the very first Ukrainian words.
5. The basis of the modern spelling system was orthography, used by B. Grinchank in the “Dictionary of Ukrainian Language” in 1907 - 1909.
6. The “most Ukrainian” letter, that is, not used in the alphabets of other nations, is “g”. This breakthrough sound has been designated in various ways in Ukrainian writing since at least the 14th century, and the letter g in the Ukrainian alphabet dates back to 1619, which was first introduced by M. Smotrytsky as a variety of the Greek “scale” in his “Gramatitsa”.
7. “The most passive”, that is, the least used letter of the Ukrainian alphabet, is “f”.
“The language of padonkaff” or “he who does not know words must create them”
As we see, the Ukrainians themselves admit that the current “ridna mov” was invented at the end of the 18th century Ivan Kotlyarevsky, but they are silent about its humorous creation through deliberate distortion of common Slavic phonetics and clogging the language with heterodox borrowings and deliberately invented neologisms like brake pad.
Modern ukrophilologists also keep silent about the fact that Kotlyarevsky’s “Aeneid” in the 18th century was perceived precisely as macaroni poetry - a kind of comic poetry. Now it is presented as an epic work of the Little Russians.
Nobody stutters at all about why the letter “f” has become the least used in Ukrainian Newspeak. After all, Kotlyarevsky in the newly invented Little Russian language replaced the sound “f” with “hv” solely for comic effect.
Eh, Ivan Petrovich knew what crap he had come up with... However, even during his lifetime he was horrified when he found out what his linguistic tricks had led to. The innocent joke of the Poltava nobleman became a nightmare in reality.
Ukraine is preparing to switch to the Latin alphabet
 Sergey Mironovich Kvit |
The Minister of Education and Science of Ukraine, a member of Petro Poroshenko’s bloc and a member of the right-wing radical Ukrainian nationalist organization “Trident” named after S. Bandera, said in one of his private conversations that Ukraine will soon switch to the Latin script. According to the minister, such a decision will lead to significant savings in budgetary funds due to the fact that there will be no need to change the interfaces of computers, mobile phones, smartphones and other equipment will not have to be modified to fit the Cyrillic alphabet.
Also, the introduction of the Latin alphabet in Ukraine will significantly simplify the stay of foreign tourists in the country and make it more comfortable, and, therefore, will contribute to the influx of tourists from Europe.
It must be said that the project of switching to the Latin alphabet was proposed even under Yanukovych. The author of the bill was then a deputy with the characteristic surname Latynin.
Cyrillic | Latin | pronunciation
a A a A [a]
b B b B [b]
in V v V [v]/[w]
g G gh Gh [γ]
ґ Ґ g G [g]
d D d D [d]
e E e E [e]
є Є je Je /[‘e]
f Zh Zh [h]
z Z z Z [z]
and And y Y [y]
і І i I [i]
ї Ї ji Ji
й И j J [j]
k K k K [k]
l L l L [l]
m M m M [m]
n N n N [n]
o O o O [o]
p P p P [p]
р Р r R [r]
с С s S [s]
t T t T [t]
u У u U [u]
f Ф f F [f]
x X kh Kh [x]
ts ts c C
ch ch ch
sh Sh sh Sh [∫]
However, then this project was blocked by the communists. Now that the Communists have simply been expelled from the Rada, no one will stop the nationalists from abandoning everything national in favor of what is “universal to mankind.” nevertheless, preparations for such a transition had been going on latently throughout the previous years. Thus, on January 27, 2010, the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine issued Resolution No. 55, in which it streamlined the rules for transliteration of the Ukrainian alphabet in the Latin alphabet, approving the transliteration table, and the corresponding GOST was adopted on July 11, 1996. The official Ukrainian transliteration system is based on political rather than scientific principles and is too closely tied to English spelling. The motivation for such a close connection is the following arguments: firstly, if English in the modern globalized world is international, then all transliterations must be strictly subject to the norms of English spelling.
