Russian Literature Of Ukraine
Historically, many famous writers of Russian literature were born and lived in Ukraine. Nikolai Gogol is probably the most famous example of shared Russo-Ukrainian heritage: Ukrainian by descent, he wrote in Russian, and significantly contributed to culture of both nations. Russian author Mikhail Bulgakov was born in Kyiv, as well as poet Ilya Erenburg. A number of notable Russian writers and poets hailed from Odessa, including Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov, Anna Akhmatova, Isaak Babel. Russian child poet Nika Turbina was born in Yalta, Crimea.
A significant number of contemporary authors from Ukraine write in Russian. This is especially notable within science fiction and fantasy genres. Kharkiv is considered the “capital city” of Ukrainian sci-fi and fantasy, it is home to several popular Russophone Ukrainian writers, such as H. L. Oldie ,Alexander Zorich,Andrei Valentinov, and Yuri Nikitin. Science fiction conventionZvezdny Most is held in Kharkiv annually. Russophone Ukrainian writers also hail from Kyiv, those include and Vladimir Arenev. Max Frei hails from Odessa, and Vera Kamsha was born in Lviv. Other Russophone Ukrainian writers of sci-fi and fantasy include Vladimir Vasilyev, Vladislav Rusanov, Alexander Mazin and Fyodor Berezin. RBG-Azimuth, Ukraine’s largest sci-fi and fantasy magazine, is published in Russian, as well as now defunct Realnost Fantastiki.
History Of The Russian And Ukrainian Languages
Both Russian and Ukrainian are Slavic languages from the Indo-European family. Russian is an official language of Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kirgizstan, while Ukrainian is the sole official national language of Ukraine. Due to a common history, Russian is widely spoken in Ukraine , Latvia, Lithuania, Georgia and many other ex-Soviet countries.
Russian is the largest native language to Europe but the modern language was formed only in the 18th century following the reforms of Peter the Great. In 1783 the first Russian dictionary appeared.
Ukrainian on the other hand has its origins in the medieval federation of Kievan Rus and after this was conquered by the Tatars, the language became known as Ruthenian, which was a mix of East Slavic languages. Modern written Ukrainian was first used in the 17th century during the heydey of the Cossack Hetmanate. At that time the first Kiev Mogila Collegium appears and it became the centre of cultural and language development of Ukraine.
Later on, Ukrainian was forbidden in the Russian Empire and refered to derogatorily as Little Russian while Russian was the official language. Ukrainian also became influenced a lot by Polish because of its geographical and political situation as western Ukraine was for a long time part of the Rzeczpospolita . So today we can see these two influences on Ukrainian as it has both Polish and Russian versions of many words.
Linguistic And Geopolitical Borders
As already stated, Russian and Ukrainian are separate languages. Any remaining debate over the fact is not really about vocabulary and alphabets. Throughout history, language has been a way for groups to form identity and rally around a cause. Theres no scientific way to prove that two languages are separate, so people can play up or play down differences to suit a certain narrative. When someone equates Russian and Ukrainian particularly given the situation today its not rooted in linguistic fact, its an argument about nationhood.
As the two languages stand today, there are about 30 million Ukrainian speakers in Ukraine and 138 million Russian speakers in Russia. The difference in size reflects the large difference in the two countries respective populations. The legacy of the USSRs occupation of Ukraine means many Ukrainians speak Russian as a second language , whereas comparatively few Russians speak Ukrainian. While there might be a certain amount of mutual intelligibility, knowing one of the languages is not enough to be able to speak the other.
This article was originally published on December 19, 2017 and has been updated.
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Nouns And Noun Phrases
English nouns are only inflected for number and possession. New nouns can be formed through derivation or compounding. They are semantically divided into and common nouns. Common nouns are in turn divided into concrete and abstract nouns, and grammatically into and .
Most count nouns are inflected for plural number through the use of the plural –s, but a few nouns have irregular plural forms. Mass nouns can only be pluralised through the use of a count noun classifier, e.g. one loaf of bread, two loaves of bread.
Regular plural formation:
- Singular: man, woman, foot, fish, ox, knife, mouse
- Plural: men, women, feet, fish, oxen, knives, mice
Possession can be expressed either by the possessive –s , or by the preposition of. Historically the -s possessive has been used for animate nouns, whereas the of possessive has been reserved for inanimate nouns. Today this distinction is less clear, and many speakers use –s also with inanimates. Orthographically the possessive -s is separated from a singular noun with an apostrophe. If the noun is plural formed with -s the apostrophe follows the -s.
