Question for Russians

S nastupajushem !   Sat Dec 27, 2008 11:18 pm GMT
In your opinion, Ukrainian language is dialect of Russian or separate language???? Thanks!
K. T.   Sun Dec 28, 2008 2:40 am GMT
If you ask Ukrainians, they will tell you it is a separate language. They were punished in school (I've been told) for using Ukrainian instead of Russian, so they probably have very strong feelings that could be roused with this topic. Russian and Ukrainian differ a little in their script as well. Ukrainian has a letter that looks like the letter "i" and Russian does not, for example.

Russians have given us some top-notch composers, but Ukrainian sounds more like singing when spoken (to me, anyway.)

I do not speak Ukrainian. I know a few words. On the other hand I can sometimes figure out texts in Ukrainian ever with my poor Russian, so there has to be a high level of mutual intelligibility between them.
Tupolev   Sun Dec 28, 2008 3:05 am GMT
They are definitely different languages, although there is a lot of mutual intelligibility. It is a similar situation to closely related Romance languages, for example, Spanish and Portuguese or maybe Catalan and Spanish.
olasz   Sun Dec 28, 2008 2:24 pm GMT
I'd like to know the main differences in morphology, verbal system, vocabolary and syntax between Russian and Ukrainian. I've learnt some Russian and in my view its morphology is rather complex and irregular compared to other slavic languages... what about Ukrainian?
Rui   Sun Dec 28, 2008 5:56 pm GMT
I would also like to know if the differences are wider than Portuguese vs Spanish for example.
The wikipedia page on east slavic languages does state some differences but I'm not able to understand if they are wider.
eastlander   Sun Dec 28, 2008 6:46 pm GMT
Ukrainian has many borrowings from Polish.
Rui   Tue Dec 30, 2008 10:15 pm GMT
gramatical borrowings? or vocabular ones?
eastlander   Thu Jan 01, 2009 5:05 pm GMT
I dont know :(((
eastlander   Thu Jan 01, 2009 8:59 pm GMT
5:05 pm it's not my post (I'm surprised-it's GRU?),but I say ,that is lexical borrowings.