Galician nationalists, nurtured by the Austro-Hungarian General Staff, tried to write Latin in Ukrainian. However, even the creator of the Ukrainian Latin alphabet, the so-called “abetsadlo”, Joseph Lozinsky, later revised his position and completely broke with the Ukrainophile movement. In 1859, Czech Slavist Josef Jireček proposed his own version of the Ukrainian Latin alphabet, based on the Czech alphabet.
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Khokhol, Jew, Katsap, Moskal and others In Ukraine or in Ukraine. The issue has been resolved a long time ago
The official political mythology of Ukraine claims that there is an ancient Ukrainian nation that speaks an equally ancient Ukrainian language, and the archaic Ukrainian language existed already in the 13th century and it began to take shape almost from the 6th century.
Before you agree with or refute these statements, it is worth turning to historical facts, which indicate that in not a single written monument of ancient Rus' will you find anything even remotely similar to the modern Ukrainian language. There are no traces or even hints of the existence of the Ukrainian language deeper than the second half of the 19th century.
In addition, you don’t have to be a philologist to see in the Old Russian language, in which chronicles and birch bark letters were written, a prototype of the modern literary Russian language.
What’s interesting is that the Old Russian language “Svidomi” is persistently called “Old Ukrainian” and they fundamentally try to call everything Russian (Little Russian) that finds itself on the territory of modern Ukraine “Ukrainian”. The former editor of the Kyiv newspaper “Kievlyanin” Vasily Shulgin wrote about this in immigration: “They are looking for all the evidence in this story that indisputably proves that the Russian people lived and suffered in our region. In all these cases, they cross out the word “Russian” and write “Ukrainian” on top.
The fact that in historical documents there is nothing even remotely reminiscent of the modern Ukrainian language is explained by “Svidomo” quite funny, they claim that in those days there were two languages - spoken and written, and the one that was spoken was precisely Ukrainian. If Ukrainian existed only in spoken form, then how did Svidomo learn about it, because living speakers of this language did not live to see the bright moment of “independence”.
All talk about the “old Ukrainian language” is nothing more than speculation, unsupported theories in the name of political mythology, and historical documents on the basis of which such conclusions can be drawn simply do not exist.
Science claims that in the 3rd century the Proto-Slavic language community emerged from the Proto-Indo-European linguistic community, and from it in the 9th century the Old Church Slavonic (Church Slavonic) language sprang off. The latter arose among the Slavs, received its further development in the Balkans, and from Bulgaria Old Slavic came to Rus'. And only then, under his strong influence, in the 10th-13th centuries, the Old Russian language was formed.
It is possible to draw any conclusions about the origin of a language only on the basis of written sources, and “Svidomo” are forced to admit that in the 11th-13th centuries. throughout all of Rus' there was one common written and literary language, called Old Russian, created on the basis of the merger of the local spoken language with the alien Old Church Slavonic (Church Slavonic) language.
At the same time, they deny the existence of a common spoken language, recognizing a common written language. It is simply impossible to deny the existence of a common written Old Russian language for all of Rus', since this is proven by the written monuments of medieval Rus' that have come down to us, written only in the Old Russian language. But it’s possible to fantasize about the colloquial “ancient Ukrainian” language, which none of us has heard and will ever hear. This opens up a huge space for myth-making.
For “Svidomo” it is fundamentally important to prove the existence in the territory of southern Rus' of a language different from Russian, Ukrainian. They only needed the “non-Russian” language and nothing else. That is why they categorically reject the existence of a structurally unified, spoken Old Russian language in the 10th-13th centuries.
Thus, the conclusion suggests itself that all the statements of the “Svidomo” Ukrainian ideologists that in the south of ancient Rus' with the center in Kyiv the population used the ancient Ukrainian language (“Ukrainian-Russian”) are an outright lie. Medieval Rus' spoke and wrote in a single Old Russian language, which, however, had some distinctive features in the western, eastern and northern regions of the state, which, however, is inherent in any living language, and the church used the Old Church Slavonic (Church Slavonic) language in its rituals.
It should be noted here that the process of spreading literacy on the territory of Rus' began with the first “Slavic” grammar, which was written by a Little Russian from Podolia, Meletiy Smotritsky, and then it was reprinted in Moscow and introduced as a textbook in all schools in Russia.
