LESIA UKRAINKA AS A LINGUIST-TERMINOLOGIST (devoted to the 150th anniversary of the writer’s birth)

Abstract

In this scientific investigation we set the task to trace how Lesya Ukrainka represents the intellectualism of the Ukrainian language through the prism of her linguistic consciousness, due to her word formation, verbalizing her own linguosophy as that one which belongs to a linguist-terminologist, master of the word, Ukrainian elitist linguistic personality, which is manifested in the epistolary discourse of the poet. It is about the writer’s reasoning about the development of the Ukrainian language, description of its ontology, as well as her views on the development of Ukrainian terminology, relevant practical work on modeling terms, including neologisms, etc. Lesya Ukrainka used various techniques of creating terms: (1) she tried to make the term correspond to the spirit of the Ukrainian language; (2) knowing the foreign languages well, the writer actively used foreign terms, using them in Latin graphics and transforming them into Cyrillic, tracing, trying to make them look Ukrainian, in particular, providing Ukrainian suffixes and endings; (3) she created terms-neologisms to describe the concepts that she introduced; (4) she intensified borrowed prefixoids, which today have become productive and regular; (5) she worked on modeling femininitives; (6) she represented figurative terms of the metaphorical type, as well as terms based on the phenomenon of precedent (actualization of proper precedent names, statements of famous people, delineation of precedent situations, etc.). Lesya Ukrainka considered herself a linguist to some extent, so she reflected on linguistic problems, the status of the Ukrainian language, its development, stylistics, the peculiarities of the functioning of the Ukrainian language in different regions of Ukraine, the nature of the influence of Russian and Polish. However, we see Lesya Ukrainka’s merit first of all in the fact that she did not passively study the state and peculiarities of the Ukrainian language, but even in her letters to relatives and friends she left valuable observations, arguments, persistently and convincingly encouraged consistent and active language patriotism.