Ruthenian language
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Ruthenian руськъ rusǐkǔ |
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|---|---|---|
| Spoken in: | Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, part of the Grand Duchy of Moscow | |
| Language extinction: | developed into Belarusian and Ukrainian | |
| Language family: | Indo-European Slavic East Slavic Ruthenian |
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| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-1: | none | |
| ISO 639-2: | sla | |
| ISO 639-3: | — | |
| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See IPA chart for English for an English-based pronunciation key. | ||
Ruthenian as a successor of the colloquial language used in Kievan Rus, was a historic East Slavic language, spoken in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and later in the East Slavic territories of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
Having evolved from the Old East Slavic language, Ruthenian was the ancestor of modern Belarusian and Ukrainian. Ruthenian is a lineal descendant of the colloquial language used in Kievan Rus (10th–13th century).[1]
It is sometimes also called "Old Belarusian" (Belarusian starabjelaruskaja mova) or even "West Russian" (Russian zapadnorusskij jazyk). As Ruthenian was always in a kind of diglossic opposition to Church Slavonic, it was and still is often called prosta(ja) mova (Cyrillic проста(я) мова, literally 'simple language').
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[edit] Divergence between literary Ruthenian and literary Russian
As Eastern Europe gradually freed itself from the "Tatar yoke" in the 14th century, there were four princes that adopted the title of Grand Duke. Two of them started to collect the East Slavic territories: one in Moscow and one in Vilnius. These activities resulted in two separate mainly East Slavic states, the Grand Duchy of Moscow (Russian Velikoje Knjazhestvo Moskovskoje), which eventually evolved into the Russian Empire, and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (old literary Lithuanian Didi Kunigiste Letuvos, Belarusian Vialikaje Kniastva Litoŭskaje, Ukrainian Velyke Knjazivstvo Lytovs’ke), which covered roughly the territories of modern Belarus, Ukraine and Lithuania and later united with Poland to form the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Linguistically, both states continued to use the regional varieties of the literary language of Kievan Rus', but due to the immense Polish influence in the west and to the Church Slavonic influence in the east, they gradually developed into two distinct literary languages: Ruthenian in Lithuania and the Commonwealth, and (Old) Russian in Muscovy. Both were usually called Ruskij (of Rus’) or Slovenskij (Slavonic); only when a differentiation between the literary language of Muscovy and the one of Lithuania was needed was the former called Moskovskij 'Muscovite' (and, rarely, the latter Lytvynskij 'Lithuanian').
This linguistic divergence is confirmed by the need for translators during the mid 17th century negotiations for the Treaty of Pereyaslav, between Bohdan Khmelnytsky, ruler of the Zaporozhian Host, and the Russian state.
[edit] Continuing Polish influence
Since the Union of Lublin in 1569, the southern territories of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (roughly modern Ukraine) came under direct administration by the Polish Crown, whereas the north (roughly Belarus and Lithuania) retained some autonomy. This resulted also in differences concerning the status of Ruthenian as an official language and the intensity of Polish influence on Ruthenian. However, in both parts of the Commonwealth inhabited by Eastern Slavs, Ruthenian remained a lingua franca, and in both parts it was more and more replaced by Polish as a language of literature, religious polemic, and official documents.
[edit] New national languages
With the beginning of romanticism at the turn of the 19th century, literary Belarusian and literary Ukrainian appeared, descendent from the popular spoken dialects and little-influenced by literary Ruthenian. Meanwhile, Russian retained a layer of Church Slavonic "high vocabulary", so that nowadays the most striking lexical differences between Russian on the one hand and Belarusian and Ukrainian on the other are the much greater share of slavonicisms in the former and of polonisms in the latter.
The split between literary Ruthenian and the successor literary languages can be seen at once in the newly-designed Belarusian and Ukrainian orthographies.
The interruption of the literary tradition was especially drastic in Belarusian: In the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Polish had largely replaced Ruthenian as the language of administration and literature. In addition, during the thirteen-year war with Muscovy (1654-1667) about 50%[citation needed] of all Belarusian population (i.e. Ruthenians of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania) were killed and the country left smoldering in ashes. The cities and the whole education system was destroyed. After that Belarusian only survived as a rural spoken language without almost any written tradition until the mid-nineteenth century.
