Let us use в with Ukraine, instead of на

March 12, 2022 2:45 PM

How does the Ukrainian Language Differ from Russian? "If you’re an English speaker learning Ukrainian, the grammar will likely be complex at first, but there will also be some familiar features, too. One mostly unfamiliar feature is Ukrainian's robust case system. This means that nouns change their form depending on what role they play in the sentence. A number of languages have case systems, including Russian, Latin, German, and even English — though in English, we only mark case on a few words. (Basically, the case system is the reason we say “I love him” but “He loves me.”) In Ukrainian, case gets marked on regular nouns (house, newspaper, child, country), pronouns (I, they, it, we), and even people's names."

"Ukrainian and Russian are distinct languages that are, effectively, cousins to one another. Over a thousand years ago, there was a language spoken in central Europe that we now call proto-Slavic, an ancestor to all the Slavic languages spoken today. Speakers of proto-Slavic migrated across Europe, spread out, and settled down, and taught their children to speak their language....and then... things got more and more different, until eventually members of these communities that once spoke the same tongue became unable to understand one another. "

"Because of differences in the Ukrainian and Russian sound systems, shibboleths are also being used in Ukraine to quickly identify Russian soldiers...by their pronunciation of Ukrainian words that are particularly difficult for Russian speakers to say. In this video clip, the shibboleth is паляниця (palianytsia), which is pronounced with "i" in Ukrainian (like the "i" in English "kit," or like in "Kyiv"!) but "ee" by Russians (like in English "meet"). In fact, Russian does have this "i" in "kit" sound in the language – but it just can't be pronounced in this position in a word."

"Some of the most notable differences between Ukrainian and Russian are in its vocabulary. This is often what stumps a Russian speaker trying to understand Ukrainian, or vice versa: many common Russian words look totally different from their Ukrainian translations....Because the languages come from a common ancestor, sometimes a speaker of one language could deduce the meaning of a word based on its roots — the same way an English speaker might be able to look at the word Hund in German, relate it to “hound,” and figure out, with some work, that it means “dog.”"

posted by storybored (15 comments total)

Other than using the Cyrillic alphabet, isn't Ukrainian closer to Polish than Russian?
posted by acb at 3:07 PM on March 12, 2022

When he's not too far out in the weeds, I like this guy.
posted by Bee'sWing at 3:22 PM on March 12, 2022 [4 favorites]

Polish is in the Western Slavic branch (with Slovak and Czech). Ukrainian and Russian are Eastern Slavic languages.
posted by damayanti at 3:26 PM on March 12, 2022 [4 favorites]

that explains the 2nd ь of ь****ь!
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 3:44 PM on March 12, 2022 [1 favorite]

I studied Russian for eight years. Over that time, I had a Georgian TA, a Ukrainian TA, and my professor was from Chicago. My two Russian best friends were from Moscow and Novosibirsk, respectively. This post reminds me of every lab where I tried to figure out why everything sounded so different depending on whom I was talking to.

I can make sense of Ukrainian, but then friends send me video clips to translate and I just can't heads nor tails of a third of what is being said. I am actively unlearning Kiev and learning Kyiv. My brain still interposes "Soviet" in front of "Georgia" and "the" in front of "Ukraine. This is a very well-put together article from duolingo.
posted by gwydapllew at 4:10 PM on March 12, 2022 [8 favorites]

"Other than using the Cyrillic alphabet, isn't Ukrainian closer to Polish than Russian?"

No. I understand Ukrainian has a bunch of Polish loans because of the period of Polish rule, but that's no different to English having a bunch of words from Norman French... still doesn't make English closer to French than Dutch.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 4:31 PM on March 12, 2022 [4 favorites]

It reminds me of that scene in Inglorious Basterds where Hicox gives himself away as English.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 5:52 PM on March 12, 2022

When he's not too far out in the weeds, I like this guy.

It reminds me a lot of code switching between Australian and American English and their various subdialects like Southern American English and African American Vernacular English. Like it's not unintelligible but I have to think about it sometimes. It goes both ways though. If I speak strine none of my American friends would know what the fuck I'm saying and I doubt my wife would either.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 6:37 PM on March 12, 2022 [3 favorites]

"No. I understand Ukrainian has a bunch of Polish loans because of the period of Polish rule, but that's no different to English having a bunch of words from Norman French... still doesn't make English closer to French than Dutch."

