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PREFACE Ukraine is - by European standards - a large country with a large population, and its international visibility has grown rapidly since the achievement of independence in 1991. Russian was the overall lingua franca in the Soviet Union, including, of course, Ukraine; since 1991, however, the Ukrainian language has gradually been displacing Russian in official functions and is now in the process of assuming the role of a true national language. Outside of Ukraine, the growing awareness of Ukrainian as an independent language (read: 'not Russian') has been leading people - whether students, tourists, businesspeople, or diplomats - to study the language. This phenomenon is also reflected in the recent publication of new grammars and handbooks of Ukrainian outside Ukraine, for example Colloquial Ukrainian (Routledge, 1994). This book, as a 'Comprehensive Grammar', can also be described as a 'reference' grammar: a book to be consulted on a wide variety of questions concerning the Ukrainian language. To our knowledge, no comprehensive grammar of Ukrainian has appeared outside of Ukraine; grammars produced in Ukraine - with the exception of some textbooks to be used in a classroom setting - are naturally written in Ukrainian, and are therefore of limited use to those who do not yet read Ukrainian. For a language such as Ukrainian, in which there is great regional and stylistic variation, probably no one speaker will agree with every point made in the book: the authors therefore must take full responsibility for making the choices that had to be made. Even in the process of writing a grammar of a 'standard' language, it soon becomes apparent that some rules are fluid, as language itself is fluid; we recognize and indeed welcome that a book of this kind will inevitably be open to suggestions of every kind, as there will always be much more to be said about this - as every other - language. Ukrainian is a very rich language, as are all the elements of Ukrainian culture, including literature, music, and film. Ukraine has a long literary tradition that is all but unknown to the vast majority of non-Ukrainians. To put this statement in perspective: some - if not many - of the great works of Russian literature could be named by the average citizen in London, Paris, and Washington, but it would be a rare person indeed who could name a single Ukrainian novel or poem. Of course, not a few Russian writers were born in Ukraine, such as Gogol and Akhmatova, who are counted as part of the Russian literary tradition. The richness of the literature is fed by the richness of the language: the lexicon is enormous, the grammatical and word- formational processes flexible and productive. Part of the problem with learn- |
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скачати Stefan M. Pugh and Ian Press. Ukrainian: a comprehensive grammar.