SCIENTIFIC CONTROVERSIES OF LINGUISTS OF THE 1920-S ON WAYS TO REPLENISH THE LEXICAL FUND OF THE UKRAINIAN LANGUAGE OF THAT TIME

Abstract

The article considers about a difficult period in the development of the Ukrainian literary language, which fell on the period of the so-called de-Russification (20-s - early 30-s of the last century). The scientific disputes that continued at that time around the issues of standardization of the literary language also touched upon the painful question of ways to replenish the Ukrainian vocabulary. Such scholars as Y. Shevelev and P. Veksler identified two trends in Ukrainian linguistics, or two groups of purists (“extreme” and “moderate”), which demonstrated different approaches to many acute normative issues, one of which was the question of ways to enrich the Ukrainian terminology system. So, extreme purists denied the need to borrow foreign words, suggesting to use their own, Ukrainian instead, and if there were no such correspondences, then invent or, as they wrote then, “forge” new words to denote abstract concepts and phenomena. Moderate purists were of the opposite opinion and suggested not to restrict the use of foreign words, because this would contribute to the replenishment of the Ukrainian terminological system. It is significant that today we are trying to return to scientific circulation those Ukrainian words that were removed during the linguocide period (from the beginning of the 1930s) from the terminological dictionaries of that time, and we prefer non-borrowed lexemes, such as: pervenʹ instead of element, pidsonnya instead of klimat, svitlyna instead of fotokartka, bihun instead of polyus, mapa instead of karta, rivnovartnyk instead of ekvivalent and many others. Analysis of the then lexicographic sources allowed us to visually show these linguistic discussions and prove that there was no agreement between the normalizers of the 1920-s regarding the use of such lexemes that can be used not only in the language of science and technology (as an example, we took several linguistic units, which were codification in bilingual translation dictionaries, published at that time in large numbers).