Europe’s crossroads: what language will Ukraine use in 2101? How to translate into interacting languages?

1. Which language will dominate in Ukraine soon? Ukrainian? Russian? English? Each competitor is widely spread and potent, yet none functions alone. Together they produce an unprecedented environment. Their contrasting vocabularies, grammars, euphonies, styles, dialects, even alphabets and accents interact so weirdly, variably and vigorously we should rather ask: What sort of (each?) language will the new generations speak and write? By what features of the country’s voice will the Earth recognize a future Ukrainian?  

One needs to ask and to learn more before one can answer these queries. What is a separate tongue? What makes it distinct from its closest relatives, marking it as unique? What maintains a language as an effective system that functions in many social spheres? What ensures its disjuncture, entity, integrity, steadiness and fortitude? Can languages live a life of full value while overlapping and being mixed? Do they still linger in blends as peculiar and separate? Or is it a mixture by itself that is peculiar and quite stable? What roots does a pidgin appear from? What keeps hybrids flourishing? How do they develop as a rule? What happens to them eventually? How is a language standard formed and sustained? Why does it deviate and alter from stage to stage of its life? Do we truly share an advanced philosophy while regarding its development to be an everlasting change for the better? Should the growth of vocabulary indeed be praised as an achievement? Does it really help individuals to understand one another? Or is it just a token that “Pardon, what did you say?” is likely to be a more frequent question, and what was originally a common language will soon split into many newer tongues, even if these have a chance to be considered as overlapping, intimately interacting or “separate” subsystems of one piece under their parental name? Last but not least, what is the language situation in Ukraine at the moment? What sort of language is the country indeed using? What preferences can be expected already and trends traced?  

Naturally, any attempt to look beyond the horizon of one’s time springs from some need which of itself provokes certain expectations, approaches and attitudes. Any insight into the unknown equally depends on the choice of tools and ways. The human mind has always striven to absorb, reflect and retain more of the past. But its memory has only proved to be quite selective and patterned. Methodology has ever been a matter of controversy for historians. The word “ever”, of course, is an exaggeration here and could be debated by itself. The future can only be seen by its signs and with the help of the experience of a great multitude of lives. It goes without saying that linguistic futurology must seek to be even more well-grounded than any excursion into the days of yore. And to be prudent along with being daring. Paradoxical though it may seem, the breach of some restrictions on how to view the past can be helpful in casting a glance into the future. 

2. People very unwillingly accept the bitter truth that the biggest lesson of history is that we take no lessons from it. Chomsky goes as far as to suggest, not without sarcasm, that homo sapiens is likely to prove dead stupid in the long run. The breed may be a biological mistake, he argues, because it has used its 100,000 years to destroy its species and environment. Harm may rank first among the things mankind has learned to do best.2 Optimists still trust that man can reform. And they work for it. Hope dies last, its reign is a creative factor, more so with mightier wings of fancy.  

Just imagine what would have happened should Alexander the Great, King of Macedon, had been killed in his first battle against the Persians (334 B.C.) in which he was badly wounded and saved by accident. We can assume that there would have been no rise of the Roman Empire, no advent of Christianity, Renaissance and Romance languages. Neither Europe of today, nor New World would have sprung. No France, Spain, Great Britain or Brazil would have come into being to be spoken about. No Rome, London, Paris, Johannesburg, Sidney and New York.  

It is strongly and universally believed that history allows no Conditional Mood. One is neither favoured, nor suffered to say: “If it had not been for the Normans (or William the Conqueror personally) the Earth would probably speak a fairly inflected and less Latinized descendant of Anglo-Saxon now”. One sins, not only against history, even by keeping in secret those sorts of uncensored ideas: “If Gautama Siddhartha had not left his palace and family to live an ascetic life he would not have become Buddha and…”, “If Moses had not led the Jews from Egypt 33 centuries ago…”, “If Mohammed had not fled from Mecca to Medina in 622…”, “If Jesus Christ had returned the day Giordano Bruno (Jeanne d’Arc) was to be burnt…” or “If Jesus came today…”. Such conjectures are mirrored in public opinion as preposterous dreams, deplorable and irritant. 

No doubt, the prerogative of the Simple Past to express a succession of actions is essential to reveal causes, results and the rule of laws. Continuity and abruptness (“the country’s economy was flourishing then” and “hardly had the prince taken the throne”) come quite handy to depict evolution and revolution. Different shades of modality are normally allowed unless a historian enters the realm of “must have existed”, “may have happened”, “would have been”, “could have won”, “should have acted” and the like. Yet if we reached beyond the bias we could see much more. The mode of thinking, which is just manifested in a richer grammar, is proof of a higher level of human and social development. A small child knows no Oblique Moods, Conditional, Suppositional and Subjunctive, whatever the classification. It says ‘Gimme’ and ‘May I have’ before it grows up to say ‘Would you mind giving me’ and ‘If I could bother you to let me have’. The modality of the very young is fairly undifferentiated and indiscriminate, yet with a resource to develop. Their syntax is unpretentious. They do not synthesize secondary codes in figurative phrases like “he kicked the bucket” and take everything word for word. The age of civilization, in its green and adult years, can also be measured by the type of grammar it uses to learn about things. Should criticism and modelling of the past be more tolerated, less despair and fatalism would spread to swing our society, ecology and whatnot. Should it be normal to read in school textbooks: “If it had not been for Confucius (Aristotle, Caesar, St. Paul, Charlemagne, Genghiz Khan, Columbus, Cort?s, Luther, Galileo, Newton, Washington, Napoleon, Bolivar, Marx, Lenin, Hitler etc.)”, the generations to come would be more fanciful, sure, adventurous and responsible.

