# Ukrainian: few Latin-Greek derivations?



## ThomasK

@_Mod: I hope this is not too broad a question, but I can try to narrow it down by asking for 10 equivalents for Latin/ Greek root words or something the like in Ukrainian _

My student does not seem to recognize fairly common words with a Latin/ Greek root. I do not blame her for that but I would like to know whether Ukrainian has less such words than non-Slavic/... languages. 

For example: 
(a) information
(b) transport
(c) assistance
(d) result
(e) price
(f) commerce/ commercial
(g) traffic _[we do not have that in Dutch either, only a calque from French in my Flemish dialect]_
(h) bibliothèque/ library
(i) hospital
(j) impact OR influence

Thanks a lot!


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## jasio

Of course, it does! Especially that Ukraine is located quite far from the French-speaking world, separated by the German and Polish, isn't it? So it's a matter of a physical proximity and daily contacts with the native French speakers rather than a Slavic vs. non-Slavic opposition. Unless by "non-Slavic" you specifically refer to the Romance languages and languages used in the regions under a direct French influence. At the same time, in Ukrainian you can expect many more Greek loanwords (especially related to the religion and church) than in French or Dutch.

Many of the words you mentioned had been quite ordinary words used by regular people, which were inherited by the Romance languages directly from Latin. Some of them were then loaned by other languages to mean some fancy, abstract things discussed by elites. Hence, oftentimes, a Latin/French loanword is used as a specialized term used by the professionals, while a native word is used by a general population with a less precise meaning.

For example, people had been trading, helping and influencing each other for millennia before the Romans, so they developed local terms like market, commerce, price or impact, and loaning the Greek/Latin/French words was not needed. On the other hand, libraries and hospitals had not been that common, so once they were established, a new word was loaned along with the thing.
Besides, many Central-European languages experienced periods of the language purification, when in place of the loanwords, native terms were promoted, oftentimes artificially coined. I'm not sure specifically about the Ukrainian with this respect though.

Anyway, please find your list below, with the Ukrainian equivalents. The words which differ are marked bold for clarity. In case of "transport" I differentiated the noun and the verb meaning to illustrate a point mentioned above. English loaned the word quite naturally from Latin or French, so it's used to describe both the economical phenomenon and the act of transporting things from place to place. In Ukrainian the loanword is used only in the former meaning as it was loaned for the use in economy.

information - інформація (informaciya)
transport - транспорт (noun) - transport, *перевозити (verb) - perevozyty*
*assistance - допомога (dopomoha)*
result - результат (noun, rezultat)
*price - ціна (tsina)*
*commerce/ commercial - торгівля (torhivlya)*
*traffic - рух (rukh)*
bibliothèque/ library - бібліотека (biblioteka)
*hospital - лікарня (likarnya), *шпиталь (shpytal)
*impact OR influence - вплив (vplyv)*


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## ThomasK

jasio said:


> Of course, it does! Especially that Ukraine is located quite far from the French-speaking world, separated by the German and Polish, isn't it? So it's a matter of a physical proximity and daily contacts with the native French speakers rather than a Slavic vs. non-Slavic opposition.


I simply wondered whether Ukrainian (and Russian) possibly shunned foreign words, like the French did (and do): ordinateur (computer), logiciel (e-mail, I think), ... I would think that certain cultural aspects are fashionable and that in those cases the original word in the foreign languages might be used (as you suggest below: _hospital, library_). I noticed in previous days: 
- Butterbrot , German (not tartine)
- Strafe, German for 'fine'
- velociped, from French, I guess, but not bicylette
Why they use French words for farming is not so clear to me. 
HOWEVER, my key interest is the presence (or absence) of Latin/Greek root words. 


jasio said:


> Many of the words you mentioned had been quite ordinary words used by regular people, which were inherited by the Romance languages directly from Latin. Some of them were then loaned by other languages to mean some fancy, abstract things discussed by elites. Hence, oftentimes, a Latin/French loanword is used as a specialized term used by the professionals, while a native word is used by a general population with a less precise meaning.
> 
> For example, people had been trading, helping and influencing each other for millennia before the Romans, so they developed local terms like *market, commerce, price or impact,* and loaning the Greek/Latin/French words was not needed. On the other hand, *libraries and hospitals* had not been that common, so once they were established, a new word was loaned along with the thing.


OK, I agree... 


jasio said:


> Besides, many Central-European languages experienced periods of the *language purification*, when in place of the loanwords, native terms were promoted, oftentimes artificially coined. I'm not sure specifically about the Ukrainian with this respect though.


That is what I supposed, but I seem to find only some that could fit in that category, below... 


jasio said:


> Anyway, please find your list below, with the Ukrainian equivalents. The words which differ are marked bold for clarity.


