Savitskaya I.I. (Minsk, Belarus)
A nation is a type of ethnos, a historically emerging socio-economic and spiritual community of people, characterized by the commonality of territory, language, economic ties, psychological makeup of the population, culture, and self-consciousness. One of the sources for the study and simultaneously a means of codification of the national literary language is national lexicography in its early dictionary period, which is usually marked by the publication of a lexicographic work that is significant in terms of quantitative selection and its role in the formation of the language system — a dictionary of the national language that functions as an expression of the national self-consciousness of language speakers.
The comparison of the cultural-historical specificity of East Slavic lexicography during the period of nation formation is relevant for ethnological theory, as well as for the study of the historical lexicography of East Slavic languages. Similar issues have been investigated by leading East Slavic lexicographers and historians of lexicography — T. Kulchytska [4], A. Plotnikova [5], P. Goretsky [2], M. Gulitsky [3], and others.
The aim of this article is to analyze the extralinguistic and intralinguistic factors influencing the formation and role of national lexicography in a specific historical period. The results of the study will address both the aforementioned factors and the systematization of the national-cultural component in national dictionaries of East Slavic languages.
The formation of a national language is impossible without the development of unified language norms. This process has features common to different nations (the functioning of codified norms as a cultural-social marker, the selective character of codification, the narrowing of the gap between the codified norm and usage, the deepening of stylistic variability of norms [1, 25]), as well as differences conditioned by the philosophy and style of the epoch in which the process of nation formation took place, the specificity of the social structure of that nation’s society, the uniqueness of the education system at various stages of historical development [1, 26] — in other words, the peculiarities of the historical-cultural process in the country.
The Ukrainian language went through two stages of development: Old Ukrainian (14th — mid-18th centuries) and modern Ukrainian (from the end of the 18th century). The modern Belarusian language, as the highest form of the national language, began to take shape later — in the 19th century — due to certain social and historical factors. These factors determined the different chronological frameworks and quantitative indicators of Ukrainian and Belarusian national dictionaries.
One of the most authoritative Ukrainian national dictionaries is the “Slovar ukrainskoi movy” by B. D. Grinchenko (vols. 1-4, 1907-1909, approximately 70,000 words). This Ukrainian-Russian dictionary covers the vocabulary of the Ukrainian language from the late 18th century (from I. Kotlyarevsky) to 1870, with occasional lexemes from works by Ukrainian writers up to the 1890s. For the word list and illustration of its usage, the dictionary also draws on folk art collections by M. Maksymovych, A. Metlynsky, and other lexicographic works of the time (for example, “Opyt russko-ukrainskogo slovarya” by M. Levchenko, 1874, etc.). Russian equivalent words or descriptive Russian explanations are provided for the Ukrainian entries. Latin correspondences are indicated for Ukrainian botanical and zoological entries. For numerous lexemes, the dictionary provides examples of the use of a given word in literary language or in living folk speech.
Furthermore, B. Grinchenko adheres (though not entirely consistently) to the principle of documenting the presented words, i.e., for illustrations from literary sources he indicates the author, the page from the work, or the locality where the word was recorded. At the same time, the dictionary does not provide stylistic characterization for Ukrainian words. Nevertheless, Grinchenko’s dictionary laid the foundation of the theory of Ukrainian lexicography and was a significant step in its development.
Regarding the Belarusian literary language, it must be noted that both in the first and second halves of the 19th century there was no unity in views on the Belarusian language: some researchers (B. Linde, M. Maksymovych) considered it an independent Slavic language, while others (I. Sreznevsky, A. Sobolevsky) regarded the Belarusian language as a dialect of either Russian or Polish. Despite this, intensive ethnographic research of Belarus revealed a rich ancient written heritage of the Belarusian people, which needed analysis and dictionary systematization.
Such a dictionary became the “Sloynik belaruskay movy” by I. I. Nosovich, planned by the Imperial Academy of Sciences as the second part of the “Opyt slovarya oblastnykh narechiy,” but published in St. Petersburg in 1870 as an independent work under the title “Slovar belorusskogo narechiya” (Dictionary of the Belarusian Dialect). I. Nosovich was commissioned to compile a dictionary that “would systematize the vocabulary of the living folk language and simultaneously serve as a source for linguistic studies of the Belarusian language and as an aid in reading ancient written monuments” [3, 60].