When in the 17th century the Church Slavonic language of the Moscow edition was supplanted by the all-Russian Church Slavonic language, which was formed on the basis of the Western Russian (Kyiv) edition, changes began to occur in the spoken language of the upper classes of Russian society. Elements of the Western Russian secular language began to penetrate into this language, and a powerful stream of elements of the Western Russian secular and business language flowed into the dictionary of the spoken language of the upper classes (and through it into the dictionary of the secular-literary and clerical language).
The foundation of the Russian, or rather all-Russian literary language was laid by the Little Russians, using the Little Russian and Great Russian dialects as material for it, as well as the Kiev edition of Church Slavonic, which is precisely from their creative heritage that the genius of Lomonosov, and then Pushkin, continued to create the language of great science and literature on a global scale .
From all that has been said, we can conclude that the literary Russian language was created by scientists and writers naturally over the centuries from a mixture of Little Russian, Great Russian and Belarusian dialects using Church Slavonic, and the basis of the Russian literary language is the Little Russian dialect.
Now let's see how the “Ukrainian” language was created. In fact, the language that we now call literary “Ukrainian” began to be created somewhere in the middle of the 19th century by Polish-Little Russian Ukrainophiles. Then the “Svidomi Ukrainians” of Austrian Galicia worked on it until the beginning of the 20th century, and the officials of Soviet Ukraine completed its revision.
In response to this, “Svidomo” declare that the literary Ukrainian language began much earlier, with Kotlyarevsky’s “Aeneid” and Shevchenko wrote in Ukrainian.
But the fact is that neither Kotlyarevsky nor Shevchenko had even heard of the “Ukrainian language”. And if they had found out about it, they most likely would have rolled over in their graves with frustration, since they wrote not in Ukrainian, but in the Little Russian dialect.
What is the Little Russian dialect? This is the Old Russian language of medieval Rus', abundantly diluted subsequently with Polish borrowings. This is the dialect of the village, the everyday communication of Russian serfs of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, who naturally adopted words and phrases from the language of their masters over the course of several centuries. The Little Russian dialect is what we now contemptuously call surzhik. The dialect of the Little Russian peasants of the Poltava and Chernihiv regions is the standard of the Little Russian dialect. It is very beautiful and melodious, but, as you understand, it is too primitive to be the language of literature and science.
That is why “The Aeneid” by Ivan Kotlyarevsky was a kind of “joke” of a well-educated Little Russian (whose native language, by the way, was Russian), a parody of Virgil, written in the everyday language of serfs in order to amuse the highbrow intelligentsia of Russia.
However, at the end of the 19th century, the Svidomo decided to appoint Kotlyarevsky as the father of the Ukrainian language. Written, lightly and funny, “The Aeneid” was only supposed to entertain the capital’s intelligentsia, and only then, “Svidomo” literary scholars found in its depths a secret, deep meaning - a Ukrainian revolutionary satire directed against the Russian “tsaratu”.
No less interesting is one of the favorite mythologies of the “Svidomo Ukrainians” about the Valuev decree, which seemed to prohibit the use of the Ukrainian language, or, more precisely, the Little Russian dialect. One might wonder why this had to be done? How could the Little Russian dialect harm the Russian Empire?
In fact, this is all complete nonsense. And to be convinced of this, you just need to read not a quote taken out of context, but the entire text of the same Valuevsky circular. He prohibited not the Little Russian dialect, but the propaganda of South Russian separatism under the guise of literature for peasants, and before talking about this, one should remember the subversive activities of the Russophobe Poles on the territory of Little Russia, who were preparing the Polish uprising (1863) and planning to drag Little Russian peasants into it.
In January 1863, the Polish uprising began and that is why in the summer of 1863 a document appeared entitled “Attitude of the Minister of Internal Affairs to the Minister of Public Education of July 18, made by the Highest Command.” It said, in particular, the following:
“Instruction in all schools without exception is carried out in the all-Russian language and the use of the Little Russian language in schools is not allowed anywhere; The very question of the benefits and possibility of using this adverb in schools has not only not been resolved, but even the raising of this issue has been accepted by the majority of Little Russians with indignation, often expressed in the press. They very thoroughly prove that there was, is not, and cannot be any special Little Russian language, and that their dialect, used by the common people, is the same Russian language, only spoiled by the influence of Poland on it; that the all-Russian language is just as understandable for Little Russians as for Great Russians, and even much more understandable than the so-called Ukrainian language now composed for them by some Little Russians and especially Poles...
This phenomenon is all the more regrettable and deserves attention because it coincides with the political plans of the Poles, and almost owes its origin to them...
Taking into account, on the one hand, the current alarming situation of society, agitated by political events, and on the other hand, bearing in mind that the issue of teaching literacy in local dialects has not yet received final legislative resolution, the Minister of Internal Affairs considered it necessary, until agreements with the Minister of Public Education, the Chief Prosecutor of the Holy Synod and the chief of gendarmes regarding the printing of books in the Little Russian language, make an order to the censorship department so that only such works in this language that belong to the field of fine literature are allowed to be printed; by omitting books in the Little Russian language, both spiritual and educational, and generally intended for the initial reading of the people, to stop...”
From the above text of Valuevsky’s circular, popular among the “Svidomo,” it is not difficult to understand that he did not prohibit the Little Russian dialect and literature, but only blocked the mechanisms of separatism launched by the Poles and Austrians under the cover of the Ukrainophile movement. And nothing more.
In addition, by the 70s, the censorship restrictions introduced in Russia in 1863 were practically not in effect. Ukrainophiles freely published whatever they saw fit. In addition to scientific works, fiction and poetry, cheap popular brochures were published in large editions in Little Russian to educate the masses.
Returning to Shevchenko’s poetry, we can say that this is the maximum that could be “squeezed” out of the folk dialect in the literary field. Few people know that half of his texts are written in literary Russian. Shevchenko is a peasant poet; he lacks the universal, aristocratic depth of thought and sophistication of form. In essence, the meaning of his work comes down to the chronic, rhyming anger of a slave towards the whole world, which, in his opinion, is unfair to him. It is precisely from the aggressive, whiny, bloodthirsty pathos of his poems that people are so “dragged” by “Svidomo”, from the glorification of the Cossack and Gaidamatchina, from the attacks on the “Muscovites”, and not from any genius of his works.
When in Galicia they began to sculpt him into an idol, many churchmen were shocked by his blasphemous poetry and plaintively asked whether it was possible to choose someone else for this role. They were told that it was impossible. Kobzar had to be edited, and much of his work simply had to be hidden from the devout public.
The inability of the peasant dialect to operate with abstract, abstract concepts of science and literature, its primitiveness, and “everyday” nature were clearly seen by the activists of the Ukrainophile movement. But what kept them from sleeping peacefully even more was the amazing similarity of the Little Russian dialect to the Russian literary language. For them, this was much worse than the cultural failure of the village “language.” To “razbudova” the separate Ukrainian nation and state, the Poles and Little Russian separatists needed a separate language, as different as possible from Russian. This is how the idea of creating a literary Ukrainian language arose.
And so, in the second half of the 19th century, work began to boil in Galicia to create an “ancient Ukrainian language” and Polish officials, professors, teachers, even priests, began to study primarily philology in order, with the assistance of Russian traitors, to create a new Russian-Polish language.
First of all, Russian spelling was raped. At first, reformers wanted to replace the Cyrillic alphabet with Latin alphabet. However, mass protests from the population forced them to abandon such an intention. Then, Ukrainizers-Russophobes threw out such letters as “ы”, “е”, “ъ” from the Russian alphabet and at the same time introduced new ones - “є”, “ї” and an apostrophe. This modernized alphabet was imposed by order of the Austrian authorities on Russian schools in Galicia, Bukovina and Transcarpathia.
When Kulish (whose phonetic grammar was used as the basis for the grammar of “Ridnoi Mova”) finally “realized” that his “Kulishovka” was being used by the Poles and Austrians to split the Russians, he became hysterical.
Then the “Ukrainians,” Poles and Austrians began to Ukrainize the vocabulary of the Russian language. Words that at least somehow resembled Russian were thrown out of dictionaries. Instead of them, Polish, German, and also simply fictitious ones were taken.