Bifurcation or crossroads studies known as “alternative history” provide a breakthrough in our understanding of time along with our grasp of relativity, cause and effect. Time is a riddle that many philosophers, physicists, mathematicians, engineers, poets, fiction writers, painters, film-directors and other cross-epoch intellect envoys have mused over. Among them we find such minds as Democritus, Epicurus, Campanella, Saint-Simon, Kant, Hegel, Newton, Einstein, Hawking, Dante, Shakespeare, Proust, Kafka, Wells, Tolkien, da Vinci, Dali, James Cameron and brothers Wachowski. By assessing what may happen the films “Terminator” and “Matrix” cry out a warning, even a call to conquer the predetermined evil. Present-day Ukrainian periodicals are full of outspoken reminiscent criticism. Popular here are such titles as “The Ukrainians have never lost a chance to lose a chance” and the image of “stepping again on the rake” that denotes inability to learn from mistakes. This new promising brand of brainwaves is well expressed in the book “The Ukrainian Ifology” by Dmytro Shurkhalo (Lviv, 2004). It focuses on the lost opportunities of the past by enquiry into the choice of a path at its fork, the choice being a must for the society to go ahead. This trend is also notable in a number of fanciful novels that model and connect days of long ago and the future… 

3. Neither is it generally believed that scientific foresight should be a responsibility of linguistics, and that the Future Tense could be suitable for this purpose and serve it in many ways, as could all forms and shades of modality, condition, supposition etc. Oddly enough, language planning is a more or less popular idea. At least immediate and long-term policies are usual for young states and countries that can afford spending much on cultivating a language. But that is another pair of shoes, occasionally with no brain-driven feet in them, either. 

Despite its genuine meaning, the term “diachronic (i. e. temporal) linguistics” is normally used in a restrictive meaning urging to look back, not forward, to scan the past, not its work at the present moment and further on, in the nearest and distant future. The moments to come can be logically spanned in the mind for by far more durable periods than those suggested by a pocket planner. Jones’ findings on Sanscrit, Champollion’s endeavour to decipher Egyptian scripts on the Rosetta Stone and Swadesh’s glottochronology are just three examples of valuable contributions that enable us to look further ahead. A true forecast implies a keen application of the knowledge of laws drawn from what has been happening since time immemorial. It looks into the facts to learn about trends of development and it thus differs from idle guesswork, utopia, palmistry or chiromancy. Neither it is an invocation to serve someone’s whims, nor a mere statement that the words “It’s Tuesday tomorrow” are going to be said on Mondays in April 2101 and that it would be definitely wrong to say then “We had August last month”. In order to reveal latent contradictions within a seeming harmony in the lingual space it is only reasonable to treat the inevitable with curiosity and to doubt the obvious. If we limited the modern study of language change to what used to be ages ago (used to, by the way, is also valued as modal), was just now, a very short while back, or has been so far, for whatever period cut from what will have been, we would present only a part the process and its purpose would be explicit quite modestly.  

There is still another confusing touch if we are going to talk about the potential of a future language, not just of the way it may look. Can one trace a tendency with a shaky tool that is itself under review to indulge in premonitions? To doubt everything is a tested principle, yet it brings to mind other maxims: “nosce te ipsum” (mull over your tongue and your doubt, in our case) and “everyone complains of his memory, none of his judgement”, along with the need to provide grounds. Again we go back: a keener historical study could reduce the wide-spread reluctance to admit that a future language will develop under the same laws any language has ever developed. But this obliging idea will only do for a starter. And to follow? Shall we live up to the ability of fauna that have a foreboding of cataclysms in the environment? Nobody could imagine the might of computer lexicography (prompt word processing) even a short while ago. The impact of the screen on our speech and brains (behaviour, decision-making) is hardly likely to lessen… 

Naturally, it is difficult not to yield to misleading hints of what is called common sense that attributes the language element (lingual sphere) to the outer world rather than to the human nature within its own power. Should we ignore, in particular, our scions’ curiosity (“vouloir savoir”), creative urge, desire of self-expression? These motive forces will definitely keep the lexical heritage revived, brushed up and renewed. It is true, we speak words out taking them for social instruments that are no property of ours. Too often what we say is beyond our own grasp and ability to curb. Too often the capacity of a word to deflect and abstract provokes a gap of misunderstanding. And kindles conflicts too. We translate the word “table” into other languages without even asking ourselves what sort of material the table is made of, what its shape and colour are, how many legs it has, round, square, carved in balls or styled otherwise, if any at all. Such words as “happiness” and “democracy” are most effective in self-address, they belong to personal jargons rather than to the global code. No natural code, whether it be used in mass or even private communication, can be controlled as a possession. “One word is too often profaned,” said Shelley. “A thought spoken is a lie,” pointed out Tiutchev. But we do follow the poet, don’t we?... 

