A Quantitative Evaluation of Borys Hrinchenko’s Purism

Abstract

This article examines the influence of Borys Hrinchenko’s puristic principles, which he articulated on the pages of the Lviv semimonthly Zoria during the years 1891–93, on his poetic lexicon. Our research shows that the number of words per textual unit in Hrinchenko’s poetry is 35.7 per cent less than in Ivan Franko’s poetry of the same period (1,939 words vs. 2,631 various words per 8,000 words of text). The number of identical Russian and Ukrainian words was 319 (12.1 per cent) in Franko’s poems and 278 (14.3 per cent) in Hrinchenko’s (i.e., 36.1 words in Franko vs. 30.8 in Hrinchenko per 1,000 words of text). The number of identical Polish and Ukrainian words was 245 (9.3 per cent) in Franko and 188 (9.7 percent) in Hrinchenko (i.e., 34.2 in Franko and 37.3 in Hrinchenko per 1,000 words of text). Violations of the monotonicity of dependence of identical Ukrainian, Russian, and Polish consonants on the frequency these words occur clearly indicate that the “failure” of monotonicity is greater vis-à-vis the Russian language. The hypothesis that this non-monotonicity and poorer lexicon result from Hrinchenko’s purism is substantiated. By cleansing the language of his poems of evident Russianisms, he reduced the proportion of identical Ukrainian and Russian words by only 5 per cent. Meanwhile such words are fewer in Franko’s “uncleansed” language by 17 per cent. Hrinchenko’s principles did not, in fact, distance Ukrainian from Russian, but they led to impoverishment of the Ukrainian lexicon and diminished the ability of the language to convey semantic nuances, thereby harming its communicative functions.