The article analyzes the specific features of the Ukrainian scientific terminology at the beginning of 20th century that appeared in the Ukrainian-Russian dictionary by A. Nikovsky (1926). The register of the analyzed edition exceeded the most complete at that time dictionary by B. Grinchenko about 10 thousand words. This dexicographic work reflects the strong development of the Ukrainian language at the beginning of the 20th century in the formation of the body of terminals. The article describes the most notable features of modern scientific discourse on its lexical, morphological, word-forming and spelling levels. Interesting thing on the lexical level of the modern terminology is the specific vocabulary presented in the dictionary, which in modern literary language is replaced by the borrowings. Also, A. Nikovsky’s dictionary gives a lot of specific words that disappeared from the active vocabulary due to imposing on our language lexical-word-building models that are close to Russian. On the morphological and word-formation levels we have defined five characteristic features of the Ukrainian-Russian dictionary by A. Nikovsky: significant productivity of non-affixal method of word formation; the presence of adjectives formed by other word-building models than modern language units; fixation of adjectives with the suffix “уват”, which were subsequently replaced by complicated adjectives calculated from the Russian language with the second part “подібний”; some names of persons whose specialty or type of activity in the analyzed dictionary differs in their morphological features from the modern ones; a series of nouns of the female genius presented in the form of a male language. The attention is also focused on some spelling features of the Ukrainian language in the beginning of 20th century which attracts our attention in view of the discussion of modern spelling reform. The study made it possible to outline the meaning of this dictionary for contemporary users and for current scholars.
BELARUSIAN LEXICOGRAPHICAL CODIFICATION OF THE FIRST HALF OF THE 20TH CENTURY AND “DICTIONARY OF THE UKRAINIAN LANGUAGE” EDITED BY B. GRINCHENKO: SPECIFICITY OF DESCRIPTIVE METHODS