This artificial, hastily cobbled together synthetic language was rigidly imposed through schools on the Russian population of the Austrian Carpathian and Transcarpathian regions. Those who resisted and did not want to give up the Russian language were persecuted by the authorities and Svidomo.
At the end of the 19th century, the most significant contribution to the sacred cause of creating the Ukrainian language was made by the Scientific Society named after. Taras Shevchenko, headed by Pan Grushevsky. The main goal of their work was to move as far away from the literary Russian language as possible.
By the way, the modern literary Ukrainian language has nothing in common with the Poltava-Chernigov Little Russian dialect, which seems to be recognized as the standard of the Ukrainian language. In fact, the basis of the modern Ukrainian literary language is the so-called Podgorsky Galician dialect.
This was done because the Little Russian dialect of the Poltava and Chernihiv regions has too much in common with the literary Russian language. And the Podgorsk subdialect is most clogged with Polish and German words.
A mixture of Little Russian dialects was allowed with great precautions: every Little Russian word or phrase in which all-Russian features were noticeable was either rejected or altered. Most willingly, Russian-Ukrainian reformers reshaped ready-made Polish words in their own way and turned their language into Polish-Galician jargon.
Every citizen of Ukraine can independently verify all this. To do this, you just need to take any non-specialized text from any Ukrainian-language newspaper and check it with a dictionary to see if it contains distorted Polish, German, or Czech words. Everything that is not of Polish or German origin will turn out to be Russian, interspersed with Newspeak.
This list can be continued for a very long time. If Polish borrowings are removed from the modern Ukrainian language, basic everyday communication will become extremely difficult.
Even such an old Ukrainophile as Nechuy-Levytsky was forced to note that what is happening is not a cleansing of the language from “Russianisms”, but its purposeful substitution.
He wrote: “Professor Grushevsky took as the basis for his written language not the Ukrainian language, but the Galician Govirka with all its ancient forms, even with some Polish cases. To this he added many Polish words, which Galicians usually use in conversation and in the book language, and of which there are many in the popular language. Before these mixed parts of his language, prof. Grushevsky added many more words from the modern Great Russian language without any need and inserts them into his writings mechanically...”
This is how he characterized the “govirka” that Grushevsky used: “The Galician book scientific language is heavy and not pure due to the fact that it was formed according to the syntax of the Latin or Polish language, since the book scientific Polish language was formed according to the model of heavy Latin, and not Polish folk... And something so heavy came out that not a single Ukrainian could read it, no matter how hard he tried.”
Delving into the analysis of the language that Grushevsky and Co. constructed, Nechuy-Levitsky was forced to come to the conclusion that all this Galician “Svidomo” public “began to write in some kind of linguistic mishmash, similar to a caricature of the Ukrainian folk language and the language of the classics. And what they came up with was not a language, but some kind of “distorting mirror” of the Ukrainian language.”
By its design, the literary Ukrainian language, which is now taught in Ukrainian schools, is part of the West Slavic and not the East Slavic language group. The modern Ukrainian literary language has no connection with the ancient linguistic tradition of southwestern Rus' and, in fact, due to its artificiality and unnatural eclecticism, hangs in the air. It is deprived of that amazing depth of semantic and sound shades that arise in the Russian literary language due to the organic fusion in it of Little Russian, Great Russian, Belarusian dialects and the Church Slavonic language, which dates back to the end of the era of Proto-Slavic unity.
For this reason, the modern Ukrainian literary language is rejected by the spiritual and psychological organization of the Little Russian as something foreign, inconvenient, limiting, and emasculating. For us Little Russians, the “Ukrainian literary language”, constructed at the end of the century before last by the Poles and Galicians, is something like Esperanto. With its help, you can support the communication process at the clerical level, but it is not intended to convey the full spectrum of shades of our extremely complex spiritual and intellectual world. With this artificial language brought in from outside, we limit ourselves and push ourselves onto the path of spiritual and intellectual degradation. Hence our inexorable craving for the Russian language and Russian culture, breaking all barriers created by the Ukrainian state.