To sum up all hopes in plain words, the tokens of the future can be as convincing as are those of the past. Every yesterday was once a tomorrow but tomorrow never happens to prove its advantages and dangers until it becomes today. Why sit and wait to get frustrated? We benefit from weather forecasts, don’t we? Why cannot we make good use of linguistic futurology?

4. Today there are three languages that interact most powerfully in Ukraine. Any of these contains word groups loaned from dozens of languages at different periods of the past. Therefore their modern lexicons are graphic parts of history that goes on. Thus we find many lexemes in Ukrainian borrowed from Finno-Ugric, Caucasian, Celtic and Altaic languages, Greek, Latin, Scythian, Gothic, Arabic, Lithuanian, Polish, German, Italian, French etc. The interaction of Ukrainian and Russian has been discussed for quite a long while and in all possible aspects. Now in Ukraine the mixture of these two languages, popularly named “surzhik” (i. e. contaminated grain), is spoken by millions of people. It penetrates into the press and academic life, it feels at home in businesses and makes its way into the Ukrainian establishment. The official censuses and statistics just ignore the obvious fact treated with prejudice in political doctrines.  

Of course, it presents a big problem for editors. Editing commonly turns into translation from surzhik into authentic Ukrainian, as in this example: „Мені прийшло в голову співставити міроприємства, в котрих ми приймали участь” – „Мені спало на думку зіставити заходи, в яких ми брали участь” (“It came to my mind to compare all planned actions we had taken part in”). The “original” here is in adapted Russian, spelt and pronounced in Ukrainian. In fact, it is a half-way or partial translation that is completed, i. e. corrected into a full one. 

The end of the Soviet era opened all doors to English in Ukraine. Here in few years English has spread triumphantly and become a favoured language with the prospect of losing much more of its strangeness fairly soon. It ranks first on the scale of language values in many situations. “No job without English” is a more likely approach in Kyiv than “No Ukrainian, no pay”. English has ousted Russian from ministerial sign-boards, hung next to Ukrainian ones. It is at home on road guides, billboards, official forms, visiting cards, cash cards etc. It may strike as odd that dozens, in fact, the overwhelming majority of signs in the trading centre at the

Independence Square

in the capital is either in English or in the Latin alphabet. 

 

Ukrainian English is only a reality. David Crystal attributes it to Canada3 whereas Yuriy Zhluktenko studied it as North American.4 Its Australian and British branches are also worth mentioning. But it is equally flourishing in Ukraine. Many local names, trade-marks, labels and adverts are English-based, like “Kyiv Post” (newspaper), “Kyivstar” (mobile phone Co), “Green Gray” (musical pop-group), “Ukrnet” (Internet provider), “Hetman” (whisky) etc. Russian keeps on putting its finger into the pie too. Bottled “Nemiroff” and e-mailed “kharkov” are names of the Ukrainian cities Nemiriv and Kharkiv. The “Soviet” spelling “Kiev” is much frowned upon. A Ukrainian will ordinarily correct the global term “chicken Kiev” in a restaurant menu and most definitely change “beetroot and cabbage soup” for “(Ukrainian) borsch”, a pride of the land (though originally the dish means “cut bits” in Persian). Ukrlish contains inherent terms and phrases like “fuel and energy complex”, “Kyivgolovarchitectura”, “Ministry of Agricultural Policy of Ukraine”. It inflects family names as gendered: Mr. Bily and Mrs. Bila (equal to Mr. and Mrs. White) are supposed to be husband and wife. And it twists the established word order putting Bila Oxana for Oxana Bily even in passports. Ukrainian words are getting increasingly transliterated and transcribed as English-like. One finds such explaining translations in an atlas of Kyiv: hora – mountain, doroha – road, mist – bridge, ozero – lake, ostriv – island, tserkva – church and so on.  

Anglicized Ukrainian goes far beyond the natural need to loan words for new things. Old things are too often renamed into English. Thus the donor substitutes the receptor in the very body of the latter. The influx of English words into Ukrainian is so powerful that we can translate from English into English within Ukrainian by attaching local pronunciation and Cyrillic, e. g. explain “briefing” with “press-conference”, “blockbuster” with “bestseller”, “hamburger” (“cheeseburger”) with “sandwich”, “invasion” with “aggression”, both last rooted in Latin and having intrinsic Ukrainian equivalents “навала”, “вторгнення” and “нашестя”. Ukrainian suffers a war of synonyms, old and new. “Department of administration” is already a Ukrainian term “департамент адміністрації”, though the phrase is twice as long as the purely local match “відділ управи” and less convenient to write on a board (incidentally, it costs tax-payers more). However, most English words are quite short and sound harsh in a Ukrainian melody. It is thought smart and posh to adapt into Cyrillic and say “master class” for “семінар-практикум” and “coffee break” for “перерва на каву”. Street signs like “Форевер Лівінг Продактс Юкрейн” and “Відео Інтернешнл Київ” (Cyrillicized “Forever Living Products Ukraine” and “Video International Kyiv”) with indiscriminately capitalized first letters are not infrequent. Fast-food restaurants “Ростик’c” carry an idea of ownership in “c” taken after McDonald’s. English plural is already Ukrainian (“Січ-моторз”) though the double plural regularly occurs (chips – чіпси, clips – кліпси, bucks – бакси etc.). And again, Russian is still helping Anglicization and blending, even alphabetic: “КиевCity”, “Sбей пепелs”. Back in 1955 the whole Russian “Dictionary of loan words” was published as “translated” into Ukrainian. Among other phonetically adapted words and phrases in Ukrainian are: intention, nonsense, brand, promotion, suicide, pampers, transformer, underground, marketing, casting, pressing, price list, talk show, dealer, trader, provider, distributor, speech writer, biker, fan, killer, applicant, helicopter, slogan, art review, digest (reader), stapler, player (Fr. “baladeur”), cotton, (to) respect, tolerate, implement, creative, business lunch, fast food, toast, shaping and fitness. All these and hundreds suchlike could be translated with the corresponding Ukrainian words, tantamount and adequate. “Нонсенс” and “імплементація”, for instance, have over 30 synonyms each. Yet, Ukrainian science, technology, government, industry, trade, culture, education, sport and other social spheres tend to yield to Cyrillic Ukrlish. In fact, Ukraine at large is giving up to a pidgin that consists of incompletely translated either language.

