SEELECTS of ‘Slavic and East-European Lectures’ is een lezingenreeks. Het biedt een forum aan nationale en internationale onderzoekers. De thema’s die aan bod komen hebben alle betrekking op Oost- en Zuidoost-Europa, maar beperken zich niet tot Slavische topics alleen. De thema’s zijn eerder breed explorerend dan eng toegespitst.
SEELECTS or ‘Slavic and East-European lectures’ is a series of scholarly lectures. It is a forum for national and international scholars. All presentations cover East and Southeast Europe, but are not restricted to Slavic topics alone. The talks are rather broad and exploratory, than all too narrow or specific.
Programma 2023-2024
Event Information:
-
Do22Feb201818:00Campus Boekentoren, Blandijnberg 2, room/lokaal 160.015 (sixth floor/zesde verdieping)
From ‘prosta mova’ to ‘jazyčie’: Linguistic legacies of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
Jan Fellerer (University of Oxford)
The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (1569-1795) was ethnically and linguistically highly diverse. Many were East Slavs who spoke Belarusian and Ukrainian dialects. Besides Church Slavonic for religious writing, they used an unstable amalgam of vernacular Ukrainian and Belarusian, Church Slavonic and Polish for administrative purposes. The beginnings of this so-called prosta mova, often referred to as ‘Ruthenian’ in English, date back to the 14th c., but its usage and linguistic profile changed and developed considerably since the 16th c., to include many new domains, such as religious writing and literary prose. It is usually assumed that the prosta mova was falling out of use over the 18th c. due to the increasing dominance of Polish throughout the Commonwealth.
After sketching the trajectory and linguistic profile of the prosta mova during its early modern heyday, I shall argue that it did, however, not disappear together with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Its legacies continued well into the 19thc., in particular in texts by Ukrainians from Galicia, the part of the former Commonwealth that was annexed by the Habsburgs. By then, their mixed written language was labelled jazyčie, ‘gibberish’. Its ultimate demise was only towards the end of the 19th c., when the new, vernacular-based Ukrainian written language gained general acceptance throughout all Ukrainian lands, including Galicia. To what extent the prosta mova played a role in the inception of new written Ukrainian too, remains a question for further research.