But, in spite of everything, the newly minted Polish-Galician jargon began to be exported across the border to Little Russia as a “read language”, where it was actively adopted by Ukrainophile sectarians. At the beginning of the 20th century, “Ukrainian-language” newspapers began to be published there with Austrian money. But the funniest thing about this was that the periodicals of the “Ukrainophiles” did not find a reader. The Little Russian people simply did not understand this strange language. If it were not for constant foreign cash injections, the “Ukrainian” press would quietly and quickly disappear on its own
As you can see, what is now called the “Ukrainian language” was so “native” for the Little Russians that without “special training” it was extremely difficult for them to understand it.
When, after the revolution, the Central Rada reigned in Kyiv, proclaiming the Ukrainian People's Republic, the first stage of the forced Ukrainization of Little Russia began. However, the opportunity that suddenly fell on the heads of the Little Russians to be reborn in the guise of a “Ukrainian” did not cause delight or euphoria in anyone except a small group of “Svidomo” rural intelligentsia. The peasants were, at best, indifferent to nationalist slogans; they caused irritation and indignation among the Little Russian intelligentsia, especially when it suddenly became clear that for some reason everyone had to switch to a “language” that no one knew and no one wanted to know.
In her memoirs about the events of 1917-1918 in Ukraine, the wife of Ukrainian Prime Minister Golubovich, Kardinalovskaya wrote that the Kiev intelligentsia reacted extremely negatively to Ukrainization. The woman was greatly impressed by the long lists of people who signed the slogan “I protest against the forced Ukrainization of the South-Western Territory” published in the newspaper “Russian Thought”.
And here’s how a party worker described already in 1926, at the height of Soviet Ukrainization, the situation with “ready language” in Lugansk: “I am convinced that 50% of the Ukrainian peasantry does not understand this Ukrainian language, the other half, if they understand, then still worse than the Russian language... Then why such a treat for the peasants? – he asked reasonably.
Now the same situation, over the years of intensive Ukrainization into “nezalezhny”, for most of the Little Russians, “ridna mova” is something like a special Russian-Polish jargon, serving as the business language of the ruling classes of society, a kind of Latin in which official documents are written, public speeches and officials and politicians communicate.
But when a modern Little Russian finds himself in an informal setting, when he communicates with friends, relatives, and loved ones, he switches to his native Russian language or the Little Russian dialect. We do not have bilingualism, as is commonly believed, but trilingualism. About 95% of the population of modern Ukraine speaks and thinks either in Russian or in the Little Russian dialect (surzhik). And only an insignificant handful of trained “Svidomo Ukrainians” speak fundamentally in literary Ukrainian.
“Svidomo” do not have the resources and time to effectively brainwash the population. The maximum they can do is to force television channels to make funny subtitles for Russian films and programs in clumsy Ukrainian, or to translate Russian dubbing of Western films into terrible Ukrainian, when their characters speak three languages at once, first in English, then in Russian and and finally in Ukrainian.
How the Ukrainian language was created - artificially and for political reasons. “The truth is never sweet,” Irina Farion recently noted, presenting her next book about the Ukrainian language on the First Channel of the National Radio of Ukraine. And in some ways, it’s hard to disagree with the now widely known deputy of the Verkhovna Rada. The truth will always be bitter for Ukrainian “nationally conscious” figures. They are too far apart from her. However, it is necessary to know the truth. Including the truth about the Ukrainian language. This is especially important for Galicia. After all, Mikhail Sergeevich Grushevsky admitted this.
“Work on the language, as in general work on the cultural development of Ukrainians, was carried out primarily on Galician soil,” he wrote.
It is worth dwelling on this work, which began in the second half of the 19th century, in more detail. Galicia was then part of the Austrian Empire. Accordingly, Russia was a foreign country for Galicians. But, despite this circumstance, the Russian literary language was not considered alien in the region. Galician Rusyns perceived it as an all-Russian, common cultural language for all parts of historical Rus', and therefore for Galician Rus'.
When at the congress of Galician-Russian scientists, held in 1848 in Lvov, it was decided that it was necessary to cleanse folk speech from Polonisms, this was seen as a gradual approach of Galician dialects to the norms of the Russian literary language. “Let the Russians start from the head, and we start from the feet, then sooner or later we will meet each other and converge in the heart,” said the prominent Galician historian Antoniy Petrushevich at the congress. Scientists and writers worked in the Russian literary language in Galicia, newspapers and magazines were published, and books were published.
