Ukrainian through Russian eyes
Alina Israeli
aisrael at AMERICAN.EDU
Tue Sep 15 18:36:07 UTC 2009
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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