You parade your abysmal linguistic ignorance before other ignorant readers.
"If [Ukrainian] it's such a distinct language, which does it look and sound exactly like Russian? ...
It seems like Americans saying that American English is a distinct language from English."
Absurd. Evidently, you do not speak Russian or Ukrainian. I learned Russian, but not Ukrainian.
My Russian professor certainly knew that Ukrainian is a distinct language.
"Today, Russian and Ukrainian are close relations: they share more vocabulary, grammar, and features of pronunciation with
each other than they do with the other Slavonic languages. 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).
As Russian and Ukrainian diverged from each other relatively recently (less than a millennium ago), they still share a lot of
basic and core vocabulary – but not enough to be considered dialects of a single language.
is that Ukrainian and Russian share about 62% of their vocabulary. This is about the same amount
of shared vocabulary that English has with Dutch, according to the
. If you expand your sample by scraping
internet data to compare a broader range of words than just those 200 ancient “core” words, the proportion of shared words
declines. One computational model suggests that Russian and Ukrainian share about
.
Using that higher figure of 62%, though, a Russian with no knowledge of Ukrainian (or vice versa) would understand roughly
five in eight words. To understand this, have a friend cross out three out of every eight words in a newspaper and see how
much of the text you can follow.
“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.
...
The similarities between the two 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
, 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.
In historical terms, then, neither name is more “original” – each contains changes that crept in over time.
...
The differences between Russian and Ukrainian amount to much more than what Putin dismissed in 2021 as “
”. By looking for “unity” in language between Russia and Ukraine, he was marshalling an argument that allowed
Russia the right to intervene in what he asserted to be Russian space."
Most writers here apparently have been cheering on Russia's invasion of Ukraine, so they may be motivated to deny,
however dishonestly, that Russian and Ukrainian are distinct, though related, languages.
