Sprachklassifikationen in den ukrainischen handschriftlichen Logikkursen vom Ende des 17. bis zum ersten Drittel des 18. Jahrhunderts

Abstract

Some logic courses given at the Kievan academy in the last decade of the seventeenth and the first third of the eighteenth century comprised a discussion of language kinship conceived in terms of 'mother languages' and 'daughter languages'. The inclusion of such discussion aimed at corroborating the thesis about the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign, particularly evident in the case of the 'corrupted' post-Babelic languages that arose by human institution. In this respect, the Ukrainian logicians leant on previous works by the Roman Catholic theologians Gilbert Génébrard and Cornelis Cornelissen Van Den Steen. However, many of them (Stefan Javors'kyj, Innokentij Popovs'kyj, Ilarion Levyc'kyj, Amvrosij Dubnevyč, among others) made significant corrections to the lists of Germanic and especially Slavonic languages as provided by their predecessors. Their contribution to this field is illustrative of the fact that the genealogical view of language kinship had become quite current by that time.