It is only natural that one can translate from Ukrlish into both standards. This is a good exercise to be done by a would-be translator. I offer my students to convert big texts from Ukrlish into English and Ukrainian. Here is just a sentence to show transformation either way: “На рецепції офісу депресивна тінейджерка перманентно полишає месиджі, адресовані ексклюзивно босу”. Word for word: “At the office reception a depressed teenager (girl) permanently leaves messages addressed exclusively to the boss”. In true Ukrainian: „Пригнічена юнка-підліток постійно залишає у приймальні записки особисто для начальника”. 

And this is a dialog in which almost all words of full meaning are English:  

„Гадаєш, піпл буде без бонусу й пресингу толерувати інвазію офшорних брендів у прайс-листах наших маркетів і на бігбордах?” – зі смайлом на фейсі проартикулював бой-френд іміджмейкер офіс-менеджерці за бізнес-ланчем з бренді й чикен-київ у снек-барі фітнес-центру, коли диск-жокей міняв рімейк синглу модерної хедлайнерки-суперстар на коктейль з хітів попси, мікс гардроку, арт-ґотіку, репу – харитативний ексклюзив для фанів брейк-дансу й рекреаційного секондхенду. „Що за слоган з постера? Не жени перманентно, без тайм-ауту піарний фаст-фуд, як на брифінгу перед самітом чи на пабліситі ток-шоу зі спікером! Ти ж не копірайтова топ-модель істеблішменту. Та й не репрезентант формації аутсайдерів, не тінейджер-скінхед чи памперсний байкер з пірсингом. Ти – креативний трейдер інновацій, промоутер маркетингу й сайдингу, хай-фай модератор, тебе респектують фундатори холдингів, спонсори перформенсів, монетарні боси, що мають кейси баксів на депозитах і гігабайти в ноутбуках лояльних білих комірців! Не пролонгуй нонсенсу фрустрацій депресивним кілером із мильного трилера. Наш месидж рецептору – це глобальний виклик. Фокусуватися в дискурсі конвенційної трансляції та мобільної перцепції на евентуальних лейбелах прагматичної екзистенції і нефункційних субститутах ноу-хау хепіендової футуристики – аналог суїциду на старті. Альтернатива – драйв у тренді. Концентруймося на тотальному консенсусі щодо формату тренінгу просунутої генерації лідерів. Щоб мати з гарантією реальний дилінг, треба зафондувати драстичний моніторинг і релевантний консалтинг дистриб’юторів, імплементувати трансформацію менталіте­ту через масмедіа і шоу-бізнес, поюзати для піар-акцій кліпи, музик-фести, інет-клаби, таблоїди, рейтингових спічрайтерів, блокбастерних секс-бомб, дайджести віртуальних блоків, пакети тестів для аплікантів на гранти”. „Вау, моя бізнес-леді, твій прес-реліз – супер для адмінсайту фірми! Але таймер у холі демонструє фінал вікенду й акселерує інтенцію фінішувати з чізбургером та біг-шейком. Подискутуймо адекватно на бізнес-панелі або в чаті он-лайну, окей?”. 

Pidgin Ukrlish differs from surzhik Ukrussian (or Movojaz, to blend the Ukrainian and Russian words for “language”) in many aspects. Ukrlish features globalization, whatever the attitude is to it (“mondialiser” is a French term: owing to its present-day contexts it has acquired a slightly more threatening connotation). Ukrlish is peculiar because the two donor languages belong to different groups of the Indo-European family and their contrasting lexicons, grammars and sound systems stand further apart. Translated literally, transcribed or copied otherwise, many words and set expressions, like “boyfriend”, “brain drain”, “pilot project”, “billiard club”, “internet cafe”, “mass media” are passed over by the speakers of the community as unmistakably English and universal. Adjectival attributes in preposition are growing to be stem nouns: “більярд-клуб” is already preferable to “більярдний клуб”. Inflected case, gender and even plurality interrogatively wander among abundant new lexical loans and struggle not to fade away.  

