Ukraine, the land and its people : $b an introduction to its geographyRudnytskyi, Stepan
Science
Ukraine, the land and its people : $b an introduction to its geography
Rudnytskyi, Stepan
Ukraine; Ukrainians
We see here a fine example of how relationship of languages goes hand in hand with
anthropological relationship. (Incidentally, proof is herewith presented that the
anthropological characteristics in the peoples of Eastern Europe have an entirely
different significance from the same in Western and Central Europe). This coincidence
of two sciences, entirely independent of one another, causes the Ukrainians to appear
to us a very peculiar independent unit in the Slavic family of races. Only the restriction
of the knowledge of Ukrainian among Slavists, the interpretation of Eastern European
history always from the Russian point of view, the common church language, which,
for a long time, was the basis of the written language as well, the unfortunate confusion
due to the name Russ, Russki, which as ancient state designations for the Empire of
Kiev were usurped by the Muscovite Empire and applied to all Eastern Slavic nations;
these things have made it possible to conceal the real state of affairs from the eyes
of European science and have helped establish the Russian unity theory.
That the Ukrainian language is independent and entirely different from Russian or
Polish is known to every illiterate peasant from one end of the Ukraine to the other.
He does not understand the Pole and the Russian; likewise his language is unintelligible
to a Pole or Russian. Polish is the more easily understood by the uneducated Ukrainian,
since the living together of the Poles and Ukrainians for centuries in the Polish-Lithuanian
state resulted in important influences in both directions, especially in the vocabulary.
But Russian, with its strange vocabulary and phonetic character, different manner
of word-building, [171]declension and conjugation, is for a Ukrainian a difficult foreign language. How much
trouble must the Ukrainian peasantry endure at every step because the unintelligible
Russian language is used exclusively in administration, court, school and church!
The educated Ukrainian who has been trained in Russian schools has had much trouble
to learn his Russian, and he never has so complete a command of it that a Russian
could not immediately recognize “the Khakhol in him.” For an educated Ukrainian trained
outside of Russia, Russian is as hard to learn, if not more so, than the Polish, Czechic
or Serbian. Such obvious facts convince us of the independence of the Ukrainian language,
perhaps, more forcibly than the arguments of learned philologists.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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