Perfect, thanks!


jasio said:


> In case of "transport" I differentiated the noun and the verb meaning to illustrate a point mentioned above. English loaned the word quite naturally from Latin or French, so it's used to describe both the economical phenomenon and the act of transporting things from place to place. In Ukrainian the loanword is used only in the former meaning as it was loaned for the use in economy.
> 
> information - інформація (informaciya)
> transport - транспорт (noun) - transport, *перевозити (verb) - perevozyty*
> *assistance - допомога (dopomoha)And*
> result - результат (noun, rezultat)
> *price - ціна (tsina)*
> *commerce/ commercial - торгівля (torhivlya)*
> *traffic - рух (rukh)*
> bibliothèque/ library - бібліотека (biblioteka)
> *hospital - лікарня (likarnya), *шпиталь (shpytal)
> *impact OR influence - вплив (vplyv)*


I think I'll check with the Ukrainian lady. Of course if a word is shortened, like /spital/, it makes things more difficult. 
I do think though that my student did not seem to recognize something like "information" in English, nor "transport". Could you me the root in /torhivlya/? is it something like trade? And the root of /vplyy/?


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## pimlicodude

ThomasK said:


> @_Mod: I hope this is not too broad a question, but I can try to narrow it down by asking for 10 equivalents for Latin/ Greek root words or something the like in Ukrainian _
> 
> My student does not seem to recognize fairly common words with a Latin/ Greek root. I do not blame her for that but I would like to know whether Ukrainian has less such words than non-Slavic/... languages.
> 
> For example:
> (a) information
> (b) transport
> (c) assistance
> (d) result
> (e) price
> (f) commerce/ commercial
> (g) traffic _[we do not have that in Dutch either, only a calque from French in my Flemish dialect]_
> (h) bibliothèque/ library
> (i) hospital
> (j) impact OR influence
> 
> Thanks a lot!


Firstly, a Ukrainian student is just as likely to be a native speaker of Russian, not Ukrainian. All cities in the Ukraine apart from Lviv are Russian-speaking by a large majority, including Kiev. So asking whether the Ukrainian language has certain roots or not misses the point that it is likely that she may have just merely learnt Ukrainian in school rather than being a native speaker of it. Unless she comes from Lviv or a from a small village, that is likely to be the case.

Secondly, some Ukrainian words are more international than the Russian equivalent. Russian has звонить zvonit', where Ukrainian has телефонувати telefonuvaty for "to phone". And Russian has бумага bumaga, where Ukrainian has папір papir for "paper".

I'm afraid - and we are talking reality here - that people do vary in their intelligence levels. This is a normal fact of life.

[Note: many Ukrainians claim to be native speakers of Ukrainian - because it their "heritage" language - where on closer questioning, they hardly speak it at all. The same thing happens in Ireland, where 40% tell the census they are native speakers of Irish.]


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## ThomasK

pimlicodude said:


> Firstly, a Ukrainian student is just as likely to be a native speaker of Russian, not Ukrainian. All cities in the Ukraine apart from Lviv are Russian-speaking by a large majority, including Kiev. So asking whether the Ukrainian language has certain roots or not misses the point that it is likely that she may have just merely learnt Ukrainian in school rather than being a native speaker of it. Unless she comes from Lviv or a from a small village, that is likely to be the case.


This is not quite new to me, but I have never heard this kind of story. Now, I did know there are relatively few differences between Ukrainian and Russian. Mainly lexical if I am not mistaken. She herself has never said she spoke Russian whereas she comes from a village not too far from Kiev; she does not correct me if I ask for a translation in Ukrainian or something. Of course in the present circumstances the differences will be highlighted, for sure. But I would be interested in hearing more about your view. Could you refer to articles or websites that corroborate your view? (In English/ GER/ FRE preferably)
However, my starting point is: I want to know whether it makes sense to try to find common words (and/ or roots), like those L/G-root words, which generally only differ by their endings. 


pimlicodude said:


> Secondly, some Ukrainian words are more international than the Russian equivalent. Russian has звонить zvonit', where Ukrainian has телефонувати telefonuvaty for "to phone". And Russian has бумага bumaga, where Ukrainian has папір papir for "paper".


Is there any explanation for that? I would have expected the opposite...


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## pimlicodude

ThomasK said:


> This is not quite new to me, but I have never heard this kind of story. Now, I did know there are relatively few differences between Ukrainian and Russian. Mainly lexical if I am not mistaken. She herself has never said she spoke Russian whereas she comes from a village not too far from Kiev; she does not correct me if I ask for a translation in Ukrainian or something. Of course in the present circumstances the differences will be highlighted, for sure. But I would be interested in hearing more about your view. Could you refer to articles or websites that corroborate your view? (In English/ GER/ FRE preferably)
> However, my starting point is: I want to know whether it makes sense to try to find common words (and/ or roots), like those L/G-root words, which generally only differ by their endings.
> 
> Is there any explanation for that? I would have expected the opposite...


Well, on the language situation, you can refer to Google and Wikipedia. I've attached a map of the language situation according to a Ukrainian university. The Kiev region is strongly Russian-speaking in the city area. The village areas have more Surzhyk (a mix of Ukrainian and Russian in the same sentence that is not considered correct in either language). 

The map only refers to the majority language in the relevant areas (apart from the areas where small minority Greek and other languages are shown with an M, meaning "minority"). It does not mean that there are no speakers of Ukrainian in areas shown as Russian-speaking or vice versa.