The effect of the rigid analytical Germanic wording on the more flexible inflected Slavic one is increasingly noticeable. English provokes basic shifts in the shape of Ukrainian morphology influencing the dispersion and frequency of its forms as well as their order, i. e. syntax, traditional subject-object, attributive and causative logics, phrasal stress and intonation. With any ethnic language carrying the genes of culture, it penetrates the nation’s soul and changes mentality at large. Words are becoming increasingly associated according to their position in the sentence rather than due to the harmony of their ending. Endings are growing weak, muffled, mispronounced and occasionally drop off altogether. A genuine Ukrainian phrase “показ мод для ділових жінок” turns into its substitute “фешн-шоу для бізнес-леді” transcribed from “a fashion show for business ladies”. “Busines-lady” in English is a marked countable at least and it assumes another “s” in the possessive case (lady’s, ladies’) while its Ukrainian counterpart is not declinable at all: stripped off all the multiple endings offered by the seven cases in both singular and plural it loses gendered case and number as such and remains flat bare:

 

It is only in the vocative case that “бізнес-леді” acquires an obligatory preposition to relate to other words in the sentence. This is the way Bulgarian and Macedonian once developed as well as Old English. In his film “The Story of English” Robert McNeil illustrated this process with a simple example: “se cyning meeteth thone biscop” equalled “thone biscop meeteth se cyning” (the king meets the bishop) whereas today such transposition changes the roles (subject and object). The function of the case (se cyning – thaes cyninges – thaem cyninge) was taken over by prepositions (the king – of the king – to the king). We observe the same trend in modern Ukrainian. As the word order becomes straight the opposite second meaning vanishes in ambivalent constructions, devoid of inflections: “А більше В” – “A is bigger than B”; “бодігард кивнула бізнес-леді” – “the bodyguard nodded to the business lady”; „в матчі з футболу Київ переміг Донецьк” – “Kyiv defeated Donetsk in a football match”, “Щодо цього Лондон випереджає Нью-Йорк” – “London is ahead of New-York in this”; “І Слово було Бог” – “And the Word was God”. Naturally, it is much easier to translate direct syntax parallels into World English and from it. Will the profession of translator live long?... 

5. “The boundaries of my language are the boundaries of my world,” said Wittgenstein. Assessing one’s own immediate verbal surrounding along with the language media of one’s country and the world-wide lingual space everyone is in a position to observe that  

1) the number of languages in the world is rapidly decreasing;

2) languages penetrate and enrich one another, they overlap and converge;

3) human language is becoming unified and globalized, yet it remains local;

4) languages interact and vary in a new, unprecedented way (due to the Internet, TV and other instant means of communication that know no borders);

5) a variety of language subsystems develop independently, among these are styles, social, professional and local dialects, territorial standard variants and so on. 

In view of the last point it is very doubtful that the first one can be absolutely true. Isn’t it rather strange that linguists readily focus on how many tongues will have survived by the middle or the end of the century while none can provide an accurate and convincing total of those used today? Crystal points out that estimates have varied from 3,000 to 10,000 (from 30,000 to 500,000 throughout history); most reference books range between 5,000 and 6,000; a quarter of all languages have fewer than 1,000 speakers, half have fewer than 10,000 (most of these are likely to die out in the next 50 years, he thinks) and nearly a thousand have over 100,000.5 The next argument may seem too simple for the debate on criteria. If an idiolect (i. e. a language of an individual person) is recognized to be a unique code system one cannot but admit that the number of languages has substantially grown up since any landmark of civilization, together with the increase of the world’s population, now over 6,5 billion. The nomenclature of businesses and trades, fields of science and technology, sports and pastimes, verbal arts and styles is constantly branching out into a still greater variety.  

It is no wonder that the vocabulary of any developed “ethnic” language has increased manifold to express a wider range of concepts, ideas and images. The frequent core of it stays more stable (less ageing) in shape but gets amazingly polysemous. An abundant language splits and reintegrates, its size becomes a barrier by itself. It was the lexical growth that made Ogden devise Basic English in 1930 and translate into it. Its simple grammar classed only 850 words into things (400), qualities (150) and operations (100) for an apparent purpose that was not going back to the caves, of course. The invention had followers in other languages and was ardently supported by Churchill and Roosevelt.6 Humanity is getting more and more polyglot but no nation is apt to acquire all languages of the world. No individual can boast knowing the whole of one’s mother tongue, either. Thus we resort to rewording to explain and reach beyond. Translation is often needed even if no language barrier separates the parties as they speak alike or are bilingual. Yet, such barriers occur within a language that falls into varieties: styles, registers, jargons, professional, local and social dialects etc. These “subcodes” normally tend to be interpreted in alternative terms rather than get contaminated. 

Semiotically speaking, any realm of human activity has its own language. A word is a sign, as St. Augustine put it, and every natural language is a system of signs. But it can also be a carrier for other systems of signs. Language is a miracle because it can vary and connote, be both seed and soil. Ancient rhetoric already discussed ways to develop and increase meaning and treated its vast new layers. St. Augustine singled out signum, signatum and signans long before de Saussure. Bartes following Hjelmslev showed in his mythologies how secondary semiotic systems (or metalanguages) grow from a set of signs that can be sponged on or even substituted, “stolen”. In “The Myth Today” he graphically specified and enriched the scheme drawn by de Saussure.7 The metaphor law can also explain how codes come into being and interrelate within the global language of mankind of which World English is just an increasing part.  