Possessive constructions:
- With -s: The woman’s husband’s child
- With of: The child of the husband of the woman
Adjectives
Pronouns, case, and person
Both the second and third persons share pronouns between the plural and singular:
| theirs | themselves |
Prepositions
Does Adopting Loanwords Clutter Up The Language
Lexical borrowing is a natural phenomenon in all languages whose speakers are in regular contact withforeign speakers. The territory where the Ukrainian language is spoken has always bordered on and was in close contact with the iconic cultures of its period and region. This has significantly affected the language Ukrainians speak today.
Loanwords often come into a language in waves and can fill a certain area of use. For instance, before the Old Ukrainian language appeared, Proto-Slavic was replenished by loanwords from German in the military-political and domestic spheres, such as words for prince, helmet, king, sword, regiment, well, carrot, and radish. Later, in the 13th-14th centuries, Ukrainian was filled with Germanisms that were used in the field of handicrafts and trade, like the words for locksmith, furrier, wheelwright, fair, and account.
Close contacts with the steppe brought Turkic loanwords. In the times of Kozaks, Ukrainian was filled with even more Turkish words due to close connections with Crimea, for example, words for watermelon, pumpkin, cauldron, carpet, and barn. A lot of terms from a traditional Kozak vocabulary, including kozak itself, were in fact Turkish.
At the same time, Ukrainian was filling up with loanwords from many western neighbours: Polish, German, Hungarian, Romanian, and other languages.
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Spanish Speakers By Country
The following table shows the number of Spanish speakers in some 79 countries.
| Country |
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Most of the grammatical and features of Spanish are shared with the other . Spanish is a . The and systems exhibit two and two . In addition, articles and some and have a neuter gender in their singular form. There are about fifty forms per , with 3 tenses: past, present, future 2 for past: , 4 : indicative, subjunctive, conditional, imperative 3 persons: first, second, third 2 numbers: singular, plural 3 forms: infinitive, gerund, and past participle. The indicative mood is the one, while the subjunctive mood expresses uncertainty or indetermination, and is commonly paired with the conditional, which is a mood used to express “would” the imperative is a mood to express a command, commonly a one word phrase “¡Di!”, “¡Talk!”.
Verbs express by using different persons for formal and informal addresses.
Spanish is considered , meaning that subordinate or tend to be placed after head words. The language uses , and usuallythough not alwaysplaces after , as do most other Romance languages.
The phoneme // is in parentheses to indicate that it appears only in . Each of the voiced obstruent phonemes /b/, /d/, //, and // appears to the right of a pair of voiceless phonemes, to indicate that, while the voiceless phonemes maintain a phonemic contrast between plosive and fricative, the voiced ones alternate between plosive and approximant pronunciations.
Influence And Derived Languages
From the late 19th to the mid-20th century, thousands of Italians settled in Argentina, Uruguay, Southern Brazil and Venezuela, as well as in Canada and the United States, where they formed a physical and cultural presence.
In some cases, colonies were established where variants of regional were used, and some continue to use this regional language. Examples are , Brazil, where is used, and the town of near Puebla, Mexico each continues to use a derived form of dating back to the nineteenth century. Another example is , an ItalianSpanish once spoken in and especially in , and .
Starting in late times in much of Europe and the Mediterranean, Latin was replaced as the primary commercial language by Italian language variants . These variants were consolidated during the with the strength of Italy and the rise of and .
During that period, Italy held artistic sway over the rest of Europe. It was the norm for all educated gentlemen to make the , visiting Italy to see its great historical monuments and works of art. It thus became expected to learn at least some Italian. In England, while the classical languages and were the first to be learned, Italian became the second most common modern language after French, a position it held until the late 18th century when it tended to be replaced by German. , for instance, wrote some of his early poetry in Italian.
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Letter Names And Pronunciation
| Upright |
|---|
For other transliteration systems, see .
Notes:
There are also which are pronounced as a single sound: , which is pronounced /d/, like dg in knowledge, and , which is realized as /dz/. Examples: , , .
Official Language Of Ukraine
The Ukrainian language is the official state language of Ukraine. The language is an East Slavic language that is believed to have evolved from the Old East Slavic language that was spoken in the medieval state of Kievan Rus. The use of the Modern Ukrainian language became widely prevalent since the end of the 17th century. However, the use of the language was banned in the Russian Empires schools between 1804 till the end of the Russian Revolution. Currently, several government institutes in Ukraine regulate the standards of use of the Ukrainian language. It is written using a Cyrillic script variant.
In 2012, a new law was passed that allowed local languages that were spoken by at least 10% of the local population of an area to be declared as official languages of the area. Thus, Russian, the second most widely spoken language in the country, became the official language in a number of cities and oblasts in the eastern and southern parts of Ukraine. The language was now used in the administrative office work of these places. However, following the 2014 Ukrainian Revolution, the countrys Parliament voted against the regional language law and rendered Ukrainian as the only official language to be spoken in the country at all levels of government and administration. However, the then President Turchynov and the current President of Ukraine did not sign the law.
