Paul Goble
Staunton, August 23 – Maksim Strikh, the head of the Ukrainian
National Commission o Morphology, yesterday announced the introduction of new
rules that will restore Ukrainian spellings to what they were in 1919 before
the Soviet regime “Russianized” Ukrainian. He said the new rules would make the
Ukrainian language richer and better reflect Ukrainian traditions (ukrinform.ru/rubric-society/2520118-v-ukrainskoe-pravopisanie-hotat-vernut-nekotorye-normy-1919-goda.html).
But Moscow commentators are furious, seeing this as yet
another Ukrainian effort to distance Ukrainians from Russians and, what is even
worse from their point of view, restoring a system that was promoted by
anti-Bolshevik Ukrainians like Simon Petlyura during the Russian Civil War (vz.ru/world/2018/8/22/938323.html).
The most notable changes involve changing the rules for
transliteration when Ukrainian borrows from another language. In Soviet times,
Moscow insisted that Kyiv follow rules paralleling those governing Russian;
now, Kyiv is dropping those requirements and going back to pre-1917 patterns.
The morphology commission has laid out the details of its
plan which is to be introduced via the schools and the media (mon.gov.ua/ua/news/mon-proponuye-dlya-gromadskogo-obgovorennya-proekt-novoyi-redakciyi-ukrayinskogo-pravopisu
and strana.ua/news/157210-kakie-imenno-normy-i-pochemu-khotjat-vernut-v-ukrainskoe-pravopisanie-ministerstvo-obrazovanija.html).
Introducing these
changes will be difficult because many will continue to use the spellings they
are used to. But for Ukrainian as a national language, this program is every
bit as important as the decision of some former Soviet republics to drop the
Cyrillic alphabet in favor of the Latin.
As such, it should be supported by all who wish Ukraine well.
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