This was the most complete collection at that time of the vocabulary and phraseology of the living Belarusian language, encompassing more than 30,000 words of mid-19th century Belarusian speech. Nosovich drew his materials from the dialects of Mogilev, Minsk, and Grodno regions, and some areas of the Privislinsky region — the entire linguistic landscape of Belarus — with the aim of generalizing the verbal resources of different Belarusian dialects for the formation of the lexical composition of the Belarusian language. The vocabulary of printed sources — acts, charters, folklore collections, and periodical publications of the time — was widely used. The meanings of words and phrases are revealed through authorial definitions and quotations from dialectal (the Eastern Belarusian, i.e., Krivich, area, which the author considered the most “pure” in ethnogenetic terms) or general literary language, as well as illustrations in the form of proverbs, sayings, riddles, and lines from folk songs.
The mythological beliefs of Belarusians in the dictionary are reflected, in particular, in entries — names of mythical beings, characters from folk tales and superstitions: vovkolak, dobrokhot, domovik, kletnik, ledashchik. Among entries of this type, there are words that are precedent for Belarusian ethnic consciousness, which, however, appear as lexical or grammatical variants of the names of Christian holidays: Hanny, Zmitro, Zyavenne, and others. For I. Nosovich, it was important not so much to name the familiar lexemes of confessional usage, but rather to convey their ethnographic authenticity.
In the work of I. Nosovich, there are a number of indicators and methods for describing vocabulary, including dialectal vocabulary, which are usually implemented in explanatory dictionaries: the presence of definitions, the interpretation of Belarusian entry words using Russian synonymic pairs and series, stylistic markers for individual entry words (fig., iron., affec., arch., philos., church, etc.), which maximally expanded the readership and allowed the dictionary to be used for the most varied purposes (scientific study of local Belarusian words, translation of various Belarusian texts into Russian, interpretation of individual ethnographic phenomena and customs). This gives grounds to assert that the “Dictionary of the Belarusian Dialect” initiated the normalization (codification) of the vocabulary of the Belarusian literary language and is the first Belarusian national dictionary.
One cannot fail to note the difference in quantitative and qualitative indicators of the national East Slavic dictionaries, as well as in the timelines of their compilation and publication: compared to the Belarusian dictionary, the “Slovar ukrainskoi movy” by B. D. Grinchenko is more representative both in its word count and chronology (4 volumes, approximately 70,000 words, 1907-1909). Unfortunately, the “Dictionary of the Belarusian Dialect” by I. I. Nosovich (approximately 30,000 words, 1870), although chronologically published earlier than the Ukrainian one, covers only the Belarusian dialectal vocabulary of the time. In our view, this chronological and quantitative “gap” in the lexicographic sources of the period of Ukrainian and Belarusian nation formation is determined by the different goals of the dictionary compilers.
Grinchenko’s dictionary had a colossal influence on the process of normalizing the Ukrainian literary language in several aspects. First, in the words of the compiler himself, the dictionary was “the first step on the path to creating a scientific Ukrainian dictionary” [cited from: 6, 270], due to the significant terminological component in its word list. It is also worth noting that many scientific-technical terms and internationalisms were replaced by native-language equivalents, which speaks to purist tendencies in Ukrainian lexicography of the late 19th — early 20th centuries and to the engaged attitude of Ukrainian language speakers toward its lexical and stylistic means. Second, the collection in one source of both Eastern and Western Ukrainian dialectal vocabulary as entries contributed to the unification of all-Ukrainian lexical resources.
Nosovich’s dictionary, on the other hand, was begun as an “Opyt slovarya oblastnykh narechiy” (Essay of a Dictionary of Regional Dialects) but in the process of compilation became a “Slovar belorusskogo narechiya” (Dictionary of the Belarusian Dialect). Due to the delayed formation of the Belarusian national language, it was impossible to reflect a developed Belarusian stylistic system. However, the generalization in one source of the richest lexical resources of the so-called “dialect” gave I. Nosovich the opportunity to emphasize the presence on the Slavic linguistic landscape of an independent Slavic language, and the use of stylistic markers for certain lexemes — to emphasize the formation of the national lexical identity of this language in its use across different linguistic situations.
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