# Ukrainian (and other Slavic) participles



## ahvalj

The codifiers of modern standard Ukrainian decided to leave the language with a very limited set of participles, comparing with Russian and Old East Slavic. This may have its basis in the Ukrainian colloquial speech, but it has left the standard language without an elegant and, I would say, very useful, way to express things. Consider such monsters as:

нелегітимний прем'єр Криму оголосив незаконний референдум _таким, що відбувся_ = нелегитимный премьер Крыма провозгласил незаконный референдум _состоявшимся_
вона прийняла рішення визнати вибори _такими, що не відбулися_ = она приняла решение признать выборы _не состоявшимися._

If such participles would have been originally alien to any form of Ukrainian, one could regret about such ponderous constructions, but eventually would be unable to do anything with that. In reality, however, the language used to possess the full system of participles in the past, and the almost 100% diglossia in Ukraine makes these participles not alien to the speakers, so my question is _why not to include such and other similar forms into the standard grammar?_ A more general question is _why are the newly codified languages often being deprived of useful grammatical phenomena for the only reason that these are associated with the ethnic, political or social groups the codifiers would like to distance themselves?_ Belarusian, having the same very reduced participle system in the colloquial language, nevertheless allows all the four participles (Present/Past, Active/Passive; + the reflexive forms) in the standard language:

для прызнання выбараў _адбыўшыміся_ ў першым туры на ўчасткі для галасавання павінны прыйсці больш за 50 працэнтаў грамадзян = для признания выборов _состоявшимися_ в первом туре на участки для голосования должны прийти более 50 процентов граждан.


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## bardistador

Two things are happening - perhaps the codifiers of the language want the language to be more descriptive than prescriptive.  Those headline constructs, although succinct, are out of touch with how people speak.  However, headlinese is its own kind of language in most languages, having its own structure, grammar and usage.   News broadcast and articles use different language to people on the street.  Medical language is different, literature, microblogging, TV, etc.   It's not one-size-fits-all.  Why bring down official language to the level of everyday language when no other language is doing that.

Maybe some of the codifiers have a descriptive intent to this, maybe.

Another likely scenario is cutting off the nose to spite the face. 

This is not unlike Croatia's linguistic purism, although it manifests itself differently.  The goal is to distance the language from the language(s) to the East at any cost.  There is nothing particularly Serbian/Bosnian/Montenegrin about the word "telefon" or "faks" or "television", but "if they use it, we won't." 

It's very strange to see people's attitudes toward their own language, where language is no longer a tool for communication, but a tool for politics, nationalism and identity.

It doesn't stop at changing the vocabulary to distance the language from the neighbors or changing the grammar for similar reasons, but there are some that want to stop using Cyrillic and adopt the Latin alphabet instead.  The reasons are obvious (one single reason, I say), but many give reasons such as "it's better for business, global trade, etc"  (marginally, maybe.  Albania's economy is not booming due to using Latin, Japan is not suffering due to using a non-Latin script).  

For some (linguistic-nationalists?), whenever someone from the West confuses them with their neighbors, it's their own language that'll take the hit.

If the decades of Communism were considered bad for the development of ethnic languages, then the post-Communist independence-era's aims are not to fix those mistakes, but top them.

Education, language, culture, academia, etc. no longer have their own policies and goals - they all must bow to the will of nationalists.  It's not the academic community that made the Book of Veles part of school curriculum.  These decisions come from somewhere else.


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## ahvalj

Thank you for your reply, I didn't expect anybody to react after the thread was moved to this forum.

I see your points, but the Croatian codifiers just change the words they don't like with counterparts they find suitable: the language doesn't suffer from that, after all (by the way, I, too, prefer linguistic purism — for esthetic reasons). Likewise, the alphabet, if it is as well constructed as the Roman and Cyrillic variants of the Serbo-Croatian writing, is almost irrelevant for the language itself: it affects just its graphical presentation.

