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INTRODUCTION 0.0 HISTORICAL BACKGROUND Ukrainian (formerly known as Little Russian) is an East Slavonic language, closely related to Belarusian (formerly known as Byelorussian, and earlier as White Russian) and Russian; all three use the Cyrillic alphabet. At the time of the Christianization of Rus' - the East Slavonic territory that stretched from Kyiv (the Ukrainian form of Kiev) in the south to Novgorod in the north - in 988, the East Slavonic group of dialects as a whole was relatively uniform, differing only slightly from region to region. The differences that today separate the three languages from one another were not brought about by internal linguistic change alone; just as important in this regard were events in the realm of political change, mostly in the form of invasions by non-Slavs and annexations by other Slavs. THE TATARS The first cataclysmic event of this kind was the protracted invasion and ultimate destruction of Kyiv by the Tatars in 1240. Immediate consequences of this event were the dissolution of the state, the establishment of smaller principalities on the periphery of the territory, and therefore a break in the continuity of linguistic evolution - heretofore centred on Kyiv. Tatar rule had no lasting affect on the development of local dialects, barring the adoption of a few words that were specific to Tatar material culture. THE POLES The eventual collapse of Tatar control over Kievan Rus' left a power vacuum, into which the Polish-Lithuanian (but primarily Polish) state entered in the course of the fifteenth century. This historical development differed markedly from the Tatar period, as Polish became a true lingua franca in the Ukrainian-Belarusian lands: Polish rule penetrated deeply into daily life in these regions, with the result that Polish was widely spoken. The consequences for later Ukrainian (and Belarusian) remain evident today, as a substantial proportion of the Ukrainian lexicon consists of borrowings from the Polish language. The lexicon is therefore the one component of the modern language which differentiates Ukrainian from Russian the most. Of course, there are significant differences in the phonology and morphology as well, but these are the result of gradual linguistic developments that are not as immediately obvious as is the sheer weight of thousands of Polish lexical items. It was this period more than any other that resulted in the formation of a Ukrainian language essentially as we now know it; and, as the lexical developments took place across the entire Ukrainian-Belarusian territory, modern Ukrainian is closer to Belarusian than it is to Russian. |
Bи можете завантажити дану книгу в DJVU-форматі для ознайомлення:
скачати Stefan M. Pugh and Ian Press. Ukrainian: a comprehensive grammar.