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Early New High German
Modern High German begins with the period, which the influential German dates 13501650, terminating with the end of the . This period saw the further displacement of Latin by German as the primary language of courtly proceedings and, increasingly, of literature in the . While these states were still part of the , and far from any form of unification, the desire for a cohesive written language that would be understandable across the many German-speaking and kingdoms was stronger than ever. As a spoken language German remained highly fractured throughout this period, with a vast number of often mutually incomprehensible being spoken throughout the German states the invention of the c. 1440 and the publication of in 1534, however, had an immense effect on standardizing German as a supra-dialectal written language.
The ENHG period saw the rise of several important cross-regional forms of German, one being gemeine tiutsch, used in the court of the , and the other being Meißner Deutsch, used in the in the .
Alongside these courtly written standards, the invention of the printing press led to the development of a number of printers’ languages aimed at making printed material readable and understandable across as many diverse dialects of German as possible. The greater ease of production and increased availability of written texts brought about increased standardization in the written form of German.
Ukrainians Would Like To Know Their Native Language Better
The gap between how many Ukrainians consider Ukrainian language native, and how many people use it in real life, is quite significant. Partly this is due to the fact that in Russian people can get more information. 21.6% of respondents would like to improve their level of knowledge of the Ukrainian language. It is interesting that the highest numbers on this issue are in those areas of Donetsk and Lugansk region, where it was possible to conduct the survey that is 33.4%. In other eastern regions, only 7.8% of the inhabitants would like to know Ukrainian better.
For those who reported their desire to know Ukrainian better, the researchers suggested choosing training options that they might like. The respondents were most interested in the idea of Ukrainian language courses in their spare time, fewer participants were interested in courses at work or at their place of study the next come distance courses, and last but not least are training programs for self-study. It is worth noting that the gap between the numbers is insignificant. Participants could note all the answers that they would be interested in trying, and given that these options scored almost the same number of points, we can assume that the majority of respondents noted all possible scenarios at once.
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English Loanwords And Calques In Other Languages
English has had a strong influence on the vocabulary of other languages. The influence of English comes from such factors as opinion leaders in other countries knowing the English language, the role of English as a world lingua franca, and the large number of books and films that are translated from English into other languages. That pervasive use of English leads to a conclusion in many places that English is an especially suitable language for expressing new ideas or describing new technologies. Among varieties of English, it is especially American English that influences other languages. Some languages, such as Chinese, write words borrowed from English mostly as , while others, such as Japanese, readily take in English loanwords written in sound-indicating script. Dubbed films and television programmes are an especially fruitful source of English influence on languages in Europe.
Government Efforts To Protect The Ukrainian Language
During the Soviet era, the population of Ukrainian speakers had drastically declined. By the mid-1980s, Ukrainians use in public life was greatly affected. However, after independence, the government of Ukraine wasted no time to launch programs and execute laws to ensure that the image and usage of Ukrainian were restored in Ukraine. The Ukrainisation policy established the language as the sole official language of Ukraine. It became the medium of instruction in schools across the country. Even foreign language films and television programs, including those in Russian, are dubbed or subtitled in Ukrainian.
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Cmo Se Usa El Idioma En La Guerra Entre Rusia Y Ucrania Hoy
Los idiomas siempre son política: qué idioma usas, qué dialecto tienes, si la forma en que ajustas cómo hablas se relaciona estrechamente con la historia cultural de tu comunidad y lo que las personas en el poder dicen sobre los idiomas.
Algunas de estas diferencias entre idiomas son grandes y evidentes. Un ejemplo claro es que el presidente ucraniano Zelenskyy cambió entre ucraniano y ruso en el mismo discurso, según se dirigía directamente a sus compañeros ucranianos o si enviaba un mensaje a las fuerzas rusas en su país. Otro ejemplo de la política en los idiomas puede verse en la reciente ley que obliga a los medios impresos registrados en Ucrania a publicar en ucraniano, (
Are There Any Language Barriers In Ukraine
Assuming you are asking if Ukrainians speak English, then yes, many Ukrainians do speak English. However, there can be language barriers depending on the region of Ukraine you are in and the level of education of the person you are speaking to. In rural areas of Ukraine it is usually hard to find someone speaking English, while in the cities that should not be a major problem.
In general, people in Kyiv and other large cities tend to have a better command of English than those in smaller towns or rural areas. Likewise, younger Ukrainians are more likely to be fluent in English than older generations. That said, even if someones English is not perfect, they will usually try their best to communicate with you and may even be able to switch to Russian if necessary.
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