APPENDIX Â “Orientalisms” in Ukrainian, Polish, and Russian

one of the clearest markers of Eastern influences on Ukrainian and neighbouring cultures is the frequency of use of words of Eastern or “Ori­ental” provenance in their modern languages.

Much more recent acquisitions include Eastern words such as karavan and bazaar, which were popularized or borrowed from Persian or Arabic into the various languages of Europe in the eighteenth century. That fol­lowed the translation of the One Thousand and One Nights (sometimes called The Arabian Nights) into French and then the other major languages of Europe. Some time before this, however, these two particular words did appear in the Ukrainian language from other sources.

“Orientalisms” in Ukrainian can be divided into four major kinds, by source language: first, Iranianisms, some of which are by far the oldest Oriental borrowings into the Slavonic tongues. A few of these entered the Slavonic “mother tongue” before it broke up into the different Slavonic groups, and some are still common to them all. Second, there are Turkisms, a few of which are also quite old, but many of which entered Ukrainian or became very common during early modern, Cossack times. Third, Ara- bisms range in type and age from medieval times almost to the present.

Iranianisms are of great antiquity and play a notable role in most Slavonic tongues. Some are in fact pre-historic, dating from shortly after the breakup of the great Indo-European family of languages, when the ancient Slavonic and Iranian tribes were still close neighbours on the eastern European, or Pontic Steppe, and neighbouring areas. We know the names of a few of these peoples, such as the Cimmerians (of dubious origins), the Scyth­ians, and the Sarmatians, but a few of the loans from Iranian languages may antedate these. Two of the most notable might be Boh (Ukrainian), Bog (Polish), and Bog (Russian), meaning “God,” and mir (Ukrainian and Russian), with the basic meaning of “peace,” but sounding a bit archaic in Polish, although in the modern Polish tongue it retains the related mean­ings of “esteem” or “respect.”

Bagha - “God” or “Lord” - is mentioned in the Avesta, the sacred scrip­tures of the Zoroastrians, a very old Iranian religion, dualist in nature, stressing the difference between good and evil, light and darkness, which faith first arose in central Asia. Bagha is a Sanskrit or ancient Indian word for “prosperity” or “good fortune.” (The old Iranian tongues and Sanskrit were closely related.) As with Boh, which some scholars believe to be merely a cognate (having similar origins) rather than a true loan-word, mir is so old that it may have come to Slavonic directly from an ancient Indo-European root meaning “fair” or “fine.” Nevertheless, it is closely related to the Iranian word mitra, meaning “friend,” which later became the name of an old Iranian god, Mithras, whose worship eventually spread into the Roman Empire. At any rate, the alternate meanings of the modern Russian word mir as “peas­ant commune” and ultimately “world” are later developments from the older meaning of “peace,” which, of course, is also associated with “prosperity.”

There are also a few more mundane Ukrainian words that are probably of ancient Iranian origin.

The French Ukrainian scholar Iaroslav Lebedynsky suggests that the names of the rivers Don, Dnieper, Dniester, and most likely even Danube are all of ancient Iranian origin, even though the modern Persian word for river is rudkhaneh. Linguists, he says, determined this origin in part from studying the Ossetian language of the Caucasus, which is an Iranian tongue descended from those Sarmatians and Alans of late antiquity, for even in modern Osse­tian don means “flowing water” or “river.” The four river names given above were formed probably from the root “don,” or something very close to it.

Of these four river examples, let us take a closer look at the most cen­tral one, the Dnieper, or Dnipro in modern Ukrainian. The river was named Dunepru in older forms of Slavonic, Danapris in Greek, and Danaper in Latin; philologists and specialists in old Steppe Ukraine, such as Iaroslav Lebedyn- sky, hypothesize their grounding in the old Iranian root Danu and a second element, also Iranian, such as Old Iranian apara (behind), or apri (west) as in Sanskrit, or apra (modern Ossetian arf), meaning “profound” or “deep.” Put them together, and we have “The Western River,” or “The Deep River.”

Of course, as is well-known, the Greek historian Herodotus called the river Borysthenes, but it too seems to be of indisputably Iranian origin. According to Lebedynsky, it is derived from the Iranian word varu, mean­ing “large” (as in Avestan vouru and Ossetian urukh) and stana, meaning “country.” (This latter Iranian word is still very common in modern Persian and other Eastern languages and appears on maps as Afghanistan, Paki­stan, and so on.) Lebedynsky hypothesizes that the ancient Greeks took one of the names of the Scythian country, “large country,” or even “the country of the large ones,” and applied it to the river itself.

