For Part One, see The Day, no. 45.
I wish somebody had contrived to write a similar work in the Trypillian language, the vestiges of which no one has ever seen or managed to reconstruct. (Scholars sat that a language loses up to 90 percent of its vocabulary after 2,000 years and vanishes in 4,000 to 7,000 years unless there are written records). This “Ukrainian monument” would also have been included in the school curriculum, and our children would be proudly strutting around, having learned from materials, not from oral myths, that we are at the forefront of all civilizations and older than all the Indo-European peoples, even older than speakers of Sanskrit, who may not be related to us at all because they, unlike the Trypillians, are Indo-European (see Vol. 9 of The Encyclopedia of Ukrainian Studies).
A people and its language cannot be older than their ethno-linguistic basis (proto-Slavic in our case), just as children cannot be older than their parents. So scholars claim that Ukrainians, as a separate ethnos with its own language, can be neither older nor younger than most of the European peoples (the English, Spaniards, French, Czechs, Poles, Serbs, and Bulgarians) which were emerging in the early Middle Ages. This is proved by archeological finds and the very fact of the birth of the Slavic languages, including Ukrainian — the main feature of a people that gradually formed on the basis of the Antes and, to some extent perhaps, the Sklavenes no earlier than a thousand years ago (see works by I. Ohienko, academicians A. Krymsky, Y. Shevelov, et. al.), having incorporated, like most other related languages, a considerable part of proto-Slavic and some Indo-European elements.
Does this mean that a female journalist was asking a rhetorical question when she inquired whether there are Trypillian features in western Ukrainian pysanky (Easter eggs)? Not at all. The Trypillian culture, as one of the most ancient and richest in the world, developed from the 5th until the 3rd millennium on the territory stretching from what is now Romania to the Middle Dnipro region. It acquired its name in Ukraine, leaving here many material vestiges and spiritual energy in the shape of traditions that were considerably erased and diluted by the next ethnoses and which need to be cared for and developed.
But heritage, on the one hand, and its origins and genetic successors, on the other, are totally different things. For example, more than 90 percent of today’s Ukrainians have ancient Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and other names (Vasyl, Ivan, Viktor, Vitalii, Petro, Hryhorii, Mykola, Oleksandr, Roman, Serhii, Oksana, Maria, Hanna, Iryna, etc.) which became — after Christianity took root in Ukraine — native to our people, an integral part of its culture, but in no way autochthonous by origin.
Furthermore, it would not occur to anyone to call the Ukrainians Hebrews, Greeks, Romans, or their descendants, even taking into account the existence of direct contacts that the Antes and the Ruses maintained with certain Christian peoples. Nor would anybody classify us as Turkic peoples on the grounds that we have borrowed hundreds of words from them, such as the symbolic “Cossack,” “haidamaka,” and “Mamai,” or as Iranians because they brought us Scythian culture and a rich vocabulary, including such an important symbol of Ukrainian ethno-culture as khata.
Science is hard to deal with: it takes into account everything that really exists or is a provable hypothesis, which should rely not on a small chain of well constructed or logically connected events and phenomena — that way you can contradict yourself or prove the unbelievable — but on verifiable facts, profound professional knowledge, and a strict scholarly method that precludes any subjectivism or prejudice.
If one is guided by this, it is easy to understand that Ukrainians did not learn to cook tasty borshch from the Trypillians, as some people say, because this is simply not credible from the scientific angle. First of all, there is a 2,500-year-long chronological gap between us and the Trypillians: there were no Trypillians left from the early 2nd millennium B.C., and proto-Ukrainians emerged from the proto-Slavic community only in the middle of the 1st millennium A.D.
Second, in the Trypillian period the tribes that populated what is now Ukraine predominantly cultivated millet, wheat, rye, and the like, from which they cooked groats and perhaps some primitive soups. But they were unaware of potatoes, cabbage, beet roots, onions, and so on (the proof is in archeological finds and in the fact that the proto-Slavonic and ancient Ukrainian languages have no names for these vegetables). Without them it is impossible to imagine a true borshch.
Third, the proto-Slavonic (not Trypillian) botanical word “borshch” usually meant “parsnip,” and only much later, when there were no more Trypillians, the word came to mean a primitive broth made of the leaves of this nutritious grass. So I would not like to taste Trypillian borshch even if they did have it.
The humanitarian sphere and linguistics clearly distinguish the scholarly and naive, or folk, approach to the explanation of facts and phenomena under study. The two approaches peacefully coexist in any society, but they never substitute each other. Each of them is assigned its own role: the former is called upon to impartially reflect social phenomena, form a system of knowledge about the laws of human development, promote a predictable impact on it, and determine the scientifically-grounded prospects of a society, while the latter is a folklore of sorts that satisfies esthetic requirements and is interesting in that it reflects the national mentality and naive ideas of the common people about their “place in the sun.” Sound-minded people trust scholars, who draw an unbiased picture of the real state of affairs, while scholars do not scoff at legends and fairy tales that accumulate popular wisdom and morality in fictitious plots.
But when followers of the latter approach strive to assume the functions of the former and substitute concoctions and emotions for scientific evidence, while remaining ignoramuses, this poses a threat to the predictable development of society and turns this society into a laughing-stock in the eyes of the developed countries. Whatever others may say, this writer would not like to be perceived like this by Europeans, with whom he mingles from time to time and wants to be in the same league. To be European not only territorially but also mentally and culturally, one must remember that with respect to every socially important question, it is experts who should be making scientifically- based findings paid for by the state with taxpayers’ money. The state should trust them by assessing their actual scholarly qualifications.
I say “actual” because when a post-doctoral fellow in history, who does not know the elementary pattern of a word-formation analysis, talks on the radio in defense of his theory that the Ukrainians are descended from the Huns, and uses such “linguistic evidence” as a large number of words with the Indo-European root ‘hun’ in modern Ukrainian (‘dvyhun’ (engine) — an energetic warrior, ‘bihun’ (runner) — strong like two warriors together) while a doctor of geography insists at a scholarly conference, contrary to written records from the early 13th century, that the hydronym Vorskla is the brainchild of a furious Peter I, who called the river this way because it had “stolen” the lenses of his telescope (why not proclaim, then, that this persecutor of the Ukrainian language was in reality its champion, since he preferred the Ukrainian “sklo” to the Russian “steklo?”) you begin to feel really despondent. It becomes clear where journalists find information that represents a danger not only to science but to common sense. Science does not tolerate barrack-room lawyers and back-seat drivers, yet scientific mythology flourishes thanks to these people, and this must be recognized.
Disappointed by scholars’ conviction that myths about the origin of Ukrainians must be actively debunked and that our people are generally not an exception in the common European historical and ethno-cultural process (this should be cause for joy, but where is the sensation in that?) a female journalist reproached us, scholars, for our failure to duly publicize the results of our research. This is probably true of a few of us.
But what is more important is the desire to acquire purely scientific information on a certain question, which can be done by communicating with experts, reading their books, and visiting scholarly workshops held by high-profile institutions. That will erase the principle that is so attractive to amateur scholars and certain mass media personalities. At the beginning of the roundtable someone commented, “It’s not interesting when a dog bites a man, but it’s sensational when a man bites a dog.”
Prof. Vasyl LUCHYK, Ph.D. (Philology), heads the Department of General and Slavic Linguistics at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy
