Meletii Smotrytskyi: languare and wordlviev hybridism?

I.D. Farion
Doctor of Philology, Professor of Department of Ukrainian, National University “Lviv Polytechnic”
12 Stepan Bandera St., Lviv 79000, Ukraine
E-mail: coffice@lpnu.ua

Heading: Researches
Language: Ukrainian

Abstract: Meletii Smotrytskyi synthesized in his worldview and religious-scientific activity two opposite time tendencies: traditional Slavonic sacral universalism and newly appeared ethno-lingual nationalism. His life has become the most demonstrative focus of those turbulent times that, leading to successful national liberation movement led by Bohdan Khmelnytskyi, ended for Ukraine with a political disaster in 1654, the consequences of which are still digested in the modern Moscow-Ukrainian war.

The “Grammar” of M. Smotrytskyi, without specifying the name and surname of the author, namely that of 1648, with significant lexical and phonetic-morphological alterations, in particular the elimination of the rule on non-allowability toconfuse Ukrainian letters “г” and “ґ”as well as the removal of the grapheme ґ, introduced by Smotrytskyi in Moscow. It is known that there it has become the basic grammar code until the “Russian Grammar” by M. Lomonosov, published in 1755.

In this article we trace Smotrytskyi’s linguistic and worldview evolution through the prism of his iconic publicistic-polemical and linguistic works. The analysis is made basing on the following major problems: a) the choice ofwriting language and the theory of language dignity, b) Didactic Gospels as the way of introducing “simple” language, c) “Slavonic Grammar” as a language-ideological vector.

The figure of M. Smotrytskyi is a focus of religious and political events that significantly influenced the biforked halved path of the Ukrainian nation as a language and a language as a nation. The choice of languages, first of all, the traditional Slavonic language as a church, unifying and Orthodox tradition, Polish as the official language of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Old Ukrainian (Ruthenian language) as a pragmatic way to convey biblical truths to the people. Such a symbiosis did not lead Ukrainism to the independent path of development, but only preserved the ancient church and stateless Ukrainian relations, since at its core it had no reformative way of solving the problem.

Keywords: M. Smotrytskyi, Old Ukrainian (Ruthenian) language, language and worldview hybridism, sacred universalism and ethno-lingual nationalism.

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