Hrodna town books
language problems
in Early Modern Times
Jury Hardziejeŭ
The
article is devoted to investigation of Polish language documents in Hrodna
magistrate and language relations in Early Modern Hrodna. The magistrate books,
materials of magnate archives, publications of townspeople, inventories of
Hrodna catholic convents and the press of that time were examined.
Beginning with the XVI century the Polish
language spread quickly in daily and public life of Grand Duchy of Lithuania
towns. Town public authorities mostly spoke Polish in everyday intercourse.
This group included governors of town magistrates, well–off merchants or
real–estate property owners. They merely used cultural wealth of nobility owing
to the absence of cultivated canons and patterns of townspeople culture.
District nobility, who often came to town to take part in diet and readily
bought country–estates there, used more Polish. Unprivileged town–dwellers and
petty nobles mostly spoke their mother tongue.
The development of the Polish language as means
of official communication in the GDL resulted in the appearance and formation
of northeastern Polish dialect. Within XVI—XVII centuries Polish gradually
fills the place that used to belong to the formal Ruthenian language in public
usage and in the XVIII century Polish utterly replaces it.
Rich archive heritage created across the
generations by scribers of Hrodna chancellery, perfectly evidences the stages
of development of Polonisms in Early Modern Times. The analysis of collected
material once again proves that apart from general tendencies inherent to the
development of the Polish literary language, the Polonisms used in Grand Duchy
of Lithuania town chancelleries, were characterized by certain conservatism.
This became apparent in slow pace of changes by which the General Polish
language was affected and in functioning of archaisms that might to a certain
degree be related to the influence of the Ruthenian language environment. The
contacts of Polish and Ruthenian language systems resulted in the appearance of
innovation forms and their symbiosis, and, in many cases, such a phenomenon as
hypercorrectness.
The Hrodna sources show the landmarks of the
Polish language development spoken in the GDL, its contact with colloquial
Ruthenian. As a result, the phenomena characteristic of Ruthenian occur in
Polish language documents. They include the appearance of a instead of o in
unstressed syllables (paręcze), appearance of the sound â before the
stressed o (Lewon) or ŭ (short u) after a vowel (Hauryło). Apart from
substance phonetization of the Polish language, the native speakers often used
Ruthenian lexicon to denote buildings, objects of public usage, housekeeping,
consumer commodities, handicraft wares and social relations: odryna,
płoszcza, powieć, czerha, stol, swiren. Ruthenian names written in
Latin could also be found: Hrehory, Ławryn, Panas, Hauryło, Symon,
Zmitruk (1790), Hardziejewski, Hanczaruk, Hapanowicz. The analysis of documents
evidences of inflexion declinations of nouns (grammatical gender declination,
Ruthenian gradation of γ/ź or appearance of nouns of
masculine gender with –a ending in nominative case), which might be related
to Ruthenian language standard.