28
votes
Accepted
Are the vast majority of Ukrainians more proficient in Russian than Ukrainian?
After researching this a bit, I'm posting an answer to my own question, but I want to say that I welcome more answers, especially if they bring other pieces of evidence.
A 2008 Gallup poll asked ...
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27
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How similar are Ukrainian and Russian?
Ukrainian and Russian are partially mutual intelligible. I as a native Russian speaker can read Ukrainian and usually understand the most but spoken Ukrainian is relatively hard to understand, ...
- 279
19
votes
How similar are Ukrainian and Russian?
You have 2 questions in 1:
How mutually intelligible the 2 languages are.
What's more practical to help refugees.
In terms of mutual intelligibility, it highly depends on context, an educated (the ...
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19
votes
How similar are Ukrainian and Russian?
The mutual intelligibility of the Slavic languages (going far beyond the pair Ukrainian and Russian) is a fascinating theme for linguistic research, and there are works out there trying to measure the ...
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18
votes
Accepted
Are there any languages where verbs in the past form are used with the future tense?
Let me explain it all in detail. The Slavic languages originally had 4 past tenses, of which two were simple and two analytical. The simple past tenses of the Old Church Slavonic verb “to see” видѣти (...
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14
votes
How similar are Ukrainian and Russian?
Russian and Ukranian are mutually intelligeable to a significant degree... perhaps to greater extent than, e.g., French and Italian. However, it is necessary to keep in mind that the situation with ...
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12
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Are the vast majority of Ukrainians more proficient in Russian than Ukrainian?
Looking at this from a software developer's perspective, there's a significant factor here that you may have overlooked. Translating a program or a website is a significant amount of work, testing, ...
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9
votes
Accepted
Do Russian-Ukrainian bilinguals or speakers immersed in both languages switch between the pair [ʂ ʐ] and [ʃ ʒ] when they switch between the languages?
TL;DR:
The difference between the two pairs is substantial.
Native speakers intuitively use phones so not to get trapped into the adjacent phoneme.
The differences between [ʃ ʒ] and [ʂ ʐ] are pretty ...
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8
votes
Are the vast majority of Ukrainians more proficient in Russian than Ukrainian?
The answer is certainly no.
We cannot say that this is true for the "vast" majority (say 80%), but maybe this is 50/50. In the south and east, people speak better russian due to their roots (...
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8
votes
Accepted
Why is "knife" in Ukrainian different from other Slavic languages?
This is one of the most salient and well-known features of Ukrainian, and the first mentioned in Wikipedia’s description of the history of the Ukrainian language; it is not just this word. The ...
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5
votes
How similar are Ukrainian and Russian?
Nearly all Ukrainians understand and speak Russian fluently, even from the west of the country (Lviv, Ivano-Frankovsk regions). This is not because the languages are similar but because Russian was ...
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3
votes
How Polish influenced Ukrainian
The reason why two languages differ is always complex, there's no one single factor, it's the combination of the factors. You can look at it as you've formulated, or you can look at it like Russian ...
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3
votes
Why is "knife" in Ukrainian different from other Slavic languages?
Is this part of a more general trend ("i" instead of "o"), or just this word?
The former, and the phenomena of this has a name in Ukrainian liguistic terminology: ikavism.
If it ...
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3
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Are there any languages where verbs in the past form are used with the future tense?
Alongside Yellow Sky's lovely answer, I do want to add that his answer does not seem to be the full story. The South Slavic languages he mentioned retaining those old analytical pasts still ...
2
votes
Accepted
Trilled R between a vowel and a consonant
You don't say what your acoustic models are, so perhaps the individual saying the words are not producing trills. Here are some examples of the Finnish word perkele, järvi, terve and sormi. You can't ...
- 82k
2
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Are there any languages where verbs in the past form are used with the future tense?
In Hebrew, the two main finite verb forms are originally aspectual rather than tensed: the Perfect (pa'al) denotes a completed act, and the Imperfect (yiph'al) an incomplete one. These are often used ...
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