The reason Ukrainian has many Western words is because of centuries of Polish influence before the Ukraine was reunited with Russia in the 1600s.


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## ThomasK

Interesting, valuable information. Thanks. I wonder whether anyone here wishes to add anything to that...


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## wyrzyk

ThomasK said:


> I simply wondered whether Ukrainian (and Russian) possibly shunned foreign words, like the French did (and do): ordinateur (computer), logiciel (e-mail, I think), ... I would think that certain cultural aspects are fashionable and that in those cases the original word in the foreign languages might be used (as you suggest below: _hospital, library_). I noticed in previous days:
> - Butterbrot , German (not tartine)
> - Strafe, German for 'fine'
> - velociped, from French, I guess, but not bicylette
> Why they use French words for farming is not so clear to me.
> HOWEVER, my key interest is the presence (or absence) of Latin/Greek root words.
> 
> OK, I agree...
> 
> That is what I supposed, but I seem to find only some that could fit in that category, below...
> 
> Perfect, thanks!
> 
> I think I'll check with the Ukrainian lady. Of course if a word is shortened, like /spital/, it makes things more difficult.
> I do think though that my student did not seem to recognize something like "information" in English, nor "transport". Could you me the root in /torhivlya/? is it something like trade? And the root of /vplyy/?


torh = market/auction/haggling, related to Russian torg, Polish targ, Czech/Slovak trh, Serbocroatian trg… the word was also borrowed into Old Norse, giving Swedish/Norwegian/Icelandic torg, Danish torv, Finnish tori.


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## Drakonica

ThomasK said:


> Could you me the root in /torhivlya/? is it something like trade? And the root of /vplyy/?


Proto-Slavic:
- *plyvati - to sweem, to flow, to leak

Ukrainian:
- плавати [plavaty] - to sweem
- вплив [vplyv] - an influence

prefix: в [v-] (to-, into-)



ThomasK said:


> I wonder whether anyone here wishes to add anything to that...



Latin:
- hospes - a guest

English:
- a hospital

гість [hist'] - a guest
хост  [khost] - a host
готель[hotel] - a hotel
хостел [khostel] - a hostel
---------------
асистент [asystent] - an assistant


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## Awwal12

pimlicodude said:


> Firstly, a Ukrainian student is just as likely to be a native speaker of Russian, not Ukrainian. All cities in the Ukraine apart from Lviv are Russian-speaking by a large majority, including Kiev. So asking whether the Ukrainian language has certain roots or not misses the point that it is likely that she may have just merely learnt Ukrainian in school rather than being a native speaker of it. Unless she comes from Lviv or a from a small village, that is likely to be the case.


The share of people who use Ukrainian as the first language has noticeably increased since the 1990s. But Russian is nearly invariably either the first or the second language, and for a great share of Ukrainians it's, indeed, the first language (while the knowledge of Ukrainian may be mostly passive), that much is true.

The map is curious as it regards Surzhik as a separate idiom, while in reality it's just Ukrainian saturated with non-standard words of Russian origin (mostly technical terms, words of higher culture and the like). Effectively it somehow presupposes that all the remaining Ukrainian speakers speak pure standard literary Ukrainian, which is as absurd as claiming that all Russians speak pure standard literary Russian (with no slangish loans and calques from English to begin with). However, it does reflect the stigmatization of "non-pure" forms of Ukrainian in the more educated circles, which often leads to people using (or claiming to use) Russian as their first language instead.


Drakonica said:


> Latin:
> - hospes - a guest
> 
> English:
> - a hospital
> 
> гість [hist'] - a guest
> хост  [khost] - a host
> готель[hotel] - a hotel
> хостел [khostel] - a hostel
> ---------------
> асистент [asystent] - an assistant


Гість is an inherited Slavic word (cf. Rus. гость /gost'/ etc.). The remaining are relatively recent loans from various European languages.


jasio said:


> price - ціна (tsina)


Curiously, cf. Rus. прайс (prays) - a price list (a common colloquial term among people employed in trading, though not much beyond those circles), a shortening of прайс-лист.

Overall I find it difficult to believe that a modern Ukrainian citizen, regardless of his or her first language, fails to recognize "information" or "transport" in English (or, to that matter, in any European language), as long as he or she doesn't suffer from some terminal linguistic issues. After all, people in Ukraine not only are predominantly biligual but also typically learn English at school, even if at the "London is ze kepital of Great Britain" level.