Polish-Ukrainian are way closer than English-French or even English-Dutch. Russian-Ukranian are even closer yet. This site is pretty fascinating if you're into this sort of thing.


http://www.elinguistics.net/Compare_Languages.aspx
posted by readyfreddy at 7:28 PM on March 12, 2022 [4 favorites]

I'm fond of the language games played on the Ecolinguist YT channel.
I describe something ('animal, with big ears and a long nose') in my language. You ask clarifying questions in yours ('would I see it in a circus?'), then we see if we understand each other.
Relevant Slavic entries, w/Eng subtitles available:
Ukrainian vs Polish: Animals
Can Russian, Slovak, and Polish speakers understand Ukrainian?
posted by bartleby at 7:28 PM on March 12, 2022 [1 favorite]

"I am actively unlearning Kiev and learning Kyiv."

This is so hard! I did four years of Russian in high school and continued in college (with the idea of eventually going into Russo-American relations or something, but then I got distracted by theology being awesome). I'm doing pretty well with removing "the" from in front of "Ukraine," because that started a long time ago and I've had a lot of practice, although occasionally I still trip up. But turning "Kiev" into "Kyiv" is really hard! I learned it in English AND Russian as Kiev, and now I gotta migrate!

(Also, being from Chicago, I do not have the broadest repertoire of vowel sounds available to me, so shifting them is always very difficult! I can hear the difference, I just can't always reproduce the difference.)

I can sound out printed Cyrillic words without much problem, and I generally can still recognize noun cases and verb tenses/numbers. But I don't remember all that much vocabulary, so I'll be like "subject noun, object noun, verb, that does appear to be a cromulent sentence!" but I don't know what any of the meanings are. Signs are usually pretty easy (studied abroad there, remember a lot of store names/navigation stuff). Recognize question markers and a handful of swear words, which is surprisingly useful in watching war videos. When I read machine translation of Russian or Ukrainian and it's gone wonky (usually b/c of noun cases), I can often guess what the problem was and guess what the sentence was meant to be.

The hardest thing by far as an American learning Russian is that you don't lift your pitch at the end of a sentence to signify a question. Questions end with the same final, falling tonality as a declarative sentence: "I went to the store." "Who did this." It's crazy-hard to learn to say "who bought the groceries." instead of "who bought the groceries?" Especially because in English, the rising pitch in a question is not just how you signify that it's a question; it's part of how you signify politeness and/or uncertainty -- like, this isn't an accusation or a trick question, I am genuinely trying to get this information. (And also because I grew up at the height of uptalk for American teenaged girls, so to sound adequately girlish? and friendly? I learned that I should always uptalk? several times? in a single sentence?) Apparently it makes you sound somewhat insane when you do it in Russian.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 7:31 PM on March 12, 2022 [10 favorites]

Derail, or spur line, from the other end of Europe is the sch shibboleth in Dutch/Flemish. Recently the seaside town of Scheveningen was used in WWII to smoke out Germans but 700 years ago Schild en vriend was used during the Bruges Matins to identify and kill the ruling francophones. Needless to say, that pissed off the French king Philip IV and he sent an army to exact retribution. On 11 July 1302, the militia stopped the charging French cavalry in a maze of drainage ditches and killed everyone who would stay still long enough to be caught. The French general Robert of Artois was surrounded by pikemen and sued for his life but someone jeered "We spreken niet Frans" and he was bludgeoned to death and stripped of his fancy gear. This debacle for the French is known as the Guldensporenslag, the Fight of the Golden Spurs because of the quality of the spoils.
posted by BobTheScientist at 12:30 AM on March 13, 2022 [3 favorites]

read somewhere that the names of the months etc. are different because modern Russian was influenced by Church Russian, which had some Latin roots, & Ukrainian was not

great article!
posted by taquito sunrise at 12:33 AM on March 13, 2022 [1 favorite]

Just a note on language and ethnicity and national identity that's important to note, while the Ukrainian language is important to protect and encourage the use of, it is far from a sure demarcation of who is Ukrainian and who is not.
My family on both sides is from Ukraine, and Ukrainian was never a primary language for them. It wasn't the majority language where they lived, and the generations that left for here lived in a time when it was actively suppressed by the Soviets. I had the pleasure of being young in a house where older relatives talked in the shared pidgin of home, as well as formal 'church' German (what sermons were in, I think it's closest to Plautdietsch but I'm far from a language expert, and we are not Mennonites either.).
Which is all just to say, Ukraine is not a country that falls easily into the early modern ideal of one language, one culture, one nation. Many ethnic Ukrainians speak Russian, and some ethnic Russians speak Ukrainian, many people of neither ethnicity live there and speak either language, or neither, and are still Ukrainian.
It is important to differentiate between the two languages, but not as a decisive or investigative tool, but for cultural reasons, to preserve and respect. The word 'Shibboleth' being used makes my blood run cold. I'm personally terrified of Russophobia in America, not because I'm Russian (I am not), but because Americans have historically terrible target recognition.

