ORTHOGRAPHIC FLUCTUATIONS IN THE 1916 AND 1917 EDITIONS OF“WHY DO WE WANT AN INDEPENDENT UKRAINE?” BY STEPAN RUDNYTSKYI

Abstract

The article presents a comparative analysis of orthographic fluctuations in four publicist works by Stepan Rudnytskyi: two editions of “Why do we want an independent Ukraine?” (1916 and September 1917) and two editions of “What kind of independent Ukraine do we need?” (May and July 1917). These texts constitute a revealing case of works close in time and provenance, making it possible to trace not only individual orthographic differences but also the consistency of authorial or editorial decisions. The main features of the 1916 original are divided into four groups: the first comprises direct correspondences to the norm, the second covers dialectal phenomena, the third includes deviations, and the fourth focuses on those features that confirm a shift in the West Ukrainian character of the text’s language toward a common Ukrainian standard. In seeking to carry out a structural analysis of the earliest edition and determine its conformity with “Gramatyka of Ruska Mova” by Stepan Smal-Stotskyi and Theodor Gartner (1914), we established that the language of the work belongs to the western variant of standard Ukrainian. The fluctuations identified here manifest themselves primarily at the orthographic level (for example, doubled consonants in nouns such as “робленє” and “робленнє” (“doing”), “корінє” and “коріннє” (“roots”); inconsistent use of the apostrophe; and the writing of the grammatical particles “що”, “небудь”, and “ж” both together and separately). Variability has also been confirmed at the lexical and phonetic levels. The second edition of September 1917, while preserving the style of the previous one, reveals deliberate, though not always consistent, revisions that show a tendency to lengthen “-н-” to “-нн-” in neuter nouns of the second declension and to narrow the use of the phoneme [g] in loanwords. The analysis of the two editions of the brochure “What kind of independent Ukraine do we need?” confirmed their continuity with the style of “Why do we want an independent Ukraine?” and at the same time brought to light new changes not previously attested, the most striking of which is the spelling of the name “Європа” instead of “Европа” (“Europe”). In sum, it is concluded that the fluctuations identified reflect a heterogeneous picture of the coexistence of norm and usage in publicist writing and demonstrate broader patterns in the convergence of regional variants of the standard Ukrainian in the early twentieth century. Cases of non-conformity further support the thesis that the approved orthography was not adhered to strictly in Ukrainian circles in Austria-Hungary at the beginning of the twentieth century.