Anatoly Vorobey has a Facebook post that starts with a reference to a video in which Oleg Lekmanov compares a bunch of clips of people reading aloud the first stanza of Pushkin’s “Анчар” (The Upas Tree; there are a number of English translations, e.g. A.Z. Foreman, Michael Allen) to see if they read the last word in the second line as “раскалённой” (raskalyonnoi, the normal reading inn modern Russian) or “раскаленной” (raskalennoi, with e as in Church Slavic, to rhyme with the final word of the stanza, “вселенной” [vselennoi] ‘universe’). Anatoly says it seems to him this is a sort of intelligentsia shibboleth, with a snobbish preference for the Church Slavic as “correct” (he quotes a textbook to that effect), whereas he thinks both pronunciations have a right to exist — a conclusion with which I, naturally, concur. One of his commenters brings up English rhymes like rove/love, but this seems to me a different, though parallel, case.
In any case, the Pushkin quote led me to look up the word анчар (apparently first used in this poem), which according to Russian Wiktionary (citing Vasmer) is borrowed from Dutch antjar, itself from Malay ančar. Amazingly (to me), the OED has an entry (from 1885) for antiar ‘The Upas tree of Java, Antiaris toxicaria; also, the poison obtained from it’; there are no citations, but there is an etymology: “< Javanese antjar, antschar.” And upas itself (entry from 1926) is “< Malay ūpas poison, in the combination pōhun (or pūhun) ūpas poison-tree.” All roads lead to Malaya.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Moral_Alphabet/U_for_Upas_Tree
snobbish preference for the Church Slavic
Would it really be snobbish? Or, more broadly, would taking Church Slavic into consideration be seeing as learned and not, say, backwards?