There are, of course, many lesser-known Ukrainian toponyms (place names) of ancient Iranian origin - more than two thousand, according to the Ukrainian philologist K.M. Tyshchenko. He also notes that other very common words like khata (a peasant cottage or simple one-storey house) are probably of ancient Iranian lineage. Khata in particular, he claims, is a “Sarmatianism” known exclusively to Ukraine and Belarus', which, in the province of Podolia has two separate, though related local meanings: a small home or a grave mound in a cemetery. The latter usage, he also claims, comes directly from the Zoroastrian Avesta, which seems to indicate (so he again claims) that the ancestors of modern Ukrainians and Belarusans were probably at one time in close contact with Iranians of the Zoroastrian religion on the European Steppe. Zoroastrianism, though originating in pre-historic central Asia, became a principal religion of the Persian Empire, especially under the Sasanian dynasty of late antiquity. Most Ukrainian philologists agree that khata is probably borrowed from the ancient Iranian kad, meaning “house.” That word is preserved in the modern Persian language in the title kadkhoda, originally the “lord of the house,” or today the “headman of a village.”

Other very common Iranian-origin Ukrainian words, says Lebedynsky, are of cultural/religious import, such as vira (faith) from vara (to believe), and vina (fault) from vinah, and, quite surprisingly, titular words such as Pan (Mister) and Pani (Mrs). These last supposedly descend from the Old Iranian form pana, meaning “protector,” and are also used in Polish, which greatly influenced their use in Ukrainian. (Gau-pana in Pashtu, an Iranian tongue spoken in Afghanistan and Pakistan, was once the name of “the Protector of the Cattle”).

A parallel case is the Ukrainian word bovvan, meaning today “dumbbell” or “blockhead,” that is, a person who is not very bright, but originally the up­right statues, poles, columns, “wooden blocks” or “idols” once erected on the Ukrainian Steppe.

Another interesting old Slavonic root is konop, which yields konoplia (hemp) in modern Ukrainian. It is clearly related to cannabis in Greek and Latin, which is not strange, says Lebedynsky, because they are both derived from the ancient Scythian word for “hemp,” or “marijuana,” as is attested by Herodotus and demonstrated by recent archaeology. Herodotus says that it served the Scythians as a psychedelic drug and as a kind of incense; in mod­ern times Ukrainian women would use it to help their babies sleep while they themselves worked in the fields. This useful custom was even carried over to the prairies of western Canada by some of the early Ukrainian “pioneers” before 1914, although it seems to have largely disappeared by the 1920s.

It is difficult to distinguish between actual loans from Iranian and sim­ple cognates with it, derived from their common ancestor, the very ancient Indo-European “mother tongue” (Proto-Indo-European). How close the Slavonic and Iranian languages are is clear from linguists' grouping them as satem languages (from their words for a “hundred”) as opposed to the centem languages of western Europe. Geographers also note that the geo­graphical area of Slavonic languages falls between the languages of western Europe and those of central Asia and, later on, Iran, which are the historical homelands of the Iranian peoples.

Turkisms make up the second great class of Orientalisms in Ukraine, after Iranianisms.

A great many of the oldest Turkisms in Ukrainian do not feel in the least foreign to the Ukrainian ear, especially the historical Turkisms. In his article in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine on “Turkisms,” Victor Swoboda divides these chronologically. The oldest, dating to about the sixth century, are words like kahan (ruler) and bohatyr (great hero). Vladimir the Great, grand prince of Kyiv, claimed the quasi-imperial title kahan, or kagan, which had been handed down from the Turkic-speaking Khazar Empire after it had been extinguished by the Varangian Rus', and bohatyr was even­tually used as a common personal name all over central Asia. As “Bahador,” it is common enough in today's Iran.

With the decline of Kyivan Rus' many Turkic tribes swept across the land and left their traces in both the physical features of the Ukrainian peo­ple and in their language. Words dating from the eleventh to the thirteenth century include zhemchuh (pearl), yevshan (wormwood), tlumach (inter­preter), and tovar (merchandise or goods, from the Turkic for “cattle” and especially “sheep”), from which many common Ukrainian and Russian words derive: for example, the Russian tovarishch (comrade) and the Ukrainian tovarysh (comrade), which originally meant “camp” or “wagon-train.” The English etymologist Terence Wade believes that tovarishch may come from tovar, plus the ending -ishch, meaning “place,” thus “place of trade,” where one naturally made social connections. (The same ending also occurs in kladbishche or “cemetery,” a “place” where people are buried.) However, Wade adds that the Ukrainian tovarysh may be even closer to Turkic, where the ending -ish means “friend,” thus initially rendering “a friend in trade” or “a trading partner.” It is an irony of history that this word, which was once so closely associated with commerce and business, became ideolog­ically associated with a militantly anti-business form of socialism, Soviet Communism. In the Slavonic languages, even today, the word does not al­ways have the military connotation of the English “comrade.” For example, the great Ukrainian historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky, who was anything but a military type, used it simply to mean “friend,” even when addressing his students at the University of Lemberg/Lviv.

