The common people have collected and preserved the treasures of the Ukrainian language. While the vocabulary of an English farmer, according to Ratzel, does not include more than three hundred words, the Ukrainian peasant uses as many thousands. And, incidentally, the purity of the language is remarkable. Barely a few borrowed words have been introduced into the language of the people thru the centuries of contact with neighboring peoples. They disappear entirely amid the wealth of pure Ukrainian words. What interests us geographers and natural scientists most of all is the wonderful wealth of the colloquial language in very striking names for surface forms, natural phenomena, plants and animals. The construction and codification of the Ukrainian terminology of natural sciences and geography was, therefore, very easy. The infant science of the Ukraine possesses a terminology which, for example, far surpasses the Russian.
The most important proofs of the independence of the Ukrainian language are Ukrainian literature and Ukrainian science. The Ukrainian language has given proof, thru its development of a thousand years, that it is capable of giving expression to the loftiest products of human feeling and human intellect.
Ukrainian national literature cannot possibly be compared with the literature of a Provencal or Low German dialect, which represents the daily life of a small group of people. Ukrainian Literature is the versatile literature of a great nation; a literature which looks back upon a history of a thousand years and continues to develop in spite of all obstacles. A strong foundation is furnished it in the remarkably rich, popular poetry, which has not a counterpart in the entire civilized world.
Ukrainian Literature holds a high place among Slavic literatures. Only Russian and Polish Literature surpass it in the number and greatness of their works.
The history of almost a thousand years of Ukrainian Literature begins at the time of the fullest development of the Kiev Empire, when the so-called Chronicle of Nestor originated, the Galician-Volhynian Chronicle, the powerful Epic of Igor and other important monuments of Ukrainian Literature (the works of Ilarion, Serapion, Kirilo Turivsky, etc.)- Their language is built up upon the Church-Slavonic dialect, but presents great linguistic departures, as early as the 11th Century, from the literary works simultaneously produced in the Russian territory to the north.
This promising beginning of the old Ukrainian Literature was almost completely crushed by five centuries of Tatar barbarism. The continuous state of war, the loss of their independent political organization, the crushing foreign yoke, permitted only a weak vegetating of Ukrainian Literature for five centuries. Legal, theological, philosophical and polemic literary monuments and the beginnings of the drama, written in a Macaronic language made up of a mixture of Ukrainian and Church-Slavonic, can at the most be considered proof that the educated Ukrainians of that time had too little leisure and opportunity to devote themselves to artistic literature.