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Draft profile of Ukrainian

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Linas
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Lithuania
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 Message 1 of 4
06 February 2006 at 8:04am | IP Logged 
INTRODUCTION
Ukraine is a new country which came into existence only in 1991 and is not very familiar to Westerners. Yet it roots go back to the Kievian Rus which existed in IX-XIII centuries, to the Great Duchy of Lithuania and to the Hetmanshchyna of Bohdan Khmel'nyts'kyi and Ivan Mazepa, to the heroic but unsuccesful freedom struggle of Symon Petliura and Stepan Bandera. It has suffered much oppression - social, political and religious - from both Russian(tzarist ans soviet) and Polish governments. Yet despite all oppression Ukrainians and Ukrainian language has not desappeared, even if they have suffered great losses. Now Ukranian nation has been building, 15 years already their own national home, among numerous difficulties. It would be very interesting to know this unique country on the crossroad of Catholic and Orthodox part of Europe.
Ukrainian was made the official language in 1991, and its situation has improved, yet it is still long way to go until Ukrainian really starts to perform all the functions of official and national language.

USEFULNESS
Ukrainian would be certainly useful if you intend to travel or do business in the Western Ukraine; in the Central-Eastern Ukraine you can very well do with Russian only, while in Southern-Eastern Ukraine and in Crimea you should better forget about Ukrainian
       
CHIC FACTOR      
The prestige of Ukrainian used to be rather low, it was considered both in Imperial and Soviet Union and in pre-war Poland as a second rank language(to the extent that speaking Ukrainian in public was considered inappropriate in some more russified places) but now the prestige of Ukrainian has increased considerably when it was declared the official language yet it still lags behind Russian.

ECONOMIC IMPORTANCE
Ukraine is a country with a middle degree of development, although lagging behind Russia, nevertheless it has good economical prospects; yet, the most developed regions of Ukraine are those who use only Russian or predominantly Russian

TRAVEL OPPORTUNITIES
On the contrary the most beautiful tourist spots are located in the predominantly Ukrainophone regions. You could see such interesting historical cities and towns as Lviv, Kamenets’-Podil’skij, Luts’k, Ternopil’, Kremenets', Mukacheve, Uzhhorod, Ostroh and many other and enjoy the beautiful scenery of Carpatian mountains and the exotic culture of Transcarpatian Hutzuls. From the rest of Ucraine the most interesting are such places as Kyiv and Poltava as well as completely russophone Crimea and Odessa, but the rest of non-Western Ukraine has little attractions for a tourist.

COUNTRIES
The only country where Ukrainian is spoken is Ukraine. Some Ukrainian-speaking minorities exist in Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Rumania. There are also emigrant communities in several countries, the biggest is in Canada.
Ukraine can be subdivided in three large zones

-Western Ukraine – oblasts of Lviv, Ternopil’, Ivano-Frankivs’k, Luts’k, Rivne, Chernivtsy and Zakarpattia plus the area around Kamenets-Podil’skij
It is predominantly Ukrainian speaking area.
-Central-Eastern Ukraine – oblasts of Khmel’nytskiy, Zhytomyr, Wynnytsia, Kyiv, Cherkassy, Sumy, Chernyhiv, Poltava
It is mixed Russo-Ukrainian area. In areas east to the Dnipro river the most of rural population speak mixed Russian-Ukrainian dialect called “surzhyk”, while in the area west to Dnipro, rural people and dwellers of small towns speak mostly dialectal Ukrainian. Russian(together with “surzhyk”) predominates in all larger cities within this area, yet there are also Ukrainian speakers and their numbers seems to be growing since 1991 when Ukrainian was declared the official language of Ukraine.
-Southern Eastern Ukraine – oblasts of Odessa, Mykolaiv, Kherson, Dnipropetrovsk, Kirovohrad, Zaporizhzha, Luhansk, Kharkiv, Donetsk – Russian is spoken there by the entire population, the local Russian accent can have some Ukrainian flavour, but otherwise it is normal Russian
-Crimean Autonomous Republic – the pure Russian of Russia is spoken there. There are some Crimean Tatars, but they all speak Russian as well.

