Iryna Farion

Lviv Polytechnic National University

TO THE HISTORY OF SCIENTIFIC LANGUAGE IN THOUGHTS OF IVAN PULIUI

© Farion I. D., 2016

The subject of the article analysis is considerations of famous physician and translator Ivan Puliui about the need of the formation of specific scientific language during Ukrainian statelessness at the end of ХIХ – beginning of ХХ centuries and their absolute consonance with today’s problems of scientific terminology strengthening on the basis of native language. The first source of research of thinker’s considerations about language of science, education and enlightenment became his 298 letters issued as soon as 2007.

Keywords: Ukrainian language, Ivan Puliui, scientific language, linguistic and ideological convictions, term.

The subject of the article analysis is considerations of famous physician and translator Ivan Puliui about the need of the formation of specific scientific language during Ukrainian statelessness at the end of ХIХ – beginning of ХХ centuries and their absolute consonance with today’s problems of scientific terminology strengthening on the basis of native language. The first source of research of thinker’s considerations about language of the science, education and enlightenment became his 298 letters issued as soon as 2007.

  The research of scientific language in historical context is not only the reconstruction of historical linguistic and scientific consciousness but also a persuasive way to fully explain complex internal and extra-linguistic factors of term system formation in different disciplines. The figure of the famous physician, theologian, translator, public activist Ivan Puliui in the raised problems is significant, symbolic and absolutely projected to the future of our scientific language. Ivan Puliui has always been a nation-centered in his linguistic and political beliefs and followed exclusively independent Ukrainian interest as witnessed all his life focused on political credo in his latter days: our idea is Ukraine set free from Russia’s oppression and free development of all life forms, particularly in scientific educational field. He remarks non-formedness of Ukrainian scientific language and analyzes such reason in social context. In addition to that, the scientist calls for relying exclusively on people’s lingual basis of scientific texts’ formation, and gives a remarkable example by his own having written his works on physics and electrical engineering in Ukrainian language.

  Ivan Puliui himself was the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and simultaneously it’s most active organizer. His path in Ukrainian educative and scientific institutions lies across the struggle for opening Ukrainian university in Lviv and acting in Scientific Society named after Taras Shevchenko, full member of which he became on June 1, 1899. He initiates creation of «full Rus’ dictionary», which to Puliui’s opinion, will be a source of Ukrainian terms because a scientist having read it will inevitably find there necessary lexemes for concepts used by him or just created by him in the very moment. In the same time, having read such a dictionary, our scientists would study their language and be guided by it.

Without Ivan Puliui, no educational and scientific society formation could be made, for example «Societies for scientific teaching named after Petro Mohyla», (1908–1939) formed to popularise knowledge in every life domain. Having read this society rules, the scientist recommended to necessarily withdraw the paragraph permitting to teach in a different language, having emphasized that popular science and education could be spread among people only in native language and not in foreign.

At the change of ХIХ–ХХ centuries, Ivan Puliui formulated a task to create Ukrainian scientific language on the basis of people’s language – people’s «stronghold», and he put it into practice: wrote his essays in Ukrainian language and offered his own neologisms on electrical engineering, physics and astronomy. He translated school books on planimetry, stereometry, botany and recommended for translation books on arithmetic, physics and religious literature. He emphasised that popular education and science must be exclusively taught in native language. In the third millennium, these messages of the famous scientist at the time of unprecedented dominance of English language in science do acquire special relevance.

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