Today one can make good use of a big library of sources on territorial language standards. Here we find numerous studies like “Englishes” and “More Englishes” by Manfred G?rlach and a multitude of dictionaries such as unmistakably American Websters. It is worth reminding that Webster’s two volume work challenged Johnson’s with some 70,000 explained items as far back as in 1828; Webster’s Third, 1961, claims over 450,000 entries. Also on the reference shelf are a ten-volume “Scottish National (!) Dictionary” (ed. by W. Grant, Edinburgh, 1931–1976), “The Scots Thesaurus” (Aberdeen, 1990), two volumes of “Dictionnaire du Fran?ais de Belgique” by Christian Delcourt as well as popular editions: British-American glossaries, Indian-Australian travel aids, “Le Swiss Al?manique de poche “Schwyzerd?tsh”, “L’Anglais britanique de poche” and many suchlike. As these are in great demand to unveil messages, e. g. “While оvertaking a caravan and filtering in on a fly-over a tipper lorry hit the bonnet and a wing of a saloon car” (Br.) with “While passing a camper and merging on an overpass a dump truck hit the hood and a fender of a sedan” (Am.), or “Ilk bonny wee lass wi twa mirk een maun ken hoo tae spier the gree o saut (Scot.) with variably pronounced “Each beautiful little girl with two dark eyes must know how to ask the price of salt”, why should that sort of translation be considered as intralingual?  

How far must the nearest semiotic kin branch out and stand apart to constitute a code of full value? In particular, what lexical distance is enough to make a separate language? There can be mutually intelligible and unintelligible languages within one group. The following indicates to what extent some European languages differ in their word stock (lexis), according to the data collected by Kostiantyn Tyshchenko for the Language Museum of Kyiv Taras Shevchenko National University and his book “Metatheory of Linguistics”8:  

It is only every fifth or sixth word that severs Swedish, Danish and Norwegian nynorsk, every seventh one that distinguishes Slovenian and Croatian, Czech and Slovak, Ukrainian and Belarusian. Every tenth word marks Galician from Portuguese, and Macedonian from Bulgarian. Every twentieth lexeme or so makes Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian unlike, mostly due to stimulated divergence, or “narcissism of petty differences”, to express it in Freud’s term. On the contrary, the Chinese treat eight peculiar Chinese languages as dialects on the ground that any speaker of these can understand hieroglyphs shared by all. Of course, everyone pronounces them in one’s own way when reading. But the use of common signs helps to bridge “dialects” with a rigid system of equivalence and fill in some blanks. And this is also the case with the Arabs living in many countries on vast territories of Africa and Asia who speak “the same” language but frequently have to ask a go-between to explain it. If it were not for the staunch devotion to the canonized text of the Koran the situation would probably bear more resemblance to that with the Turkic languages, reputed as separate and having their own names. On the contrary, the Bible itself favours its translations, the Pentecost (the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the Apostles) might as well be celebrated as Translators’ Day.  

It is only obvious that a language is alien if one cannot make head or tail of it. Undoubtedly, the need to translate from a language into another is proof positive that they are different. In a regular case the overlapping part of their lexicons and grammars is not big enough to elucidate the discrepancies by producing adequate contexts. Nevertheless, even a native tongue of a very small community is fairly often dark for its users and requires clearing up. Nobody lives long enough to master completely any language that is open to all. No one can ever learn to comprehend and handle its every shade, variety or discourse, every slang, dialect and technical term. With over 500,000 lexemes registered in the “Oxford English Dictionary” (1992) and millions more suggested, Shakespeare is claimed to have used as many as 29,000 (fewer than 20,000, according to other calculations), though some students argue that these may have rather belonged to the lexicon of his theatre. Low thresholds are even more impressive. De Maupassant’s stories owe their vigour, subtle nuances and clarity to some 3,500 lexemes. The type of language makes no difference. In case of elaborately inflected one “The Large Explaining Dictionary of Modern Ukrainian” (Kyiv, 2005) covers 250,000 words and word combinations but only a little over 10,000 are listed in “The Dictionary of Shevchenko’s Language” (in two volumes, Kyiv, 1964). 

On the other hand, as previously mentioned, there is a want to translate from a language even if we can easily figure out things in it. For instance, some folk songs sung in Belarus can be translated by a Ukrainian vocally at once, while singing. Likewise a Belarusian can join a Ukrainian choir or read aloud a Ukrainian book converting it offhand into a Belarusian version. None of the Japanese or even non-Slavic Indo-Europeans stand a chance of being able to do so. Indeed, Japanese, French and Belarusian are not equally foreign in Ukraine. But it is discourse that structures lingual elements into a distinct unity. A language is separate from its closest relative owing to a systematic correspondence that can be found between them to interpret each other. 

6. A command of three languages sometimes means knowing a third of what an adult is supposed to have mastered in every of these. It is their overlapping part alone that often saves the bridge between individuals from narrowing, shrinking and breaking. Having learnt by heart ten instructions in ten languages on shop packages one can boast being a polyglot. But a sound grasp of the many clear-cut varieties of one’s “only” tongue gives far greater ground to qualify for a multilingual speaker. A person with a vaster lexical coverage is normally more sensitive to subtle vibrations of genial minds that are always peculiar in self-expression. Equally often pidgin steals away the chance to fly high by thought and to see the flight.  