The Austrian authorities did not like all this very much. Not without reason, they feared that cultural rapprochement with the neighboring state would entail political rapprochement and, in the end, the Russian provinces of the empire (Galicia, Bukovina, Transcarpathia) would openly declare their desire to reunite with Russia.
And then they came up with the roots of “mova”
From Vienna, Galician-Russian cultural ties were obstructed in every possible way. They tried to influence the Galicians with persuasion, threats, and bribery. When this did not work, they moved on to more vigorous measures. “The Rutens (as the official authorities in Austria called the Galician Rusyns - Author) have, unfortunately, done nothing to properly separate their language from the Great Russian, so the government has to take the initiative in this regard,” said the viceroy of France. Joseph in Galicia Agenor Golukhovsky.
At first, the authorities simply wanted to ban the use of the Cyrillic alphabet in the region and introduce the Latin alphabet into the Galician-Russian writing system. But the indignation of the Rusyns over this intention turned out to be so great that the government backed down.
The fight against the Russian language was carried out in a more sophisticated manner. Vienna was concerned with creating a movement of “young Ruthenians”. They were called young not because of their age, but because they rejected the “old” views. If the “old” Ruthenians (Rutens) considered the Great Russians and Little Russians to be a single nation, then the “young” insisted on the existence of an independent Ruthenian nation (or Little Russian - the term “Ukrainian” was used later). Well, an independent nation must, of course, have an independent literary language. The task of composing such a language was set before the “young Rutenes”.
Ukrainians began to be raised together with the language
They succeeded, however, with difficulty. Although the authorities provided all possible support to the movement, it had no influence among the people. The “young Ruthenians” were looked upon as traitors, unprincipled servants of the government. Moreover, the movement consisted of people who, as a rule, were intellectually insignificant. There could be no question that such figures would be able to create and disseminate a new literary language in society.
The Poles came to the rescue, whose influence in Galicia was dominant at that time. Being ardent Russophobes, representatives of the Polish movement saw direct benefit for themselves in the split of the Russian nation. Therefore, they took an active part in the “linguistic” efforts of the “young Rutenes”. “All Polish officials, professors, teachers, even priests began to study primarily philology, not Masurian or Polish, no, but exclusively ours, Russian, in order to create a new Russian-Polish language with the assistance of Russian traitors,” recalled a major public figure in Galicia and Transcarpathia Adolf Dobryansky.
Thanks to the Poles, things went faster. The Cyrillic alphabet was retained, but “reformed” to make it different from the one adopted in the Russian language. They took as a basis the so-called “Kulishivka”, once invented by the Russian Ukrainophile Panteleimon Kulish with the same goal - to dissociate the Little Russians from the Great Russians. The letters “ы”, “е”, “ъ” were removed from the alphabet, but “є” and “ї”, which were absent in Russian grammar, were included.
In order for the Rusyn population to accept the changes, the “reformed” alphabet was introduced into schools by order. The need for innovation was motivated by the fact that for the subjects of the Austrian emperor “it is both better and safer not to use the same spelling that is customary in Russia.”
It is interesting that the inventor of the “kulishivka” himself, who by that time had moved away from the Ukrainophile movement, opposed such innovations. “I swear,” he wrote to the “young Ruten” Omelyan Partitsky, “that if the Poles print in my spelling to commemorate our discord with Great Russia, if our phonetic spelling is presented not as helping the people to enlightenment, but as a banner of our Russian discord, then I, writing in my own way, in Ukrainian, will print in etymological old-world orthography. That is, we don’t live at home, talk and sing songs in the same way, and if it comes down to it, we won’t allow anyone to divide us. A dashing fate separated us for a long time, and we moved towards Russian unity along a bloody road, and now the devil’s attempts to separate us are useless.”
But the Poles allowed themselves to ignore Kulish’s opinion. They just needed Russian discord. After spelling, it's time for vocabulary. They tried to expel as many words used in the Russian literary language from literature and dictionaries. The resulting voids were filled with borrowings from Polish, German, other languages, or simply made-up words.