SPEAKERS
About 20-25 millions speakers from about 50 millions. It is not easy to know exact numbers, since many of those who declare their mother language as Ukrainian, indeed speak “surzhyk” or even Russian, but consider themselves tobe ethnical Ukrainians and therefore declare Ukrainian as their mother tongue.      

VARIATIONS
Asides from the above mentioned “surzhyk”, there is a number of dialects, spoken mostly in countryside. The dialect of Zakarpattia(Transkarpatia), the Karpato-Rusyn, is fairly different from the Standard Ukrainian to be considered a separate language, but the most of people speak the Standard Ukrainian as well

CULTURE
Ukrainian culture is fairly different from Russian. It lacks the menacing, imperial, sovietist, kegebist aspect of Russian culture, and centers heavily around the heroism of Cossacks and other freedom fighters and the rural life. Again, the richest Ukrainian culture can be found in the Western Ukraine, while the Eastern Ukrainian culture, especially pop culture, lags strongly behind Russian culture. The most of the pop in Ukraine is in Russian.
The most important figures of the Ucrainian literature are Taras Shevchenko, Ivan Kotliarevskyi, Kvitko-Osnov'anenko, Panas Myrnyi, Marko Vovchok, Mykhailo Kotsiubynskyi, Lesia Ukrainka, Ivan Franko, Vasyl Stefanyk, Iurii Fedkovych, Maksym Ryl'sky, Ivan Pavlychko, Volodymyr Sosiura, Lina Kostenko, Pavlo Zahrebel'nyi, Ivan Drach, Vasyl Stus.
Among the know political figures one could mention princes Volodymyr Velykyi(who christianized Rus-Ukraine), Iaroslav Mudryi, Danilo Romanovych, army general of XVI century Konstatyn Ostrozhskyi, hetmans Bohdan Khmel'nytskyi and Ivan Mazepa, freedom fighters Symon Petliura and Stepan Bandera and more recently - dissident Chornovil and presidents Kravchuk and Iushchenko.
An interesting feature of Ukrainian culture is the notorous complication of its religious life. There are even four different groups to which the Ortodox Church has split - the Orthodox Church of Moscow Patriarchate, the Orthodoc Church of Kiev Patriarchate, the Ukrainian Autokephalian Orthodox Church and the Greco-Catholic Church. The latter is orthodox in rites, yet subservient to the Roman Pope. There are also some Roman catholics, also evangelical groups.

DIFFICULTIES
The same as for Russian, Polish and other Slav languages.

GRAMMAR
The grammar is very similar to that of Russian. An interesting feature is the special form of future tense -robytymu, robytymesh, robytyme(I will do etc) which does not exist in Polish or Russian. But Ukrainian can also use budu robyty etc. as in Russian.

PRONUNCIATION
Mostly as in Russian, but contains much less soft consonants as Russian or Polish. Ukrainian often has “i” where Russian has “e” or “o”, and Polish – ie/ia or o/o’. Ukrainian lacks the Russian sound of “bI” but instead has two different “i” sounds – one of them written with the Latin “i” sounds like “ee” in see and softens preceding consonant, while another one(transcribed as “y”) which is written with the Cyrillic “i”(u), sounds more like English “i” in “sit”. It does not softens preceding wovel.
Another important feature is the pronuciation of "h" in the place where Polish and Russian have "g"

eg. Russian perexod(p’ir’ix(u)ot) – Ukrainian perex’id - Polish przecho'd(pshexut) (passage)
     Polish robic’ (rob’ich’) – Ukrainian “robyty” (in Russian delat’) – make, do
     Russian mesto(m’(i)esta)(place) – Polish miasto(m’asto)(city) – Ukrainian misto(m’isto)(city)