It is imperative to remove the blinkers of bias from the official statistics on the two tongues Ukraine allegedly knows. Obviously, more language varieties prove vital and allow translations among themselves. At least ten fairly stable rivals abound in samples serving as hints for the future:

1) Standard Ukrainian, the language which is rooted in home culture, innate and inherent to the land and the nation, yet being neglected by the newly-born state;

2) Standard Russian which hardly has the power to last unchanged in the colonized area and not to lose its historical foreignness altogether, especially as its motherland has also taken a separate way;

3) Ukrainianized Russian, a colonial branch or territorial variant with 10 to 15 % of local distinction, mainly Ukrainian lexical ingredient, which is more than enough to make a separate language;

4) Russianized Ukrainian, slightly Anglicized too, with a joint influx of new words ranging within 10 to 15 %;

5) Ukrainianized English, widely used in Ukraine today, especially in self-translations;

6) Anglicized Ukrainian which is tenacious due to abundant partial (word-for-word, imitative) translations and lexical borrowings from English;

7) Anglicized Russian, a new brand of similar origin, imported and home-made;

8) Russian English with its typical word usage, syntax and accent (formerly in the USSR nicknamed as “Intourist English”);

9) Anglicized Ukrussian, or pidginized “surzhik”, an outlaw dragon growing its third head, an inter-Slavic hybrid yielding already to some aspects of English grammar and phonetics;

10) Ukruslish, a further and stronger blend which may be as far from any present-day standard as a quarter of vocabulary and is likely to get creolized (become literary) pretty soon.

It goes without explaining why classical Ukrainian must be cared for as the intrinsic voice of the land and the mankind’s true value.  

7. A particular language is usually referred to as a system of systems, a quality that can rather be ascribed to the global semiosphere, or language as human faculty. Within a language, such as English or French, a regular student traditionally finds a variety of subsystems without taking the reverse view that every such language can be just one of the receptacles of a distinctive “subsystem”, a code which is not at all its monopoly. If the style of the Bible has been preserved in all its translations into 2017 languages why should we consider style to be a subsystem of each language, not the other way round? Why not regard ethnic word stocks as containers, carriers and subsystems of any terminology profiled in science, any professional thesaurus or even any palette of a brand in poetry? The grounds for this alternative standpoint are quite solid: owing to translator creative mastery such codes can travel from language to language almost untouched.

What gives meaning to naming them “subcodes”, that is to treating them as dependents of lower rank, is the fact that they can substitute one another within a certain language regarded a whole. Thus we can translate a register of speech into many contrasting ones, as in the case: 

1. No foe is able to rebuff the blow of this knight’s potent hand.

2. The individual in question is capable of destroying any adversary since his limbs are of great physical power.

3. This gentleman with iron fists is apt to win any fight.

4. This man can beat any other fighter, for he has very strong fists.

5. This ’ere feller will give any other fighting chap a thrashing: got mighty strong fists ’e ’as.

6. This guy can damn well give you a lick: he’s nifty with his mitts.  

Every step to a lower or upper register here is, in fact, a translation. But we can convert the whole scale into French, German, Italian or any other language. And by so doing drop “sub” from the concept “subcode”. Moreover, we can precisely and faithfully interpret the same gradation many times into a language to show that each of its registers has an easily recognizable systemic resource (two Ukrainian versions of the above range appeared in my article “Proteus or Janus?”9 as I make a vast use of such drills to train would-be translators).  

Still more, parallels to each lexical level can be found in non-verbal languages (those of dumb show, painting, sculpture etc.) to climb up and down the same “ladder”. Even Eliza Doolittle’s Cockney dialect in G. B. Shaw’s “Pygmalion” was translated into clumsy gestures for the ballet “Galatea”. Here, of course, Professor Henry Higgins (’Enery ’Iggins in Eliza’s pronunciation) could not help turning from a phonetician into a dance teacher. That means stripping all codes of their “subs” altogether or at least a new glance at etymology. Yet, it only makes sense if we look for an alternative type of border to single out languages within the global one. The world-wide semiosphere all resides on the network of oppositions, peculiar and limited in any mind, craft, faith, national community or any other sort of discourse. As codes spring, develop, disseminate and interact, their limits stretch into the heartlands of parent as well as neighbouring kingdoms.

In defiance of the regular dictionary definition the purpose of translation is not to change the language of a thing but to preserve its language in a new, clear form. In other words, it is the original code, accurately relayed by the translator, that provides an adequate reception of the author. Should the basic code be changed or substantially distorted, no values of the source could be passed over. 

8. A variety of semiotic systems brings to life different kinds of translation (within a language, cross-lingual and nonverbal) urging us to revise, branch out and specify the Jakobsonian triad labelled by him as intralingual, interlingual and intersemiotic, the last term referring only to “an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign system”.10 But why not vice versa? Many a poem was inspired by a piece of music, painting, sculpture or suchlike. If semiotics is to be universal any translation qualifies as “intersemiotic”, with source and target codes being verbal or nonverbal. In other words, the term fits all kinds of rewording, translation proper and transmutation. It covers all types of editing, pr?cis-writing, conversion from a big code into a small one (e. g. literary adaptations for young readers or foreign language learners) and it suits such image transformations as ballet sketches (“choreographic miniatures” at St. Petersburg) after Rodin’s sculptures or some thirty pictures of Rouen Cathedral by Monet, a translator from the language of architecture into that of painting as well as from the Gothic style into that of his Impressionism. “Translation is the only thing a human mind can do,” held von Schlegel. “In Other Words”, by the way, is the name of a Routledge coursebook by Mona Baker on translation (2002). St. Augustine would have interpreted it as “In Other Signs”… 