The Ukrainian situation with the participles is different. These participles and the participial constructions in Slavic aren't artificial inventions of the literary style: all these forms and word-combinations are inherited from Proto-Indo-European and have been in active use for several millennia — in particular, they are attested in the Old East Slavic texts of all styles (and their counterparts are still fully alive in Lithuanian, a sister language to the Slavic branch). So, if people from the Stone age to the Middle ages were capable of using participial constructions, what has happened to the modern speakers? Plus, not as actively as in the past, but these participles are widely used in Russian, which is spoken to various extents by the 99% of the Ukrainian population, so if a person uses the Past Active participle (as in the examples above) when speaking and writing Russian, why should he be unable to do so when speaking and writing Ukrainian?

Google shows that the Ukrainian counterpart of this Russian participle can be found: people keep using them (https://www.google.ru/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=відбувшимися&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&gfe_rd=cr&ei=R_REVrK3CvHnwAOL74-IDA) — the problem, as I see it, is that the standard grammar rejects them, suggesting instead the above constructions that sound very, very clumsy.


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## Gavril

In standard Slovene, there are two productive participles: present-active -_joč_/-_eč_ (_speč_ "sleeping") and past passive -_n_/-_t_ (_delan_ "done", _požrt_ "eaten, devoured").

The past active participle is restricted to a few forms in practice (_bivši_ "former, having-been", _rekši_ "having-said", plus a few more), but it may be theoretically possible to form new ones, even if this is almost never done.


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## ahvalj

Gavril said:


> In standard Slovene, there are two productive participles: present-active -_joč_/-_eč_ (_speč_ "sleeping") and past passive -_n_/-_t_ (_delan_ "done", _požrt_ "eaten, devoured").
> 
> The past active participle is restricted to a few forms in practice (_bivši_ "former, having-been", _rekši_ "having-said", plus a few more), but it may be theoretically possible to form new ones, even if this is almost never done.


That's true, but Slovene, as most other Slavic languages, has lost the _š_-participles long ago, and reviving them would have been a hard task (Czech codifiers tried to reintroduce them in the 19th century, however). I am not calling the Ukrainian codifiers to do the impossible: in contrast, I wonder why do they exclude from the grammar the forms that are used by the Ukrainian speakers themselves? It would be very easy to give the green light to these forms, just by not rejecting them from the standard language.


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## bardistador

I, too, am a proponent of linguistic purism and I fear that one day I would hear something like:

"Imam meeting s mojim fredovima u bildingu mog ex-Start-upa" or something of that sort.  I see that usage of шузы and пиплы has crept up in Russia.

Having that said, when it comes to things like this:



> branilac > branitelj
> činilac > činitelj
> dobrovoljac > dragovoljac
> glasanje > glasovanje
> građevinar > graditelj
> greška > pogreška
> naređenje > naredba
> saradnja > suradnja
> vezi > svezi



then I'm not sure what the point is (other than the "let's make it different from Serbian").  Removing words that have roots in OCS also crosses the line between linguistic purism ("we want native constructs instead of foreign loanwords") and becomes "let's make our language different from the neighbors."

It's so strange - there are about 70 attempts at making pan-Slavic, inter-Slavic and auxiliary languages for Slavs yet the codifiers of the actual, natural languages are not neutral or indifferent to this, they're actually working in the opposite direction.


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## ahvalj

_Шузы_ & _пиплы_ _belong_ to the slang of the 60's and 70's: these words aren't in active use anymore, though of course new replacements have appeared since then. That period has also left a nice expression _фейсом об тейбл.
_
The attempts of making pan-Slavic languages remain almost (or absolutely?) unknown in Russia — for (obvious) imperialistic reasons: foreign Slavs have always been regarded as poor cousins (even if they themselves wouldn't agree) speaking some ridiculous languages (_«Японский язык на слух — даже не шепелявый, а сюсюкающий. Нет чувства отклонения от нормы, как в польском»_ — http://www.e-reading.club/chapter.php/10105/55/Vaiil'_-_Geniii_mesta.html).