In contrast to the Belarusians and Eastern Ukrainians, the Western Ukrainians who came to live in Austria-Hungary retained not only the name Ruthenian but also much more of the Church Slavonic and Polish elements of Ruthenian. For disambiguation, in English these Ukrainians are usually called by the native form of their name, Rusyns.
Thus, by 1800, the literary Ruthenian language had evolved into three modern literary languages. For their further development, see Belarusian language, Rusyn language, and Ukrainian language.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- Brogi Bercoff, Giovanna: “Plurilingualism in Eastern Slavic culture of the 17th century: The case of Simeon Polockij.” In: Slavia: Časopis pro slovanskou filologii, vol. 64. p. 3-14.
- Danylenko, Andrii: “‘Prostaja mova’, ‘Kitab’, and Polissian Standard”. In: Die Welt der Slaven LI (2006), no. 1, p. 80-115.
- Dingley, Jim [James]. “The two versions of the Gramatyka Slovenskaja of Ivan Uževič.’ In: The Journal of Byelorussian Studies, 2.4 (year VIII), p. 369-384.
- Frick, David A. “‘Foolish Rus’: On Polish civilization, Ruthenian self-hatred, and Kasijan Sakovyč.” In: Harvard Ukrainian studies 18.3/4 (1994), p. 210-248.
- Martel, Antoine. La langue polonaise dans les pays ruthènes: Ukraine et Russie Blanche 1569/1667. Lille 1938.
- Moser, Michael: „Mittelruthenisch (Mittelweißrussisch und Mittelukrainisch): Ein Überblick“. In: Studia Slavica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 50 (2005), no. 1-2, p. 125-142.
- Mozer [= Moser], Michaėl’. “Čto takoe ‘prostaja mova’?”. In: Studia Slavica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 47.3/4 (2002), p. 221-260.
- Pivtorak, Hryhorij. “Do pytannja pro ukrajins’ko-bilorus’ku vzajemodiju donacional’noho periodu (dosjahnennja, zavdannja i perspektyvy doslidžen’)”. In: Movoznavstvo 1978.3 (69), p. 31-40.
- Pugh, Stefan M.: Testament to Ruthenian. A Linguistic Analysis of the Smotryc’kyj Variant. Cambridge 1996 (= Harvard Series of Ukrainian Studies).
- Shevelov, George Y. “Belorussian versus Ukrainian: Delimitation of texts before A.D. 1569”. In: The Journal of Byelorussian Studies 3.2 (year 10), p. 145-156.
- Stang, Christian: Die westrussische Kanzleisprache des Grossfürstentums Litauen. Oslo 1935 (= Skrifter utgitt av Det Norske Videnskaps-Akademi i Oslo, Historisk-filosofisk Klasse 1935,2).
- Strumins’kyj, Bohdan. “The language question in the Ukrainian lands before the nineteenth century”. In: Aspects of the Slavic language question. Ed. Riccardo Picchio, Harvey Goldblatt. New Haven 1984, vol. 2, p. 9-47.
[edit] External links
| Slavic languages and dialects | |||
| East Slavic | Belarusian | Old East Slavic† | Old Novgorod dialect† | Russian | Rusyn (Carpathians) | Ruthenian† | Ukrainian | ||
| West Slavic | Czech | Kashubian | Knaanic† | Lower Sorbian | Pannonian Rusyn | Polabian† | Polish | Pomeranian† | Slovak | Slovincian† | Upper Sorbian | ||
| South Slavic | Banat Bulgarian | Bulgarian | Church Slavic | Macedonian | Old Church Slavonic† | Serbo-Croatian (Bosnian, Bunjevac, Croatian, Montenegrin, Serbian, Šokac) | Slavic (Greece) | Slovenian | ||
| Other | Proto-Slavic† | Russenorsk† | Slavoserbian† | Slovio | ||
| †Extinct | |||