Genetically, all languages are mixed. Any standard vocabulary has been almost all borrowed, just as any idiolect. In fact, it represents former stages of pidgin that was gradually accepted into the language, sometimes with a marker of style (e. g. Latin, Greek and most of abundant French words in English are fairly bookish). Analysing Slavic etymological dictionaries Trubachev singled out only 177 (3.9%) purely Czech words out of 4,493 in the Czech record made by Holub and Kope?n?, only 91 (1.8%) purely Polish words among 4,982 in the Polish stock explained by Br?ckner, and only 92 (0.9%) solely and entirely Russian lexemes out of 10,779 in the Russian version clarified by Vasmer, along with 1,775 (39.5%), 2,283 (45.8%) and 6,304 (58.5%) late borrowings accordingly into each of these languages11. The latest four biggest Ukrainian dictionaries of loans published in 2000 and 2006 list from 10,000 to 35,000 words and phrases which foreignness in Ukrainian is felt by its users.  

The border between languages is sometimes blurred, conventional, subject to doubt and change, especially as old texts are translated into ever modern standard(s) and translations are currently made from pidgins and creoles as well as into them. “Beowulf” and Chaucer’s “The Canterbury Tales” are freshened up and given new life in BBC and CNN English(es), just as are Latin texts in Romance translations, “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” and Old Ukrainian chronicles in present-day versions. Here the parent-offspring distances do compare. Shakespeare can be read in English-based pidgins Krio and Tok Pisin by 3 and 2 million of users accordingly.12 “Newsweek” reports13 that Cervantes’s “Don Quixote” has just been translated into Spanglish, the English-Spanish hybrid spoken in the USA and Mexico (by 40 million people, some estimates claim). In these cases a hybrid was chosen on purpose as a stable lingo. Unintentional contamination is more frequent in translation, especially as few sprinkled loans are not thought to be a mixture even if they kick due native words out of the text and hence from parlance. 

Every new generation speaks a different language. This statement may seem controversial without the attribute “slightly”, much more so because no birthday of a natural language can be marked. Milestones in its development occur, of course, some words are indeed dated. But language came with man. Or rather man came with language. Which of the grains of sand makes a heap? And yet, if a changing language gets translated from itself into itself, it is definitely not itself.  

Ukruslish’s predecessors used to cause quick ageing of the land’s tongue and an accelerated change of its standard. Dante (1265–1321) does not need translating into Italian, neither Shakespeare into English, nor Cervantes (1547–1616) into Spanish. The Ukrainians have translated and published, already twice, two-volumes of Skovoroda who lived much more recently (1722–1794). Many Ukrainian classics of the 19th century are sent to print with explanatory glossaries. Likewise have been “clarified” the works of the Ukrainian historian Hrushevsky (1866–1934). 

As has been shown above, language purism aims at total translation while pidgin is a case of incomplete translation that can be completed or left to live with a chance to gain more sense and recognition. On the one hand, the substitution of fairly fresh “ruinous barbarisms”, “militant lexical aliens”, “illegally imported words” with their much older native synonyms, established and rooted, can be regarded as a transformation within a language. But on the other hand, the same sort of transformation features as cross-lingual. That is why barbarization and purism are dramatic opposites among translator credos. Whatever side we choose to take, it would do no harm “to see the world in a grain of sand”, as Blake once put it, and to keep in mind that every lexical choice moves Europe and the Earth ahead from one tiny crossroads to another, next to myriads.  

Віталій Радчук,

кандидат філологічних наук, доцент кафедри теорії і практики перекладу з англійської мови Інституту філології Київського національного університету імені Тараса Шевченка  

Донецький вісник НТШ, т. 22., 2008 р.

2 Chomsky, N. Lecture delivered at the Musical Academy in Madras on 10 Nov. 2001. Ukrainian translation: Чомскі Н. Куди прямує світ? In: Критика, 2002, № 1–2, p. 4.

3 Crystal, D. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. Cambridge, 2001, p. 111.

4 Жлуктенко Ю. О. Українсько-англійські міжмовні відносини. Українська мова у США і Канаді. Київ, 1964.

5 Crystal, D. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. 2nd ed. Cambridge, 2000, pр. 286–287, 443–451.

6 Basic English is listed with a sample translation on p. 358 of the same encyclopedia.

7 Barthes, R. Le Mythe, aujourd’hui. In his book: Mythologies. Paris, 1957.

8 Тищенко К. Метатеорія мовознавства. Київ, 2000, pp. 266–277. After: А. Шайкевич, M. Echenique, and others.

9 Радчук В. Протей чи Янус? (Про різновиди перекладу). In: Всесвіт, 2004, № 7–8.

10 Jakobson, R. On Linguistic Aspects of Translation. In: The Translation Studies Reader. 2nd ed. Ed. by L. Venuti. New York, London, 2004, p. 139.

11 Трубачев О. Н. Принципы построения этимологических словарей славянских языков. In: Вопросы языкознания, 1957, № 5, p. 67.

12 For textual examples see the aforesaid Crystal’s “Encyclopedia of Language”, р. 337.

13 Power, C. Not the Queen’s English. In: Newsweek, 2005, 7 March, p. 59.