I think the replacement of the terminology in emerging literary languages is an inevitable process: Ukrainian, turning back to the thread topic, has managed to recreate the majority of abstract words, having replaced most of the learned vocabulary that was in use in what is now Ukraine since the beginning of the Slavic Christian literacy (compare these Old Church Slavonic / Old East Slavic texts http://izbornyk.org.ua/oldukr2/oldukr2.htm of the beginning of the last millennium with their Ukrainian translations at that site). This can be regrettable as the language has received a very plebeian appearance, which it probably hasn't deserved after many centuries of literary tradition, but these replacements were well-thought and the vocabulary hasn't become poorer as a result. What bothers me in the participle question is the deliberate renunciation of the grammatical richness. Unfortunately, this was a kind of trend among the language revivalists of the 19th or early 20th centuries: if a certain feature was lost in the speech of the lower classes, it had to be removed from the newly created standard (e. g. for Belarusian: http://knihi.com/Jazep_Losik/Niekatoryja_uvahi_da_bielaruskaje_litaraturnaje_movy.html#chapter1 — fortunately, standard Belarusian has managed to escape such suggestions so far).


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## korisnik

bardistador said:


> then I'm not sure what the point is (other than the "let's make it different from Serbian").



Are you insinuating that the words on the right were "invented"?

If you're after invented words, those are the last ones you'd want to pick. The -telj suffix has always had prominence in Croatian (although it was frowned upon for the sake of a unified language during Yugoslavia), and some of the words on the left were clearly not even present in the Croatian standard even during Yugoslavia and would have been awkward in a Western standard text (_saradnja_).




bardistador said:


> Removing words that have roots in OCS also crosses the line between linguistic purism ("we want native constructs instead of foreign loanwords") and becomes "let's make our language different from the neighbors."



I'd love to hear your thoughts about Shtokavian hyper-purism that completely annihilated any trace of Kajkavian or Chakavian in the standard language of Croatia and was then even more strongly perpetuated in Yugoslavia.

Surely you must have some well thought-out criticism for it.


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## danielstan

It is obvious that in Yugoslav times there were tendencies to obtain a unified Serbo-Croatian language by rejecting from the official language the words with regional circulation, while after 1989 each new country in ex-Yugoslav space tried to revive archaic words and regionalisms in order to replace what they consider "Serbian" words.

I read somewhere that in the independent Croatia they gave on cinemas ex-Yugoslav films (considered to be spoken in "Serbian") and they use "Croatian" subtitles! People in the cinemas were laughing about the translation: the "Serbian" word X was translated by the "Croatian" word Y, in reality X and Y being synonims!

Same thing happened in Slovakia on their national television where Czechoslovak movies appeared subtitled in Slovak. After few attempts the Slovaks renounced to such practice.

On the first official meeting between the presidents of Macedonia and Bulgaria, the Macedonian presidency has asked for official translators, while the Bulgarian president refused a translator on his side claiming that he perfectly understands what the other says.

In Moldova some intellectuals supporting the thesis of "Moldovan language" have printed a Moldovan-Romanian dictionary! I read some of their "translation" and they used regional words (perfectly understandable to a native Romanian speaker) for the "standard Romanian" version of these words.


From another hand:
Countries like USA, Australia, Canada have no complex in using the term "English" for their official language.
Switzerland has a German dialect which is quite distinct from Hochdeutsch. Anyway they use the term "German language" officially.
Belgium has renounced officially to the term "Flemish language" in the 1970's and now they use the "Dutch language" for the Flanders region.

I see a big emphasis on national identity expressed by an official language distinct from neighbors in Eastern Europe, while the linguistic problem as a tool for national identity has decreased in importance in Western world.


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## ahvalj

danielstan said:


> I see a big emphasis on national identity expressed by an official language distinct from neighbors in Eastern Europe, while the linguistic problem as a tool for national identity has decreased in importance in Western world.


 Not in Scandinavia, especially Norway. I also foresee an interesting linguistic development in independent Catalonia.


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## bardistador

I don't have any criticism of -itelj endings vs -nik, -ar, -ac, -ač, -ak (or -or for that matter: animator, autor).  A word with any of those endings doesn't seem more Croatian or Serbian or anything to me.  

I think you missed my point.  I'm not after invented words, nor am I suggesting that these words are invented.  (I mean, every word is invented, but these are not more or less "invented" than any other word).   But what I'm saying is there's purism (telefon > brzoglas) and there's this (greška > pogreška, vezi > svezi).  I don't know what to call this, but I don't see it as purism myself.  Some of them would be closer to a spelling reform than to a purism.  (It's obviously not a spelling reform due to the highly phonetic alphabet, but you get my point.)