Russian gora(gara) - Ukr. hora - Pol. (go'ra)(gura)(mountain)
Ukrainian hodyna - Polish godzina(godj'ina)(hour)(in Russian "hour" is "ch'as", while czas in Polish and chas in Ukrainian both mean "time", which in its turn is "vremia"(vr'em'a) in Russian)

VOCABULARY
Vocabulary has the most similarities with Polish, although some works of earlier Ukrainian writers (Ivan Kotliarevskyj, Kvitko-Osnovyanenko, Taras Shevchenko) were based on eastern dialect of Poltava and have vocabulary closer to Russian. Of course, modern Standard Ukrainian is also sufficiently close to Russian, but not to a degree that the most would imagine, since during the tzarist persecutions of 1864-1905 it developed mostly in Austrian Galicia where the local dialect had considerably more Polish than Russian vocabulary. A Russian would have much difficulty understanding standard Ukrainian if it is really Ukrainian and not “surzhyk”. However the grammar and phonetics of the Standard Ukrainian remains more or less the same as that of Shevchenko.

TRANSPARENCY
Those who know Polish or Russian will recognize lots of Ukrainian words and will understand a considerable deal of what is said, while those who know both Polish and Russian will certainly understand about 90%.

SPELLING
The same alphabet as for Russian, yet Ukrainian has several letters of its own and lacks several letters of the Russian alphabet.

TIME NEEDED
As for Russian or Polish, if one starts from scratch.Yet one will need much less time, if one already knows Polish or Russian, or some other Slavic language.

BOOKS
There are “Teach yourself Ukrainian”, “colloquial Ukrainian”, Ukrainian-English dictionary by Andrussyshin, and Ukrainian-English/English-Ukrainian dictionary by Oleg Benyukh that can be obtained through www.amazon.com.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0071434283/qid=1139262310/s r=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/102-4660956-9200922?s=books&v=glance& n=283155

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0415306264/qid=1139262388/s r=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/102-4660956-9200922?s=books&v=glance& n=283155

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0802064213/sr=1-5/qid=11392 62041/ref=sr_1_5/102-4660956-9200922?%5Fencoding=UTF8

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0781803748/sr=1-6/qid=11392 62041/ref=sr_1_6/102-4660956-9200922?%5Fencoding=UTF8

There is a book for rusophones "Izuchaem Ukraiskii Iazyk"(lets Learn Ukrainian), Moskva, Muravei,2004

PIMSLEUR UKRANIAN
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0671579568/ref=pd_sbs_b_2/1 02-4660956-9200922?%5Fencoding=UTF8&v=glance&n=283155

SCHOOLS
There certainly should be many schools of Ukrainian for Russophones, but I do not know if there are any for anglophones.

LINKS
http://www.castles.com.ua/ (touristic information about mostly Western Ukraine, in Ukrainian)
http://www.vesna.org.ua/txt/shevchenko/kobzar/alfavit.html - "Kobzar", the poetry of Taras Shevchenko
http://www.slovnyk.org.ua/ - online dictionary for English, Byelorussian, Polish, Russian and Ukrainian
http://www.vesna.org.ua/txt/index.html - library of texts in Ukrainian
http://www.ji.lviv.ua/index.htm - an online magazine in Ukrainian
http://www.karpatorusyns.org/weblog.php?id=C0_17_1 - the grammar of the Karpato-Rusyn dialect. Also contains links to some Orthodox pages in Russian.
http://www.ji.lviv.ua/n35texts/chuchka.htm
-two poems in Karpato-Rusyn
http://zakarpattyarid.narod.ru/slova.html - some specific words used in Karpato-Rusyn with their Ukrainian equivalents


Edited by Linas on 06 February 2006 at 6:09pm

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 Message 2 of 4
06 February 2006 at 2:51pm | IP Logged 
Linas thanks a million!
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Linas
Octoglot
Senior Member
Lithuania
Joined 6671 days ago

