The Problem of Ukrainian-Polish Linguistic Relations from the Tenth to the Fourteenth Century

YURY SERECH-SHEVELOVThe extent and obviousness of Polish-Ukrainian cultural and linguistic relations in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, on the one hand, and the absence of sources for the earlier period, on the other, have caused the older bonds between the two peoples to be obscured and forgotten.Worse still, they have come to be generally denied.Thus, for example, almost all Ukrainian words absent in Russian and present in Polish are customarily taken as Polonisms absorbed after the fourteenth century . 1 The prevailing view is that before the fourteenth century there were no cultural or linguistic interrelations at all between Poland and the Ukraine. 2 But it is difficult to imagine an absence of connections between two neighboring peoples not separated by any impassible geographic barriers.It is widely held that the Poles were already at that time passing over the Carpathians and partly colonizing Slovakia-then what would have prevented their contact with the East, where there were no mountains like the Carpathians or broad rivers to bar their way?The question is answered only for Mazovia, where the presence of a wedge of Jatvjagi is assumed, but even here doubts are raised by some apparently very ancient common lexical features in Mazovia and Polesie. 3 This question will not, however, concern me here, and I mention it only to point out that, in any case, there were no Jatvjagi between Little Poland and Galicia and Volhynia.In order to give some kind of explanation for the lack of linguistic contacts between these regions a theory was even formed of a desert, supposed to have extended between the Wislok and the San.This desert may be found already in nineteenth-century historians, and it has been taken over in our time by, for example, Seliscev: "In the early period of their existence these two (Eastern and Western-Y.S.) Slavic groups were not in immediate contact: in the east they were separated by the Lithuanian tribes, and in the southeast the territory between the San and the Wislok was for a long time unpopulated."4 There is no reason for us to accept the existence of this wasteland.Already in the earliest historical sources we can see lively contacts between Poland and Rus).The Kievan Primary Chronicle, which shows no knowledge of Czech or • So, for example, in W. Kuraszkiewicz, Gramoty halicko-wolyftskie XIV-XV wieku (Prace Polskiego Towarzystwa dla badan Europy Wschodniej i Bliskiego Wschodu), Krak6w 1934, 13G-131.2 For the sake of brevity I use the terms "Ukrainian" and "Polish" dialects, even for the earliest period, instead of speaking of the dialects from which Ukrainian (or Polish) developed, or of the dialects which later fused into Ukrainian (or Polish).3 T. Lehr-Splawinski, Jfzyk polski; pochodzenie, powstanie, rozwoj, Poznan 1947, 65.The question has received special treatment in J. Tarnacki's Studia porownawcze nad geografirl wyrazuw (Polesie-Mazowsze), Warszawa 1939, but the author has refrained from any generalizations or historical interpretation (cf.particularly p. 2).• A. Seliscev, Slavjanskoe jazykoznanie 1. Zapadno-slavjanskie jazyki, Moscow 1941, 272.