Ukrainian through Russian eyes

[Alina Israeli]

As anecdotal as it sounds, the issue is far from trivial. There are  
at least two things that could be analyzed aside from political  
motivations: the input or the stimulus and the competence of the  
processor, i.e. people who render their opinion. To what extent is/ 
was the language codified and to what dialect were Russian speakers  
exposed when they made their pronouncement? Had they been exposed to  
dialects of Ukrainian before? What was the socio-linguistic effect of  
films depicting Ukrainian peasants, including those based on Gogol?

By 1992 there was all of a sudden a government conducting its  
business in Ukrainian. I do not think that your basic rank-and-file  
Russian had any reason to be exposed to political language or  
philosophical language in Ukrainian prior to the creation of the state.

I suppose codification of many language, including some Slavic ones,  
had to go through a phase of rejection of German or Latin as the  
language of political and cultural discourse. After all, I don't  
think Mozart was speaking Czech in Prague, and Henri III did not  
speak Polish or Lithuanian.

Alina

On Sep 15, 2009, at 6:22 AM, Robert DeLossa wrote:

>
> For me, the great irony in all this is that I can remember clearly  
> in 1984 touring Kyiv and having our Soviet guides (who had come  
> down with us from Leningrad) shush us and tell us every time we  
> asked about the Ukrainian we saw: "It's a peasant dialect, barely  
> distinguishable from Russian. Really, it's completely  
> understandable to every Russian, it just has a few funny, old- 
> fashioned letters." By 1992, there was a great hue and cry from  
> many, many Russian speakers that Ukrainian was impossible to  
> understand and impossible to learn. Evidently, it changed a lot in  
> eight years.
>
>
> Regards,
>
> Rob DeLossa
>
>

Alina Israeli
Associate Professor of Russian
LFS, American University
4400 Massachusetts Ave.
Washington DC 20016
(202) 885-2387 	fax (202) 885-1076
aisrael at american.edu





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