I'd say that neologisms and calques are one aspect of the reform.
Vezi > svezi is something else.  (I don't know the word for it)
The endings change (-itelj) is also something else.

We can't call vezi > svezi "purism" because it would suggest that vezi (which is still there inside svezi) is "impure" or foreign or that it has been removed, when it clearly is still there.

Also, I'd be hesitant to call priopćiti > saopćiti "purism."  Substituting OCS-based words and calling it "purism" makes it sound like OCS is a foreign language.

I'd also say that dobrovoljac and dragovoljac (meaning the same thing, but used in different contexts) and omladina/mladež (different contexts) is also another element of language reform that cannot be called "purism" because they expand the vocabulary with "new" words that have a different meaning (or alter the meaning of the older one) rather than replace one for another.  So purism is replacing "rendez-vous" with "meeting."  These last examples are similar to recruit/volunteer and juvenile/youth, not replacing, but supplementing.  

So many changes are happening and not all of them can be called "purism."  I would only consider "zrakomlat"-type word as purism.  And even then - having two similar words side-by-side meaning slightly different things is not "purism" because there's no purging.  It's dilution at best.  If the original word is not replaced, then it's simply coining no words to expand the vocabulary.    

I don't know much about the language policy of the Communist era, but I'm guessing that the Communists bent the whole country, linguists, media, education system, etc. to their will.   I'd love to read more about it.  Any suggestions on where to start?


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## bardistador

ahvalj said:


> Not in Scandinavia, especially Norway. I also foresee an interesting linguistic development in independent Catalonia.



I'm not sure if it's a coincidence or if there's actual correlation, but Catalonia, Norway and any Slavic language all have very close neighboring sister-languages, so maybe the differences/similarities are a point of discussion/contention vis-a-vis nationalism/language/identity.  English is not worried about "Icelandisms" creeping up, but then again, English is a different beast entirely.


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## ahvalj

Still, I would like this thread to concentrate on the cases when ethnic or social motives lead to the exclusion from the standard language of the meaningful elements, like in the above example with the Ukrainian clumsy participle replacements. The vocabulary changes are, after all, just substitutions of some words with their equivalents not associated with a certain other language.


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## Ben Jamin

ahvalj said:


> Not in Scandinavia, especially Norway. I also foresee an interesting linguistic development in independent Catalonia.


In today's Norway the marking of distance against Danish is not longer a point of interest. The two languages (Bokmål and Danish) have drifted so far from each other that no political pressure is necessary. On the other hand, the people use their language for two purposes:
1. To mark their regional identity inside the country.
2. To mark their political positions at the axis of proletariat - bourgoisie (progessive - conservative).
Those marking themselves under the banners of 1. feel that identity is more important than communication, and they don't care if people do not understand them, either because of their local vocabulary or pronunciation.


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## ahvalj

Ben Jamin said:


> In today's Norway the marking of distance against Danish is not longer a point of interest. The two languages (Bokmål and Danish) have drifted so far from each other that no political pressure is necessary. On the other hand, the people use their language for two purposes:
> 1. To mark their regional identity inside the country.
> 2. To mark their political positions at the axis of proletariat - bourgoisie (progessive - conservative).
> Those marking themselves under the banners of 1. feel that identity is more important than communication, and they don't care if people do not understand them, either because of their local vocabulary or pronunciation.


And what happens with the new terms: is there any positive or negative coordination of their appearance in Danish and Bokmål (at least, from the Norwegian side), or are they created independently (and thus casually coinciding and casually not)?


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## danielstan

I think Norway had a complex versus the Swedish language (after the separation from Sweden in 1905), not against Danish. Although I heard those 3 Scandinavic languages (Norwegian, Swedesh, Danish) are mutually intelligible.


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## ahvalj

danielstan said:


> I think Norway had a complex versus the Swedish language (after the separation from Sweden in 1905), not against Danish. Although I heard those 3 Scandinavic languages (Norwegian, Swedesh, Danish) are mutually intelligible.


Norway has two standard languages (plus a spectrum of intermediates), one of which, bokmål, comes from Danish used in Norwegian cities (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokmål).


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