The Drevnost’ Malorossiiskogo Yazyka [Antiquity of the Little Russian Language] was published in 1880 in Odesa. It is available in the original language at Archive.org (In case the link does not work, here is another link). Very telling is the only sentence on the second page – ‘Permitted by censorship’ because it demonstrates the scrutiny of both the author and his work by Tsarist Russia before the book went into print. The book was later suppressed by Moscow since then and one can easily understand why. Here is a translation of just one paragraph of the Introduction: “On studying and comparing the Aryan languages for a long time, I have arrived at the conclusion that the Malorussian [Ukrainian] language is not just older than all the Slavic languages, not excluding the so-called Old Slavic, but also Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and other Aryan languages. But, believe it or not, the Malorussian language does not even have a decent dictionary! This circumstance prevented the foreign Philologists from discovering the real source of the ancient languages…
It is recognized that civilization strongly influences the distortion and change of the forms of the native language; that is the reason the French and the Italians do not understand the Latin language any longer and the Germans do not understand the Gothic. In a similar way, the ancient Indian civilization from the original language produced Sanskrit which can not be considered (as previously) the father of all the Aryan languages. But because the culture has had little effect on the Malorussian language, it is not surprising that it has been preserved much better than others…
The distortion of the ancient language happened under the influence of mixing with the original dwellers of India, the so-called Dravidian peoples. Max Müller calculated that while 125 million Indians spoke the language of Aryan origin, 115 million spoke the Dravidian language.”
Ukrainian language is likely the closest to the Proto-Indo-European >
