Has Ukraine’s President Poroshenko Forgotten How to Speak Ukrainian?

newsweek.com ^ | 1/15/16 at 8:58 AM | Damien Sharkov

[Trumpinator]

Has Ukraine’s President Poroshenko Forgotten How to Speak Ukrainian?

By Damien Sharkov On 1/15/16 at 8:58 AM

Poroshenko had bold words for Russia on Thursday but not all of them were in Ukrainian.

[Trumpinator]

One of the things about Europe is they are nuts - people who are essentially the same ethnicity look to make artificial differences with each other and they declare differences in dialect a separate language. It would be like people in Alabama declaring they don't speak English and speak a different language than the English of England, etc.

Take the word "mad".

In England it means more like "crazy" and in American English it tends to mean "angry". In Europe they will base a whole new language on these kinds of regional differences. They are just nuts there and you can see why they butcher themselves and to outsiders these two factions look identical and sound identical.

[vladimir998]

Russian and Ukrainian are related but are two separate languages since the Ukrainian language sounds softer than Russian and uses a slightly larger alphabet. Ukrainian has some different grammar rules - for example, an additional future tense, an additional past tense, a way of using adverbs that would be strange in Russian, and some other different syntax features. It has some sounds that don’t exist in standard Russian, like the h in hryvnia and the yi in Ukrayina, the name of the country; also, the e sound is used in Ukrainian much more frequently while in Russian it would be ye.

When Russians start playing the bandura then maybe I’ll consider them the same people: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJeBgeMcuyc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KAHyuVjjmg

The Russian commies tried to murder every single person who played the bandura in the 1920s and 1930s.

Even the Ukrainians are blown away when someone can play it well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdmp99xXBgU

[deks]

Dyakuyu

[Freelance Warrior]

Russian and Ukrainian are interintelligible in the written form without any formal instruction. The oral form requires a minimal experience. But speaking Ukrainian in the 'correct way' is a challenge even for most modern Ukrainians.

The 'language vs dialect' issue has no solution within the science, it's a political thing. There are dialects in Russian which differ grammatically from the literary Russian, e.g. with the definite article.

The 'Russian commies' thing is a manipulation since the ethnic Ukrainians of the Soviet era were equally Communist as the Russians.

[vladimir998]

“The ‘Russian commies’ thing is a manipulation since the ethnic Ukrainians of the Soviet era were equally Communist as the Russians.”

No. Russian commies invaded and imposed communism on Ukraine. Ukrainian communists were never anything other than servants of Russian communists.