Bilingual dictionaries have been predominant in Ukrainian lexicography at least since Borys Hrinchenko’s four volumes appeared in 1913, perhaps from the outset. Unlike other nations, explanatory dictionaries appeared in Ukraine comparatively recently. Indeed, while the French and the British had their monolingual encyclopedic dictionaries in the mid-seventeenth century, the Poles in the early nineteenth, our much-advertised eleven volume academic Dictionary of the Ukrainian Language was published in the 1970s. It was inherently inaccessible to the average reader. The first attempt to publish a concise student’s explanatory dictionary was made by a team of Lviv lexicographers in the 1970s. The result was a book containing 4,000 entries. Actually, it was a motley excerpt from the academic edition. Followed a long pause, until two years ago a medium size four-volume The New Explanatory Dictionary of the Ukrainian Language appeared. Our interview with Anatoly IVCHENKO, one of its authors, linguist, and lexicographer, began with broaching the 4-volume edition. Mr. Ivchenko is currently Professor in the Department of Ukrainian Philology, Maria Sklodowska- Curie University of Lublin, Poland, member of the New York Academy of Sciences, chairman of Kharkiv’s historical-philological society, and author of over eighty scholarly works.
Anatoly Ivchenko: The appearance of a four-volume explanatory dictionary would seem an extremely pleasing fact, yet the edition’s very concept is very archaic. The authors took the academic edition and tried to extract 40,000 entries (a number generally known to exhaust the basic vocabulary of any language). But they used the Soviet period’s register, and the terminology formed over the past thirty years is absent. We all know that this period has been the most fruitful in terms of civilization and linguistics. In this edition you won’t find words like computer, yogurt, body-building, muesli, marketing, jeans, or the trident [the Ukrainian national emblem severely persecuted by the Soviets — Ed.].
This is one problem. Another is that the authors left out a considerable number of entries having much in common with Russian or those with common Slavic roots (and this considering that Ukrainian, like any other [European] language, consists in over 30% loan words). Simultaneously, they retained countless colloquialisms. Personally, I describe this dictionary as a tarakutska (archaic Ukrainian term meaning a rattle made from a gourd). I mean if there is tarakutska but no computer in a dictionary, this dictionary’s range is miserable. This version also contains incomplete entries. This dictionary claiming to be “new” is actually a purist squeeze from the academic edition. It is of little if any practical use because it presents a distorted picture of the Ukrainian language; this language has never existed the way it is portrayed in the dictionary.
The Day: Are you telling us that your dictionary relies on different principles ?
A. I.: It certainly does. In the first place, it has only 7,000 entries. Some will say the scope is too small. But the entries we have are those most often used and this is the basic principle of compiling any modern standard dictionary anywhere in the modern world. We were faced with a very difficult problem. There is only one frequency-word-list dictionary in Ukraine, including a limited number of excerpts from fiction. It does not fully represent the frequency of Ukrainian word usage, so I was happy to borrow from Polish and British lexicographers’ experience. Theirs was an excellent example of what notions should be included in a modern European explanatory dictionary.
Most people living in Ukraine are bilingual, so I included a lot of words in the dictionary that are not hard to understand and use for a Russian-speaking Ukrainian. Also, I took a principled stand, leaving out area-restricted colloquialisms and exotic coinages contributed by dictionaries dating from the 1920s and which have never been accepted by our native speakers. At the same time, the Explanatory Dictionary of the Ukrainian Language includes words that have appeared over the past decade, along with such basic acronyms like NDSC, EU, EBRD that are constantly found in newspaper and magazine articles. Most foreign borrowings are accompanied by etymological references, something traditionally absent in all previous such editions. And there are synonyms.
The Day: Does this mean that your dictionary can be used by people looking up synonyms and foreign words?
A. I.: Precisely. And it is a reliable spelling reference source. From the outset I wanted this dictionary to be a general purpose one, a reference source, textbook, and an effective tool in mastering the language. I left out quotations from the press and our literary classics. I gave my own examples; people tend to remember information they feel really concerned about or something that takes them by surprise. Here is an example. Cacao, a small tropical American evergreen tree. This entry has an example: “Two blacks were sowing a cacao trunk to have firewood.” Also, the expression “God knows where from”: “God knows where the first Ukrainian millionaires came from.” Or kapeliushok, meaning a woman’s hat: “The hat worn by the president’s wife looks more impressive than her husband.”
The Day: Did your own attitude toward the printed word undergo any changes when working on the dictionary?
A. I.: I don’t think so. I have long been aware of the profound meaning secreted in so-called everyday words. Each such word is a solid and sophisticated structure. It cannot be described using just phonetics, morphology, or logic. In this sense a spoken word is sort of like an atom; the deeper the scientists dig inside it, the more obvious is the fact that this source is truly inexhaustible.
In lexicography, as in so many other disciplines, experience is accumulated step by step. This dictionary is not the first such project in my work. Previously, I took up phraseology and made several phraseological dictionaries. My Phraseological Dictionary of the Lemko Dialect of Eastern Slovakia (the first of its kind in Ukrainian phraseology) came off the presses in Pre я sov, Slovakia. Together with Kharkiv University Professor Oleksandr Yurchenko, we composed The Dictionary of Standing Ukrainian Language Comparisons (1993). The Phraseological and Explanatory Dictionary of the Upper Lusatian Language [Wendish or Sorbian] will be printed in Germany a year from now.
The Day: Is it difficult to compile a Ukrainian language dictionary, being in a different linguistic environment?
A. I.: If I lived and worked in Ukraine now, this project would be much harder. Perhaps completely impossible. A professor working in Poland has four times less the load as in Ukraine, while earning seven times more. In this sense, my foreign residence is very helpful. Today’s Poland is taking a keen interest in Ukraine. Ukrainian is taught at nine Polish universities. Most of my students are Poles, but there are also ethnic Ukrainians.
I am very disturbed by the fact that out of seventy or eighty dictionaries annually published in Ukraine explanatory dictionaries are a minority; Ukrainian society does not seem to care much for such dictionaries. We are not always aware of how difficult it is to accurately define a given word that we all seem to know so well. Ask any school student what a music video actually means. In most cases you will receive an ambiguous, uncertain answer. In my dictionary the notion is clearly defined: a short musical film with a song and a variety of audio/video effects. This reminds me of Ludwig Wittgenstein, the most influential philosopher of our times, stressed that we can only perceive that which we can name. For this reason all human endeavor sooner or latter confronts the need to be clearly defined. Here the linkage between theory and practice is the most direct. In Europe and the United States, explanatory and encyclopedic dictionaries are the most trusted reference sources. On the Polish book market there are five medium-size explanatory dictionaries. Are the Poles’ leap in culture, politics, and the economy any wonder?
