TO BE OR NOT TO BE A HISTORICAL LANGUAGE DISCIPLINE IN THE TRAINING PLANS OF UKRAINIAN STUDIES TEACHERS

Abstract

With no state standard of native philology expert training in recent years, significant changes have been observed in the initial plans of educational programs “Ukrainian language and literature” in the secondary education field. They affected primarily the block of the historical language cycle educational disciplines, from which the Introduction to Slavic Philology, the Old Slavic language, and sometimes the History of the Ukrainian Literary Language were removed. Most often, only the Historical Grammar of the Ukrainian language is left, and even then in a much smaller number of hours. Sometimes the Old Slavic language is integrated with the Historical Grammar of the Ukrainian Language or the latter with the History of the Ukrainian Literary Language. But in any case, the educational, cognitive, or worldview potential of each branch of historical linguistics is not considered. The formation of pragmatic linguistic and communicative competencies without a thorough knowledge of different levels of the Ukrainian language linguistic units formation, their features, and understanding of similarities with other related languages is not possible without full mastery of knowledge about the origins, stages, and ways of our national language functioning and its literary forms. Based on the comparative-historical linguistics developments and our own experience achievements in teaching the Historical Grammar of the Ukrainian language (for a long time – as one of several historical disciplines, and now – as the only one), we offer a vision of the formation of the linguistic and communicative competence when studying the history of the consonant phonemes /j/, /г/, /ґ/ and traditions of marking them in writing. The choice of phonemes is not accidental, since /j/ still has Proto-Indo-European roots and a deep long-term functioning in all Slavic languages, but its written designation in Ukrainian has its own specificity; regarding the phonemes /г/, /ґ/, the history of language has a number of unsolved questions both regarding the origin (/г/) and orthoepy and orthography (/ґ/).