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## pimlicodude

Awwal12 said:


> The share of people who use Ukrainian as the first language has noticeably increased since the 1990s. But Russian is nearly invariably either the first or the second language, and for a great share of Ukrainians it's, indeed, the first language (while the knowledge of Ukrainian may be mostly passive), that much is true.
> 
> The map is curious as it regards Surzhik as a separate idiom, while in reality it's just Ukrainian saturated with non-standard words of Russian origin (mostly technical terms, words of higher culture and the like). Effectively it somehow presupposes that all the remaining Ukrainian speakers speak pure standard literary Ukrainian, which is as absurd as claiming that all Russians speak pure standard literary Russian (with no slangish loans and calques from English to begin with). However, it does reflect the stigmatization of "non-pure" forms of Ukrainian in the more educated circles, which often leads to people using (or claiming to use) Russian as their first language instead.
> 
> Гість is an inherited Slavic word (cf. Rus. гость /gost'/ etc.). The remaining are relatively recent loans from various European languages.
> 
> Curiously, cf. Rus. прайс (prays) - a price list (a common colloquial term among people employed in trading, though not much beyond those circles), a shortening of прайс-лист.
> 
> Overall I find it difficult to believe that a modern Ukrainian citizen, regardless of his or her first language, fails to recognize "information" or "transport" in English (or, to that matter, in any European language), as long as he or she doesn't suffer from some terminal linguistic issues. After all, people in Ukraine not only are predominantly biligual but also typically learn English at school, even if at the "London is ze kepital of Great Britain" level.


They probably say "ze gepital", as an unaspirated k sounds like g to English native speakers (because of the weakly voiced g in English). For some reason, Russians/Ukrainians are not taught aspiration (of p, t, k and ch at the beginning of a word, and at the beginning of non-initial stressed syllables), but it is vital in order to get a good accent in English.

I think there are various flavours of Surzhyk. In the East, you could have more Russian in the Surzhyk and in the West more Ukrainian. It's not a stable mix. And so the definitional problem will always be there: should Surzhyk speakers be classified as Ukrainian speakers? And is self-identification OK? E.g. someone could tell a pollster he speaks Russian on a daily basis, whereas objective analysis of his "Russian" could reveal it to be Surzhyk.


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## Drakonica

Awwal12 said:


> Гість is an inherited Slavic word (cf. Rus. гость /gost'/ etc.). The remaining are relatively recent loans from various European languages.


You're right 

Proto-European: *ghostis - a stranger
Proto-Slavic:   *gostь - a stranger, a guest
gość / гость [gost'] / гість [hist'] - a guest

So this is the rare case when a word that sounds similar in Slavic, Romance and Germanic languages is not a later loan from Latin.



ThomasK said:


> HOWEVER, my key interest is the presence (or absence) of Latin/Greek root words.
> 
> I want to know whether it makes sense to try to find common words (and/ or roots), like those L/G-root words, which generally only differ by their endings.


Slavic languages are a separate language family that developed in an area geographically distant from Western Europe. It's not a matter of avoiding western words, it's a matter of having our own different words for most things and activities that people have known for millennia. We borrowed western words in later times along with western religion, advanced material culture, and science.

So I think it's pointless to look for common word roots for most of everyday words.



pimlicodude said:


> For some reason, Russians/Ukrainians are not taught aspiration (of p, t, k and ch at the beginning of a word, and at the beginning of non-initial stressed syllables), but it is vital in order to get a good accent in English.


We don't hear it. And the phenomenon itself is difficult for us to recreate.


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## pimlicodude

Drakonica said:


> We don't hear it. And the phenomenon itself is difficult for us to recreate.


You can put a piece of paper in front of your mouth and say "put, talk, kill, church" in a way that moves the piece of paper. And try "abdicate" where the c has no aspiration, and "abdication" where the c has aspiration (because it is at the beginning of a stressed syllable), and so the paper should move.


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## Drakonica

pimlicodude said:


> And try "abdicate" where the c has no aspiration, and "abdication" where the c has aspiration


I'm sorry but I must be a hopeless case 
I have listened many times:

Tłumacz Google

And for me "c" in both words sounds the same, maybe in "abdicate" I hear a tiny k(h), so the opposite of what you said.

And here:

ABDICATE | Pronunciation in English
abdication

The main difference I hear is between British and American pronunciation.
I can hear in the US version a weak k(h) in both words.


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## pimlicodude

Drakonica said:


> I'm sorry but I must be a hopeless case
> I have listened many times:
> 
> Tłumacz Google
> 
> And for me "c" in both words sounds the same, maybe in "abdicate" I hear a tiny k(h), so the opposite of what you said.
> 
> And here:
> 
> ABDICATE | Pronunciation in English
> abdication
> 
> The main difference I hear is between British and American pronunciation.
> I can hear in the US version a weak k(h) in both words.


You can listen to many native speakers on forvo.com. You need a natural pronunciation, and some of these audio files are of people speaking slowly, syllable by syllable, for a dictionary. What I stated is the standard and accepted rule in English linguistics. If you don't believe it to be so, then that is your choice. Maybe you can post your own audio file of these words?


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## Drakonica

pimlicodude said:


> You can listen to many native speakers on forvo.com. You need a natural pronunciation, and some of these audio files are of people speaking slowly, syllable by syllable, for a dictionary. What I stated is the standard and accepted rule in English linguistics. If you don't believe it to be so, then that is your choice.


I believe, I have no reason not to believe something that a native speaker says. I'm just saying that people are often blind to linguistic phenomena that don't exist in their own language.



