The Grammatica Sclavonica
Two manuscripts are known of Ivan Uzhevych’s Grammatica sclavonica, written in Latin: The Paris manuscript from 1643 and the Arras manuscript from 1645, called so because of the place it is kept now; no place of
Very little is known about his biography: From 1637 he studied at Cracow University, then in 1643 he was a student of theology at the Sorbonne, writing is indicated on the cover page. Both have been published in a scholarly edition in 1970. Uzhevych’s work, which seems to be influenced by the Polish grammar Polonicae grammatices institutio (1568) by Piotr Stojeński (Petrus Statorius) and by Meletius Smotrytsky’s Church Slavonic grammar Gramatiki slavenskija pravilnoje syntagma (1619), is the only grammar known of the Ruthenian language of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the predecessor of modern Ukrainian and Belarusian, which the author calls lingua popularis, “vulgar tongue”. It is the first grammar of an East Slavic language (and not of Church Slavonic, which Uzhevych calls lingua sacra, “sacred tongue”).
Both Belarusian and Ukrainian linguistics have been trying to show that Uzhevych’s grammar belongs to the history of their respective language and not the other one. Thus, Ivan Bilodid (1972), Mykhaylo Zhovtobryukh (1976), and Vasyl Nimchuk (1985) have stressed Ukrainian features of his language, whereas Aleksandr Sobolevskiy (1906), Vatroslav Jagić (1907), James Dingley (1972) and Yuriy Shevelov (1979) have pointed out its Belarusian aspects. Olexa Horbatsch (1967) assumes that Uzhevych came from the modern Ukrainian-Belarusian borderlands, which at that time, of course, were not a borderland at all. Uzhevych’s grammar includes a lot of parallel forms that have later been incorporated into either the modern Belarusian or the modern Ukrainian language. For example, for ‘what’ both що (ščo), as in modern Ukrainian, and што (što), as in modern Belarusian, appear. This shows that Uzhevych’s intention was to describe not his own dialect but a common, partially standardized, Ruthenian language (cf. History of the East Slavic languages).
Uzhevych’s grammar exhibits a distinctly comparative approach. It is probably not a coincidence that its title is Grammatica sclavonica, not ruthenica. Much of what is written about Ruthenian seems to be meant for Church Slavonic, too, and where the two languages differ, Uzhevych often includes specific information on Church Slavonic. Apart from that, he comments on differences in Polish, Czech, Moravian, and Croatian, citing, for example, the Lord's Prayer in Church Slavonic, Ruthenian, and Croatian (in the Glagolitic alphabet).
As usual at that time, the grammar shows the difficulties of superimposing the Latin grammatical system on a very different language. Thus, on the one hand there are long lists of constructed verb forms that are of no practical relevance for Ruthenian, e.g. the optative pluperfect бодай бымъ былъ ковáлъ (bodaj bym” byl” koval”) ‘oh would I have had cooked!’ (Arras, 452), but on the other hand the locative case is not reflected, and Uzhevych tries to explain the respective endings, which sometimes resemble the dative, sometimes the instrumental (ablative) endings, as casus vagabundi, “wandering cases” (Arras, 332-341).
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