Language Cousins, not Siblings

Hi there!

Today we are going to talk about Ukrainian and Russian languages and why they are not as similar as a lot of people think. I'm full of beans to make a coherent explanation regarding this issue, as if there are origin names of these languages, indeed there must be any difference. And this difference is enough to dispel all russian propaganda around the Ukrainian language😉. Because if it wasn't russian propaganda, we would have no such thing as this question. No one is asked if there are differences between the Spanish and Italian or between Portuguese and French languages. But the distance between Ukrainian and Russian is the same as between French and Portuguese.

The differences exist, otherwise why would russians pay so much attention to the Ukrainian language and are so afraid of the it? Only one fact with prohibition Ukrainian language worth more than thousands words that describes this question and attitude to Ukrainian. But after all distortions and attempts to liken languages, the Ukrainian language stay far away from Russian.

To begin with, Ukraine is a bilingual country with Ukrainian and Russian as the two widely used (Ukrainian is the only official language). The language situation in Ukraine is probably more complicated than Ukrainian grammar!😅

Ukrainians understand the Russian language because during the times of the Russian Empire, the USSR, and to a large extent after 1991, the Russian language was widely studied at school. At the same time, russians who have never studied or heard the Ukrainian language do not understand Ukrainian, do not fully understand it, or understand it incorrectly. 

Now let's examine some differences between Ukrainian and Russian languages on the different linguistic levels: vocabulary, letters, sounds and grammar. 

Alphabet 

• They both use the Cyrillic alphabet, but slightly different versions. There are four letters in Ukrainian missing from Russian (ґ, є, і, ї), and four letters in Russian missing from Ukrainian (ё, ъ, ы, э).
• Ukrainian alphabet has І і, but in Russian, the letter и is used to represent the sound [i].
• Russian alphabet has ы, but in Ukrainian, it is и.
• Ukrainian alphabet has Ї ї, but in Russian, it’s a combination йи to represent [ji].
• Russian alphabet has Ё ё, but Ukrainian doesn't (in Ukrainian, it's a combination йо to represent [jo])
• Russian alphabet has the hard sign (ъ), but Ukrainian doesn't (in Ukrainian, the apostrophe is used instead (’).

Pronunciation

• Ukrainian is a completely phonetic alphabet. This makes reading a lot easier because the letters are always pronounced the same😍. In Russian, you have letters that can make two different sounds.
• Ukrainian language has a specific sound represented by the letter Г г. It sounds similar to [h] in Aha! 
• Russian letter O о is pronounced as [a] or an unclear schwa [ə] when it is not stressed. In Ukrainian, О is always pronounced as [o].
• In Ukrainian language, the soft consonants are used more often than in Russian (and many other Slavic languages). These difference is subtle and depends on the person's dialect too, but in short:
• Russian [ы] is deeper than Ukrainian [и].
• Russian [э] is more open than Ukrainian [е].

Vocabulary

The Ukrainian language remained in close contact with the European Slavs and remained similar to them in terms of grammar and vocabulary. While Russian language was significantly influenced by vocabulary from the Tatar-Mongol yoke, Finno-Ugric tribes and the importation of foreign technical and cultural terms from western European countries like France, Germany and the Netherlands.

That is why, from the point of view of vocabulary, the closest to Ukrainian are:

• Belarusian language (84% of common vocabulary);
• then Polish (70% of common vocabulary);
• Slovak (68% of common vocabulary);
• and only in fourth place is the Russian language (62% of the common vocabulary).

For example, according to their lexical composition, English and Dutch have 63% of common vocabulary, Swedish and Norwegian have 84%.

"False friends" - words that look the same but mean different things - make Russian and Ukrainian look more similar than they in fact are. The Ukrainian word pytannya (question) looks a lot like the Russian word pytanie (attempt). A Russian who sees pytannya won't associate it with the Russian word for question, vopros.

Also here are plenty of Ukrainian-Russian homonyms - words that sound the same but mean completely different things: час - time (in Ukrainian) - an hour (in Russian)

Grammar 

In general, it is quite easy to learn the grammar of the second Slavic language because they all have similar principles and categories: noun cases, verb tenses, genders, etc.

• That is why we can say that Russian and Ukrainian grammar systems are quite similar by concepts, but they differ by the representation (endings). E.g.: Він замовив вареники з капустою - Он заказал вареники с капустой - He ordered varenyky with cabbage
• In Russian, nouns can be used in 6 cases (forms), whereas in Ukrainian there are 7 cases. An extra one is called Кличний відмінок – Vocative case. It is used to directly address someone. E.g: привіт, Катю! (Vocative case) - привет, Катя! (Nominative case) - hi Katya! 
• In Russian, the most common way to say "I have" is: У меня есть. In Ukrainian, we use two forms: У мене є (by Russian influence) and also Western Slavic Я маю.
• In Ukrainian, there are 3 grammatical ways to talk about the future (я зроблю, я буду робити, я робитиму). In Russian, there are two of them (я сделаю, я буду делать). In English (I will do, I will be doing)

The similarities between this two languages shouldn't blind us to their distinct existence as separate entities, nor to the political implications of assuming they are one language😕.

About 25 years ago, the name Kiev started disappearing from maps, to be replaced by Kyiv. The latter is simply the Ukrainian "version" of the name, spelt in the Latin alphabet instead of in Cyrillic. Two vowels in it have changed: in Russian, the first vowel -y- became -i- after the consonant k-, and in Ukrainian historical -e- and -o- became -i- before a final consonant. 

The English habit of using Kiev, Kharkov, Lvov comes from the era of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, when Russian was the dominant written language in Ukraine. After Ukraine became independent and asserted its own linguistic identity, the Ukrainian forms Kyiv, Kharkiv and Lviv came to the fore😎.

A lot of Ukrainians had a change of heart after the beginning of full-scale war with russia, and we are finally getting rid of russian language in our country and hope that more and more people all over the world will learn Ukrainian😄. (If you want to get to know more interesting facts about Ukraine and Ukrainian culture, check my friend's blogg: https://oksanasavanchuk.blogspot.com/ 😍)

That's all for today. Have a whale of time on holiday 💗