253 posts - 279 votes 
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Speaks: Lithuanian*, Russian, Latvian, French, English, German, Spanish, Polish
Studies: Slovenian, Greek, Hungarian, Arabic (Written), Portuguese

 
 Message 3 of 4
06 February 2006 at 4:20pm | IP Logged 
I have made some additions to the profile of Ukrainian.
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Russianbear
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 Message 4 of 4
01 April 2008 at 8:17pm | IP Logged 
This is not a horrible attempt at a profile for the most part, but unfortunately, at times this profile desires to not settle for being a language profile and aspires to being a political pamphlet, instead.


Quote:

CULTURE
Ukrainian culture is fairly different from Russian. It lacks the menacing, imperial, sovietist, kegebist aspect of Russian culture, and centers heavily around the heroism of Cossacks and other freedom fighters and the rural life. Again, the richest Ukrainian culture can be found in the Western Ukraine, while the Eastern Ukrainian culture, especially pop culture, lags strongly behind Russian culture. The most of the pop in Ukraine is in Russian.

Ukrainian and Russian cultures share the common Soviet past, and in fact they are very close, probably closer than American and Canadian cultures, or even the stereotypical cultures of certain US states.In many cases, it IS the same culture, as religion, world views, a lot of music, cinema, books are the same. Like you mentioned yourself, it is very hard to draw a border on the pop music, for example. Russian performers are popular in Ukraine and vice versa. And it is not just music - has the decision been made on whether Gogol is a Russian or Ukrainian writer yet?

And the comment about Russian culture is in bad taste. It is probably not reasonable to project one's own insecurities onto a language. I am not a big fan of contemporary Russian culture - the mainstream/pop culture- myself, but it seems to be a clear bias when Russian culture is dismissed as menacing and imperial. And "kegebist" is not even a word in English language(The menace of the Russian culture is making itself felt once more, I suppose - this time by polluting the perfectly fine English language rant in disguise of a language profile :) )

Russian culture is no more menacing than German one, the Lithuanian one, or those of the English speaking countries. All those countries may have had unfortunate events in their history, including Lithuania, but you don't see me making comments on how Lithuanian language hasn't quite shed the aura of collaboration with Hitler and SS legions and Holocaust. I would suggest using a political rather than linguistic forum to spread the political agenda. Besides, isn't this supposed to be a profile on Ukrainian, not Russian?

Linas wrote:
INTRODUCTION
to the heroic but unsuccesful freedom struggle of Symon Petliura and Stepan Bandera. It has suffered much oppression - social, political and religious - from both Russian(tzarist ans soviet) and Polish governments.
In Ukraine itself it is not a foregone conclusion that the roles of Petliura and Bandera were positive - especially that of the latter. Even among many of the Ukrainians who embraced the independence have not accepted the view that Bandera is a national hero. He has been involved with shady organizations that collaborated with Nazi Germany, and that have been known to have played a role in Holocaust and mass murders of Poles, etc. I am half Ukrainian myself and have spent a large part of my life in Ukraine and I have welcomed the independence, but I find it offensive that people (from Lithuania or anywhere else) would want to make it seem like Bandera is some sort of a national hero in the Ukraine. Lithuania may have embraced and/or forgotten the Nazi/SS affiliations of some of its "freedom fighters" - it is not up to me to judge- but there is no reason to pretend that Ukraine has. It is still very much a hot topic that is up for debate.

And if we are to remember the suffering of Ukrainians during the occupation of Ukraine by foreign powers, why have you left out the suffering during the occupation of Ukraine by Imperialist Lithuania? ( [URL=http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/79/Lithuanian_state_in_13-15th_centuries.png]see here[/URL]). One would think that being a Lithuania-based Ukraine expert, it wouldn't escape your research?

Edited by Russianbear on 01 April 2008 at 8:27pm



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