Editors Julia Tolda and Solomia Dzhaman attended the presentation of Prof. Yuri Shevchuk’s Ukrainian-English Collocation Dictionary.

The crowd was small but intimate in the Harriman Institute on September 21st. The first in-person event hosted there since the start of the pandemic was a monumental one to behold. Ten years in the making, it was the presentation of Prof. Yuri Shevchuk’s new Ukrainian-English Collocation Dictionary. The UECD is an unprecedented addition to the tapestry of Ukrainian-English language resources, and is the first Ukrainian collocation dictionary. It has no precedents in Slavic lexicography and combines elements of six types of dictionaries: translation, collocation, learner’s, thesaurus, phraseological and encyclopedic dictionaries.

Ukrainian presents a unique challenge in terms of both teaching and translation. Under the Soviet Union, Ukrainian was marginalized and repressed. It was never developed or taught as a foreign language, so resources for teaching were often meager, developed by the distant diaspora. With outdated dictionaries that include many Russified definitions, and meager resources for teaching and learning, Shevchuk saw a dire need for Ukrainian-English resources.

A collocation dictionary, for those unfamiliar, is one that deals not only with the meanings of words but with how to combine those words into phrases. A dictionary simply gives a definition of a word, while a collocation dictionary goes further, with adjectives, prepositions, verbs, and more that can be used with the word. The UECD displays collocations in two languages: Ukrainian and English. It places words into a logical system that creates a framework for a reader to understand the language itself, as opposed to just reading definitions of vocabulary words. 

So the question becomes, how does one choose which words should go into a dictionary? Shevchuk described two main problems he ran into when trying to choose words: Russification and “English junk borrowing”. Russification is a century-long imperialistic takeover of the Ukrainian language, which has since Soviet times forced out Ukrainian words in favor of Russian ones. “English junk borrowing”, as Shevchuk called it, is a more modern phenomenon, where, in order to seem cooler, young Ukrainians adopt English into their lexicon.

Shevchuk described a dilemma he faced: should he take a prescriptive approach, deviating from how the language is truly spoken in favor of the “correct” Ukrainian? Or, should he simply record down the most common phrases, and in that, legitimize the imperialistic changes that have been forcefully made on the language? He settled on trying as much as possible to record pre-Soviet Ukrainian, and in this process, discovered many words that have since been forgotten or fallen from use. 

So which words did Shevchuk end up choosing? The over 8,500 words he included are a selection of the most commonly used Ukrainian words. They cover a broad range of topics: from day-to-day life, to official language used in government, to slang and vulgarisms. 

Thus, the UECD in itself combines six different things. It is at once a translation dictionary, used to directly translate words; a learner’s dictionary, with information about grammar structures and morphology of words; a collocation dictionary, of course, which includes over 200,000 collocations; a thesaurus, which includes 8,000 synonyms and 1,000 antonyms; a phraseological dictionary, describing common idioms and phrases; and finally an encyclopedia, with detailed entries about words that may be unfamiliar to a reader. 

Within the UECD are a number of unprecedented strides in furthering Ukrainian-English understanding. There are definitions of new words that have been added to the public lexicon since the 60s (when the last full dictionary was written), for example, the word “meme”. There are descriptions of non-equivalent items, or in other words, words that have no direct translation, for example, the Ukrainian word okrip, a word for bubbling boiling water, which has no direct English equivalent. There are explanations of grammatical constructs unfamiliar to an English audience, for example unidirectional vs. omnidirectional motion verbs (which are differentiated in Ukrainian but not English). 

Shevchuk intends for this dictionary to be used by a wide range of people: from a foreigner learning Ukrainian to a native speaker looking to brush up their vocabulary. He wants the dictionary to be continual proof of the aliveness and vibrancy of the Ukrainian language.

dictionary via Solomia Dzhaman