> Maybe you can post your own audio file of these words?


Maybe after being sick, but my English pronunciation is rather suitable for language jokes


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## pimlicodude

Drakonica said:


> I believe, I have no reason not to believe something that a native speaker says. I'm just saying that people are often blind to linguistic phenomena that don't exist in their own language.
> 
> 
> Maybe after being sick, but my English pronunciation is rather suitable for language jokes


Drakonica, here I am saying abdicate and abdication: aspiration.mp3


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## jasio

pimlicodude said:


> The reason Ukrainian has many Western words is because of centuries of Polish influence before the Ukraine was reunited with Russia in the 1600s.


It's a bit off-top here, but I dare to object a few claims here. 

The term "reunited" suggests that Russia and Ukraine had been united and then they were separated. It's too complex to be discussed here, but I would call it a very bold claim. In short, Russia attempts to hook up to the history and the tradition of the Kievan Rus although when Moscow gained any political significance, the former was as much a part of the history, as the Napoleonic wars are today. 
If by mentioning 1600s you refer to the Pereiaslav Agreement (what else?), the cossacks did not and could not represent the whole "Ukraine" - whether understood as in 1600s, nor even less the Ukraine as it's understood today. They represented only themselves (ie. the cossacks and the lands under the rule of the cossack elders), so the treaty concerned only the Dnieper Ukraine. Not even mentioning, that as soon as two years after it had been signed, the cossacks felt cheated by the tsar of Moscow and signed a Treaty of Hadiach with Poland and Lithuania (or, more precisely, with the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania - as using modern terms in historical contexts is only misleading). In short: it was only one of myriads of similar treaties signed among various parties, without any deeper political consequences except for a mere fact that it gave the tsars (as well as the comrades in USSR and Putin nowadays) a reason to claim the power over Ukraine. You may think of it as a an attempt to "reunite" Normandy and the whole Atlantic coast with the UK, based on the tradition and heritage of William the Conqueror.
Historically speaking, Ukraine was "united" with Russia (forcefully, of course) only after 1939, under the agreement between Stalin and Hitler. And, after a short break resulting from the war between the countries ruled by those gentlemen, since 1944. Only then the lands which can be considered "Ukrainian" found themselves under the Russian rule. 
Not mentioning that the modern borders of Ukraine were established only in 1954, when the Crimean peninsula was "gifted" by the Russian SSR to the Ukrainian SSR - a correction which at the time seemed to have only administrative consequences, like moving a few parishes from county to county in the UK.


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## jasio

pimlicodude said:


> You can listen to many native speakers on forvo.com. You need a natural pronunciation, and some of these audio files are of people speaking slowly, syllable by syllable, for a dictionary. What I stated is the standard and accepted rule in English linguistics. If you don't believe it to be so, then that is your choice. Maybe you can post your own audio file of these words?


Believe me, many Slavic English speakers do want to sound correctly in English - or, at least we want to sound understandably. But we do NOT hear the difference between aspirated and unaspirated "p", unless we are specifically trained. Just as you (and most of the European learners) are deaf to, say, the tones in the tonal languages. The opposition between aspirated and unaspirated consonants does NOT exist in our languages. The primary oppositions between the consonants in the Slavic languages are between voiced and voiceless consonants as well as between palatalised and velarized consonants. To which, by the way, foreign speakers are often deaf and have hard time to distinguish and pronounce them correctly.

And since the teachers of the English language typically are not native speakers themselves, they may not even be aware of the issue. During my long years of the English classes - including a year with a native speaker - the teachers did not explain the aspiration even once. And when I incidentally learned about the English aspirated consonants, I considered the phenomenon to be a kind of an additional, specific trait of some speakers, but otherwise without a deeper significance. Like - say - a rolling "r" or pronouncing "t" as "ch" on some occasions. Or lisping for that matter. Only a few days ago (!), quite accidentally, I learned from a video on YouTube a significance of aspiration for understanding the spoken language. In this situation your paper test or even recordings are not very helpful. 

BTW, we also have hard time with short and long vowels (except for the Czechs and Slovaks, who distinguish them natively), week forms, articles (except for Bulgarians) and quite a bunch of other phenomena, which the uneducated native speakers often are not even aware of - except that they hear a foreign accent.


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## pimlicodude

jasio said:


> It's a bit off-top here, but I dare to object a few claims here.
> 
> The term "reunited" suggests that Russia and Ukraine had been united and then they were separated. It's too complex to be discussed here, but I would call it a very bold claim. In short, Russia attempts to hook up to the history and the tradition of the Kievan Rus although when Moscow gained any political significance, the former was as much a part of the history, as the Napoleonic wars are today.
> If by mentioning 1600s you refer to the Pereiaslav Agreement (what else?), the cossacks did not and could not represent the whole "Ukraine" - whether understood as in 1600s, nor even less the Ukraine as it's understood today. They represented only themselves (ie. the cossacks and the lands under the rule of the cossack elders), so the treaty concerned only the Dnieper Ukraine. Not even mentioning, that as soon as two years after it had been signed, the cossacks felt cheated by the tsar of Moscow and signed a Treaty of Hadiach with Poland and Lithuania (or, more precisely, with the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania - as using modern terms in historical contexts is only misleading). In short: it was only one of myriads of similar treaties signed among various parties, without any deeper political consequences except for a mere fact that it gave the tsars (as well as the comrades in USSR and Putin nowadays) a reason to claim the power over Ukraine. You may think of it as a an attempt to "reunite" Normandy and the whole Atlantic coast with the UK, based on the tradition and heritage of William the Conqueror.
> Historically speaking, Ukraine was "united" with Russia (forcefully, of course) only after 1939, under the agreement between Stalin and Hitler. And, after a short break resulting from the war between the countries ruled by those gentlemen, since 1944. Only then the lands which can be considered "Ukrainian" found themselves under the Russian rule.
> Not mentioning that the modern borders of Ukraine were established only in 1954, when the Crimean peninsula was "gifted" by the Russian SSR to the Ukrainian SSR - a correction which at the time seemed to have only administrative consequences, like moving a few parishes from county to county in the UK.


No, Jasio. The Ukraine is a descendant of the Kievan Rus, and the Kievan Rus did include Galicia (incl Lvov). In 1054, when Yaroslav I died, the Kievan Rus went right up to Karelia, next to Finland, and Novgorod was long part of the Kievan Rus. When the Rostov-Suzdal' principality was incorporated in the Kievan Rus' in the 10th century, that included the area that would become Moscow too.

Wikipedia says:


> В 911 году Ростов назван в числе пяти крупнейших городов, подвластных киевскому князю Олегу. В него посылали наместников сначала новгородские, а после 882 года — киевские князья.



The Rostov-Suzdal' area was part of Kievan Rus from at least 911 until Kievan Rus fell to the Mongols in the 1240s. The Rurikids ruled Galicia until the 14th century, and *a separate branch of the Rurikids* ruled the Duchy of Moscow right up until 1612, when the Romanovs took over.

And yes, England does have a strong historical claim to Normandy, especially Calais, which was once part of England (it was in law part of England) and sent MPs to the English House of Commons. It sent 2 MPs to the House of Commons from 1536-1558.


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## pimlicodude

jasio said:


> Believe me, many Slavic English speakers do want to sound correctly in English - or, at least we want to sound understandably. But we do NOT hear the difference between aspirated and unaspirated "p", unless we are specifically trained. Just as you (and most of the European learners) are deaf to, say, the tones in the tonal languages. The opposition between aspirated and unaspirated consonants does NOT exist in our languages. The primary oppositions between the consonants in the Slavic languages are between voiced and voiceless consonants as well as between palatalised and velarized consonants. To which, by the way, foreign speakers are often deaf and have hard time to distinguish and pronounce them correctly.
> 
> And since the teachers of the English language typically are not native speakers themselves, they may not even be aware of the issue. During my long years of the English classes - including a year with a native speaker - the teachers did not explain the aspiration even once. And when I incidentally learned about the English aspirated consonants, I considered the phenomenon to be a kind of an additional, specific trait of some speakers, but otherwise without a deeper significance. Like - say - a rolling "r" or pronouncing "t" as "ch" on some occasions. Or lisping for that matter. Only a few days ago (!), quite accidentally, I learned from a video on YouTube a significance of aspiration for understanding the spoken language. In this situation your paper test or even recordings are not very helpful.
> 
> BTW, we also have hard time with short and long vowels (except for the Czechs and Slovaks, who distinguish them natively), week forms, articles (except for Bulgarians) and quite a bunch of other phenomena, which the uneducated native speakers often are not even aware of - except that they hear a foreign accent.


Well, I will say this: foreigners are often able to speak a language fluently, but technically badly, and yet find themselves quite comprehensible to themselves and also to native speakers.

E.g. Slavs who speak English with no articles, never use the perfect tense, and don't use the continuous tenses, find we can understand them. So in what sense are those things "vital" to the language? They are vital to sounding native, but people including government leaders do attend meetings and use this foreigners' English, and they do just fine.

So English native speakers who speak Slavic languages, with no distinction between palatalised and velarised consonants, paying no attention to verb aspects, and fluffing the cases in most instances, and "winging it" when it comes to verbs of motion --- they sound like poor speakers of those Slavic languages, and yet the Slavs understand this "foreigners' Slavic".

Maybe all languages contain "extra encoded information" that can be dropped without subtracting from intelligibility? All the same, it is best to try to get as close as you can to the native speakers' gold standard.


----------



## Drakonica

jasio said:


> Historically speaking, Ukraine was "united" with Russia (forcefully, of course) only after 1939, under the agreement between Stalin and Hitler. And, after a short break resulting from the war between the countries ruled by those gentlemen, since 1944. Only then the lands which can be considered "Ukrainian" found themselves under the Russian rule.


