DISTORTION OF ORTHOEPIC AND ACCENTUATION STANDARDS AS THE WAY TO REPLACE THE UKRAINIAN LANGUAGE BY UKRAINIAN-RUSSIAN DIALECT (ON THE BASIS OF LINGUISTIC STUDIES BY S. KARAVANSKYI)

Abstract

The article based on the linguistic studies by Sviatoslav Yosypovych Karavanskyi (“The Ukrainian Language Secrets”, 2009; “What Destroys Us or Why Don’t They Read Us?”, 2010; “Idiocies of the Stalin Era Russisms in the State Language of Ukraine”, 2016) describes orthoepic and accentuation mistakes made by the speakers living in Ukraine. The scholar points out that such distortion of the standards has been caused by the assimilation policy. The objective of our article is narrower as it consists in studying on the basis of his works of orthoepic and accentuation violations legalised in the Soviet era. The object of the investigation is the above-mentioned linguistic studies by S. Karavanskyi, its subject is the phonetic mistakes that had become common as the result of large-scale Ukrainian culture oppression. The material is processed by means of a number of methods, i. e. observation, analysis, synthesis, the descriptive method that involves considering peculiarities of the structure of the language units and their interpretation as well as the distributive analysis method. On the basis of the scholar’s research the article describes various orthoepic distortions, e. g. failure to differentiate unstressed back vowel sounds, e. g. pronunciation of “a” instead of unstressed “o”, pronunciation of ”є” instead of “e” ([каб’ін´е1т]), confused use of soft, hard and palatalised sounds in the words (pronouncing soft “z” in the word [зло1сти]), palatalisation of sibilants ([ч´у1ти]), unsubstantiated use of hard sounds (instead of soft ones) in the inflexions of adjectives (трикутний), gross violations of the Ukrainian language melodic pattern law (в процесі) e t. c. The article concludes that such mistakes ruin the inner structure of the Ukrainian word, destroy its harmony and direct it to the foreign language field. The scholar emphasises that the correct stress is of utmost importance for the right pronunciation as it should mostly fall on the third syllable from the end of the word if the word has three or more syllables (гaрматень, літýргія, мoвчанка, пасoвисько). He puts a special emphasis on the stress that differentiates the forms of words denoting action and effect that belong to the specialised vocabulary (обладнaння for action and облaднання for effect of the action). He suggests developing this pattern that realises the Ukrainian language word-building potential.