Tovarysh and tovarishch seem to have entered the Eastern Slavonic lan­guages as early as the fourteenth century, but many more Turkic words entered Ukrainian later, during Cossack times, when Ukrainians interacted closely with Turks and Tatars, the latter of whom spoke a Turkic language of the so-called Kipchak branch. So the name “Cossack” itself (kozak in Ukrainian and Polish, kazak in Russian) was borrowed in this period; so also vataha (warband or herd), chai (tea), and karyi (dark brown or black, as in kari ochi, “black eyes”). The English form “Cossack” arrived in that language probably via the French cosaque, from the Polish kozak, from the Ukrainian kozak (not the Russian kazak).

Later Cossack times gave us chaban (shepherd), tuman (fog), berkut (gold­en eagle), lyman (estuary), harbuz (melon or pumpkin), choboty (boots), chumak (salt trader), maidan (town square), kobza (lute), kaidany (shackles or chains), and many, many others. Indeed, according to E.N. Shipova, some etymologists and historians, following the Orientalist Ahatanhel Krymsky, believe that even the archaic Ukrainian term of scorn for Russians, Katsap, may have been borrowed from one of the Turkic languages. Recent Ukrainian etymology favours the more obvious one that ridicules persons who wear long beards, as did the Muscovites of old. (Tsap is a billy-goat in Ukrainian.) In all, according to the Ukrainian philologist O.M. Harkavets, about four thousand Turkisms populate modern Ukrainian - about as many as Ara- bisms in modern Spanish. (For the Spanish figure, see Michel Malherbe, Les langages de l’humanite [Paris: Bouquins, 1995], 160.) And like the Iranians, the Turks and Tatars have also shaped Ukrainian topography. So the names of the towns Kremenchuk and Karasu are both of Turkic origin, the former according to Metropolitan Ilarion from the Tatar ke or kyr, meaning “high place,” as in the Turkish kerman “fortress,” and the latter in particular mean­ing “black water.”

Arabisms form the third general class of Orientalisms in Ukrainian. Many entered Ukrainian via Turkish or Tatar, both of which absorbed a great many Arabic words and phrases as Islam spread through their homelands. Virtually all Turks or Tatars were historically Muslim, and, in Europe generally, “turning Turk” was the phrase for conversion. “Muslim” in Ukrainian (Musulman) comes to Ukrainian not from Arabic but rather indirectly through Persian and then Turkic. Ukrainians and Russians often corrupted it into the sometimes-pejorative Busurman.

A second class of Arabisms reached Ukraine via Latin (or sometimes Greek) and western European tongues. Most of these were scientific, medi­cal, geographical, or mathematical terms such as algebra, admiral, alcohol, arsenal, zenith, and talisman. Others were less scientific but very common, such as kava for coffee, khabar meaning bribe, and zhasmyn for the jasmine flower, this last, possibly a Persian word reaching Ukrainian through Ara­bic, Turkish, or Tatar. Still others arrived more directly from Arabic and are used in Ukrainian and some other Slavonic languages, but not in western Europe. A good example is torba (bag). Zhupan (trousers) is one word that did come from Arabic through western Europe, Italian in fact. Surprisingly, mini-jup (for a very short skirt) comes ultimately from an old Arabic word combined with a Latin prefix. Modern Ukrainian has a parallel word sport­ing an appropriate suffix: mini-zhupka.

A few Arabic words reached Ukraine through Tatar slave raiding of Ukrainian lands in early modern times and to this day evoke that era. These words include yasir (captive) and, as mentioned above, kaidany (shackles or chains). A Greek word loaned into Arabic and Turkish also arrived in Ukraine this way: katorga originally meant “slave rowing on a Mediterranean galley,” from Byzantine Greek kata (down or below) and ergon (work). But in modern Ukrainian and Russian it means “punitive exile.” Such exile, especially to Siberia, was common in Imperial Russia and massive under the Soviets.

Other languages, such as Armenian, Georgian, and Hebrew, provide the fourth general class of Orientalisms in Ukrainian, Polish, and Russian. As we saw above, the word for “book” - knyha (Ukrainian), kniga (Russian), and ksiqzka (Polish) - reached Slavonic possibly from ancient Assyrian via the Armenian knik. Terence Wade informs us that a kunukku in ancient As­syrian was originally a “sealed clay tablet, or seal impression.” To this, from Georgian should be added zubr (bison) in Ukrainian and zubr (meaning the same) in Polish. (Even today, the eastern European bison survives in the forest region joining Poland to Belarus'.)

From Hebrew, of course, came a great many biblical terms, often via the Old Church Slavonic of the southern Balkans. As in English, seraphim and cherubim are good examples. In the 1920s, Aleksander Bruckner, who compiled one of the first etymological dictionaries in a Slavonic language, estimated that about one third of all modern Polish words are of foreign origin. For Polish, he reports, German provided more new or non-Slavonic words than any other language. He does not say what proportion came from the East, but the figure must be high, especially for Ukrainian and Russian, which were usually in much closer and more direct contact with “Oriental” cultures than was Polish.