And the Ukrainians commented on the concept of reunification Kyiv with Moscow in one short and simple meme 

https://i.redd.it/g32sj10ikg651.jpg


----------



## pimlicodude

Drakonica said:


> And the Ukrainians commented on the concept of reunification Kyiv with Moscow in one short and simple meme
> https://i.redd.it/g32sj10ikg651.jpg


But no Russian has ever said "Moscow is the mother of Kiev". They have always said "Kiev is the mother of Russian cities". Киев - мать городов русских.


----------



## Drakonica

jasio said:


> Only a few days ago (!), quite accidentally, I learned from a video on YouTube a significance of aspiration for understanding the spoken language.


I started learning English in the early 90's. In the beginning, mostly on my own and from recordings. In college at the turn of the 20th and 21st century, I studied regularly, although I never became fluent. I learned that there is such a thing as aspiration in "p", "t" a few years ago from YT. I found out about the aspiration in "k" from this thread.



jasio said:


> European learners) are deaf to, say, the tones in the tonal languages.


You don't have to look that far.

A few years ago I was looking on YT for information on how to properly pronounce the Russian "щ" because in Polish school I was taught the antediluvian pronunciation: "shch" and the Russians on YT pronounced it like a softened /sh/.

The Russian in the video showed the difference between the Russian "ш" /sh/ and "щ" /sh'/, and the English-speaking commentators below claimed that they did not see any difference between the sounds because

- English [ʃ] is an intermediate sound between,
- harder Slavic [ʂ],
- and softened Slavic [ɕ],

But they were random Anglophones from the Internet. Meanwhile, as I recently wrote in another thread, even the IPA and Western linguists do not see the difference between the sounds:

AS - [ś]
śruba - [ˈɕrubä]

AS - [š']
щука - [ˈɕːukə]

Describing both using [ɕ] in a situation where, for example, for Poles, both sounds are clearly different and are also distinguished in the Slavistic Phonetic Alphabet.


----------



## pimlicodude

Drakonica said:


> I started learning English in the early 90's. In the beginning, mostly on my own and from recordings. In college at the turn of the 20th and 21st century, I studied regularly, although I never became fluent. I learned that there is such a thing as aspiration in "p", "t" a few years ago from YT. I found out about the aspiration in "k" from this thread.
> 
> 
> You don't have to look that far.
> 
> A few years ago I was looking on YT for information on how to properly pronounce the Russian "щ" because in Polish school I was taught the antediluvian pronunciation: "shch" and the Russians on YT pronounced it like a softened /sh/.
> 
> The Russian in the video showed the difference between the Russian "ш" /sh/ and "щ" /sh'/, and the English-speaking commentators below claimed that they did not see any difference between the sounds because
> 
> - English [ʃ] is an intermediate sound between,
> - harder Slavic [ʂ],
> - and softened Slavic [ɕ],
> 
> But they were random Anglophones from the Internet. Meanwhile, as I recently wrote in another thread, even the IPA and Western linguists do not see the difference between the sounds:
> 
> AS - [ś]
> śruba - [ˈɕrubä]
> 
> AS - [š']
> щука - [ˈɕːukə]
> 
> Describing both using [ɕ] in a situation where, for example, for Poles, both sounds are clearly different and are also distinguished in the Slavistic Phonetic Alphabet.


Not just p, t and k, but also ch is aspirated. The first ch in "church" has aspiration. (Slavistic is in the OED, but is an extremely rare word.)


----------



## Drakonica

pimlicodude said:


> The Ukraine is a descendant of the Kievan Rus, and the Kievan Rus did include Galicia (incl Lvov). In 1054, when Yaroslav I died, the Kievan Rus went right up to Karelia, next to Finland, and Novgorod was long part of the Kievan Rus. When the Rostov-Suzdal' principality was incorporated in the Kievan Rus' in the 10th century, that included the site of which would become Moscow too.


United Kingdom is a descendant of British Empire.
Till 1776 territory of Washington was a part of it.
And now imagin that some day president of US decides, that it is time to reunion Great Britain with the Unitet States, and calls English people a spoiled Americans who has forgoten their roots and their language.


----------



## pimlicodude

Drakonica said:


> United Kingdom is a descendant of British Empire.
> Till 1776 territory of Washington was a part of it.
> And now imagin that some day president of US decites, that it is time to reunion Great Britain with Unitet States, and call English people a spoiled Americans who has forgoten their roots and their language.


I would like to correct the English in this message, but I'm not sure if the other Slavic languages forum allows English corrections.


----------



## Drakonica

pimlicodude said:


> Drakonica, here I am saying abdicate and abdication: aspiration.mp3


In this recording, I can hear difference, when i listen to isolated "k"s. When I listen to the whole words, I don't know...

----

But I've just realised that I hear difference between "cat"
Tłumacz Google

whitch is cleary differetn from Polish word "kat" (executioner)
Tłumacz Google

And I even can pronaucuate it, but I've thought that the difference comes from [æ],

But on:
cat – Wikisłownik, wolny słownik wielojęzyczny
it is described as: [kʲæʔ]  - kʲ - palatalized k
So what I hear is probably not an aspiration.
Can you confirm?