Learn Ukrainian, not because of this war, but because it's a language of beauty. Don't fall into the trap of thinking about nations with strict lines, and 'right' and 'wrong' ways to sound. It can matter, but leave it to the experts, and don't expect to learn it in a timeframe that matters.
posted by neonrev at 11:12 AM on March 13, 2022 [22 favorites]

I found this article interesting, about identity and language use reflected in name variations across time in former Galicia, which also gets into some discussion of Poland and Polish:

History of Names: A Case of Constructing National Historical Memory in Galicia, 1830-1930s.

Jaroslav Hrytsak, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas - Themenschwerpunkt: Die ukrainische Nationalbewegung vor 1914 (2001), pp. 163-177

The gradual elimination of "Ruthenian" names coincided with the fading away of the historical memory of old Rus'. Of all the former Kyivan appanages, in the long run only the Volodymyr-Suzdal' princedom managed to preserve its independence, evolving into the Muscovite tsardom. Still, Edward Keenan revealed that on a list of three thousand upper-class Muscovite male names from the second half of the 16th century, there was not a single Igor' (Ihor), Sviatoslav, or Mstyslav, that fewer than 1 per cent of were called Vladimir (Volodymyr), and only three Gleb (Hlib). He concluded that "a Muscovite courtier of Ivan's time was more likely to be called Temir or Bulgak than Vladimir or Vsevolod.' This kind of historical amnesia does not seem to be a peculiarly Muscovite phenomenon. It covered also the most western part of the former Kyivan state, Galician Rus', which after having been a separate Galician Volhynian principality, was annexed by the Polish kings in the middle of the 14th century. Already in the 16th century the names of the canonized Kyivan princes Borys and Hlib were rare compared to "Greek" names such as Ivan, Hryhorij, Mykhajlo, or Andrij, among Ruthenian burghers in L'viv, the former capital of the Galician Volhynian principality. The Orthodox Byzantine legacy worked in a paradoxical way on the historical memory of the Eastern Slavs in the late medieval times: the local historical chronicles of the 11th and 13th centuries were subsequently replaced by the "Lives" of saints and the "Patricon." In contrast to the Catholic world, where a secular awareness of a national past developed, among the Orthodox the interest in the political past of a territory and its people was almost completely lost by the end of the 16th century.

An interest in the past emerged with the coming of the Counter-reformation in the Polish state (Rzeczpospolyta), as a by-product of bitter religious conflict between Catholics and Orthodox. The resistance against Catholicization took the form of Orthodox cultural revival...

The Rus' Orthodox revival at the end of 16th and beginning of 17th century and following the Khmel'nyts'kyi revolution (1648-1657) profoundly changed the political and cultural landscape of Eastern Europe. It halted the gradual erosion and Polish assimilation of the local Orthodox (Ruthenian) elites of the Rzeczpospolyta. On the other hand, it undermined the possibility for a common Belarus-Ukrainian (Ruthenian) nation to emerge: the Belarus lands did not strongly experience the impact of the Khmel'nyts'kyi revolution, and therefore the Cossack myth never became a constituent element of Belarus' national identity, as it was in Ukraine. Born in the wake of the revolution, the Cossack state (Hetmanate) preserved its autonomy long after its incorporation into the Muscovite tsardom (1654). It presented a model of an early modern Ukrainian nation. Still, despite ambitious plans of Cossack leaders, this state never included Galicia, which until 1772 remained under Polish rule. The local Orthodox population in the 17th- 18th centuries was converted to the Uniate (Greek-Catholic) church which accepted the supremacy of Vatican.

It has been suggested that if the Cossack state had managed to survive until modern times, on the contemporary Ukrainian ethnic lands there would most likely be two separate nations - one "Eastern Ukrainian" and one "Western Ukrainian," similar to the Holland-Flamand case. From a social perspective, the Ukrainian Cossack nation evolved along the typical estates' model, with membership restricted to Cossack elites. But as those elites and their descendants in the 18th- 19th centuries were integrated on a mass scale into the Russian imperial nobility, the very notion of "Cossack Ukraine" faded away.

The incomplete character of the early modern Ukrainian nation building had an ambiguous impact on the revived historical memory of Kyivan Rus'...

Apropos of recent events, my Mom remarked to me that she's not sure to what extent the Ukrainian side of her family conceived of themselves as distinctly Ukrainian at the time they emigrated, or for how long that was preserved - no doubt complicated by being Jews (and speaking Yiddish along with Russian and/or Ukrainian). The kids of her generation (i.e. boomers) were second generation Americans on that side of the family, and largely thought of Ukraine as "Russian" because Soviet. Their parents were as likely to describe themselves as Jews of Russian extraction as Ukrainian (I myself heard both versions from my great-aunts). Beyond that they had more residual attachment to more particular places their families had come from and told them stories about.
posted by snuffleupagus at 8:57 AM on March 14, 2022 [1 favorite]