“Most of the words, phrases and forms from the previous Austro-Ruthenian period turned out to be “Moscow” and had to give way to new words, supposedly less harmful,” one of the “transformers”, who later repented, said about the language “reform”. - “Direction” - this is a Moscow word that cannot be used any longer - they said to “young people”, and they now put the word “directly”. “Modern” is also a Moscow word and gives way to the word “current”, “exclusively” is replaced by the word “inclusive”, “educational” - by the word “enlightenment”, “society” - by the word “companionship” or “suspense”.
The zeal with which the Rusyn speech was “reformed” surprised philologists. And not only locals. “The Galician Ukrainians do not want to take into account that none of the Little Russians have the right to the ancient verbal heritage, to which Kiev and Moscow equally have a claim, to frivolously abandon and replace with Polonisms or simply fictitious words,” wrote Alexander Brickner, a professor of Slavic studies at the University of Berlin ( Pole by nationality). - I cannot understand why in Galicia several years ago the word “master” was anathematized and the word “kind” was used instead. “Dobrodiy” is a remnant of patriarchal-slave relations, and we cannot stand it even in politeness.”
However, the reasons for “innovation” had, of course, to be sought not in philology, but in politics. They began to rewrite school textbooks in a “new way.” It was in vain that the conferences of national teachers, held in August and September 1896 in Peremyshlyany and Glinany, noted that now the teaching aids had become incomprehensible. And they are incomprehensible not only for students, but also for teachers. In vain did teachers complain that under the current conditions “it is necessary to publish an explanatory dictionary for teachers.”
The authorities remained adamant. Dissatisfied teachers were fired from schools. Rusyn officials who pointed out the absurdity of the changes were removed from their positions. Writers and journalists who stubbornly adhered to the “pre-reform” spelling and vocabulary were declared “Muscovites” and persecuted. “Our language goes into the Polish sieve,” noted the outstanding Galician writer and public figure, priest John Naumovich. “Healthy grain is separated like Muscovy, and the seedings are left to us by grace.”
In this regard, it is interesting to compare different editions of Ivan Franko's works. Many words from the writer’s works published in 1870-1880, for example - “look”, “air”, “army”, “yesterday” and others, were replaced in later reprints with “look”, “povitrya”, “viysko”, “yesterday”, etc. Changes were made both by Franco himself, who joined the Ukrainian movement, and by his “assistants” from among the “nationally conscious” editors.
In total, in 43 works that were published in two or more editions during the author’s lifetime, experts counted more than 10 thousand (!) changes. Moreover, after the death of the writer, “edits” of the texts continued. The same, however, as “corrections” of the texts of works by other authors. This is how independent literature was created in an independent language, later called Ukrainian.
But this language was not accepted by the people. Works published in Ukrainian experienced an acute shortage of readers. “Ten to fifteen years pass until the book of Franko, Kotsyubynsky, Kobylyanskaya sells one thousand to one and a half thousand copies,” complained Mikhail Grushevsky, who then lived in Galicia, in 1911. Meanwhile, books by Russian writers (especially Gogol’s “Taras Bulba”) quickly spread throughout the Galician villages in huge circulations for that era.
And one more wonderful moment. When World War I broke out, an Austrian military publishing house published a special phrase book in Vienna. It was intended for soldiers mobilized into the army from various parts of Austria-Hungary, so that military personnel of different nationalities could communicate with each other. The phrasebook was compiled in six languages: German, Hungarian, Czech, Polish, Croatian and Russian. “They missed the Ukrainian language. This is wrong,” the “nationally conscious” newspaper “Dilo” lamented about this. Meanwhile, everything was logical. The Austrian authorities knew very well that the Ukrainian language was created artificially and was not widespread among the people.
It was possible to implant this language on the territory of Western Ukraine (and even then not immediately) only after the massacre of the indigenous population committed in Galicia, Bukovina and Transcarpathia by the Austro-Hungarians in 1914-1917. That massacre changed a lot in the region. In Central and Eastern Ukraine, the Ukrainian language spread even later, but in a different period of history...
Alexander Karevin