Nuts and Bolts: The Russian and Ukrainian languages.

Claims are made that Russians and Ukrainians are the same people. In that case, you'd expect them to have the same language, or very nearly the same language.

And do they?

Well, let's put it this way: they both come from the Indo-European family (as do English and French and German), and both come from the East Slavic branch of it. But the languages split nearly a thousand years ago, probably in the 1100s, with Ukrainian being influenced by Polish and Slovak languages, and Russian by Old Church Slavonic.

Over the subsequent millennium there have been other reasons for the languages to diverge. For one, Peter the Great did what he could to Westernise Russian, and at times Ukrainian has been banned in the Russian Empire, which has had an influence on some of the Eastern parts of Ukraine. After the Soviet occupation of Ukraine in the early twentieth century Russian became the primary language used in all schools. This is the main reason why there are many Russian speakers in Ukraine today.

The Russian and Ukrainian alphabets may look the same to an outsider, but there are differences. Ukrainian has the letters Ґ ґ, Є є, Ї ї, and І і. Russian has the letters  ы, Ё ё, and ъ. But even if the alphabets are similar, well, so are the alphabets of English and Italian but that doesn't make them the same language. 

Even so, a Russian reading a Ukrainian text could probably make some sense of most of it.

How about vocabulary? The two languages share about sixty per cent of their words, and that means there's more difference between Russian and Ukrainian than there is between Italian and Spanish, which are eighty-two per cent similar as far as vocabulary is concerned. 

The difference in pronunciation is about the same as between Italian and Spanish.

Ah, but what about the politics?

Well, speaking Russian makes people want to be ruled by Russia in just the same way that speaking English makes an American want to be ruled by England. 

Inside Ukraine, communication between people speaking the different languages tends to use a mixture of the two. It's normal, and it works.

And, when something is working, trying to fix it with bombs is stark raving madness.

Word To Use Today: well, хай живе Україна, (khay zhyve Ukrayina) according to Google translate, means long live Ukraine. That'll do.