POLISH-LATIN MACARONIC MIXTURE AND ‘SLAVONIC-RUTHENIAN’ LANGUAGE

Abstract

The paper focuses on the genesis of Ukrainian-Church Slavonic hybrid language, popular at the end of the 17th and during the 18th century among Ukrainian writers. Usually, this new love for the Church Slavonic, which led to the emergence of a hybrid literary form, is explained by two factors: piety to the Church Slavonic and the influence of Russian tradition, where the practice of mixing Church Slavonic with the vernacular was stable and almost unalterable. According to the paper’s author, the use of Church Slavonic as a religious and cultural marker, which had status advantages, was not a major and independent factor in the development of this practice. Th e poor knowledge of Church Slavonic in society and the lack of efforts to learn it, even among priests, undermine the notion that the sacralization of this language could lead to the creation of hybrid forms by itself. Th e Russian influence was not crucial as well, which is confirmed, in particular, by the proliferation of similar language use in the Right Bank Ukraine, free from tendencies of russification. The so-called ‘slovianoruska mova’ (Slavonic-Ruthenian language) was stimulated above all by the Latin-Polish macaronic mix, which, due to the local tradition of using such a language, and, importantly, through education, has been established in the public consciousness as a norm. The rhetoric courses and the practice of delivering occasional orations in Polish ensured the development of the trend. Therefore, both in Ukraine under Russian rule and in the Right Bank Ukraine within the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the creation of hybrid Ukrainian-Church Slavonic texts was just another way of actualizing one’s mental habit, produced by the regular use of the Polish-Latin language mixture.