----------



## pimlicodude

Drakonica said:


> cat – Wikisłownik, wolny słownik wielojęzyczny
> it is described as: [kʲæʔ]  - kʲ - palatalized k
> So what I hear is probably not an aspiration.
> Can you confirm?


You are right that the English /k/ is palatalised. The difference between palatalised and non-palatalised consonants is not phonemic in English -- but that doesn't mean that we don't have consonants that are naturally palatalised. The gutturals, k, g and ng are palatalised in English. In "king", both the k and the ng are soft.

"Cat" is really /kʲʰæʔ/, where /ʰ/ shows aspiration. It is a palatalised k, followed by a puff of breath. And yes, the glottal stop at the end is natural English.

Have you tried the paper test for aspiration?


----------



## jasio

pimlicodude said:


> Well, I will say this: foreigners are often able to speak a language fluently, but technically badly, and yet find themselves quite comprehensible to themselves and also to native speakers.
> 
> E.g. Slavs who speak English with no articles, never use the perfect tense, and don't use the continuous tenses, find we can understand them. So in what sense are those things "vital" to the language? They are vital to sounding native, but people including government leaders do attend meetings and use this foreigners' English, and they do just fine.
> 
> So English native speakers who speak Slavic languages, with no distinction between palatalised and velarised consonants, paying no attention to verb aspects, and fluffing the cases in most instances, and "winging it" when it comes to verbs of motion --- they sound like poor speakers of those Slavic languages, and yet the Slavs understand this "foreigners' Slavic".
> 
> Maybe all languages contain "extra encoded information" that can be dropped without subtracting from intelligibility? All the same, it is best to try to get as close as you can to the native speakers' gold standard.


You seem to be missing my point. 

I agree that confusing sounds can be irritating, you do not sound like a native and yet most of the time you can be comprehended. Even in the case of minimal pairs (like "czacha" - "ciacha" in Polish, which most of the foreigners pronounce exactly the same way), the meaning usually can be derived from the context. 

And yes, it's good to sound like a native - at least as long as the natives' perception of your language capabilities does not exceed your actual skills, as this can lead to troubles. 

However, that does not change the fact that the insistence on the aspirated voiceless consonants, which you demonstrated, is highly irritating, because:

You continued to refuse to accept that we simply do not hear the difference between aspirated and unaspirated consonants (at the best, we perceive them as a sort of irrelevant mannerism), 
You seemed to blame the learners, while this aspect of the language simply does not seem to be a part of the English language curriculum at least in Poland. And, as far as I can tell judging by the pronunciation of the L2 speakers from many other countries, it's not part of their curriculums either.


----------



## pimlicodude

jasio said:


> You seem to be missing my point.
> 
> I agree that confusing sounds can be irritating, you do not sound like a native and yet most of the time you can be comprehended. Even in the case of minimal pairs (like "czacha" - "ciacha" in Polish, which most of the foreigners pronounce exactly the same way), the meaning usually can be derived from the context.
> 
> And yes, it's good to sound like a native - at least as long as the natives' perception of your language capabilities does not exceed your actual skills, as this can lead to troubles.
> 
> However, that does not change the fact that the insistence on the aspirated voiceless consonants, which you demonstrated, is highly irritating, because:
> 
> You continued to refuse to accept that we simply do not hear the difference between aspirated and unaspirated consonants (at the best, we perceive them as a sort of irrelevant mannerism),
> You seemed to blame the learners, while this aspect of the language simply does not seem to be a part of the English language curriculum at least in Poland. And, as far as I can tell judging by the pronunciation of the L2 speakers from many other countries, it's not part of their curriculums either.


I am not refusing to accept that you can't hear the difference (I don't like 'do not hear' for 'can't hear'; I think there is some attestation of both uses among native speakers, but 'can't hear' is more idiomatic). It's just not the problem of native speakers whether you can hear the difference or not. So what? Do Chinese speakers care if we can hear their tones or not? That is OUR problem, if we are trying to learn Chinese.

I don't blame learners, and I do recognise that your teachers may not have mentioned this to you or may not be able to hear the difference for themselves either. But so what? I'm not being dismissive. I am trying to help by pointing out to you the importance of this thing, but I did not devise the Polish education system. Write to the Polish minister of education, if you like, and see if you get a reply on this.


----------



## jasio

pimlicodude said:


> But no Russian has ever said "Moscow is the mother of Kiev". They have always said "Kiev is the mother of Russian cities". Киев - мать городов русских.


Nevertheless they want to conquer Ukraine referring to the tradition of the Kievan Rus - while to be consistent they should surrender and pay tributes.


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## pimlicodude

jasio said:


> Nevertheless they want to conquer Ukraine referring to the tradition of the Kievan Rus - while to be consistent they should surrender and pay tributes.


Well, this gets into politics, and so these messages will probably be deleted. But maybe you can propose a compromise? Instead of Russia taking over the Ukraine, maybe the Ukraine should take over Russia? They could become one country, with the capital in Kiev. I think most Russians would actually accept that.


----------



## Awwal12

jasio said:


> In short, Russia attempts to hook up to the history and the tradition of the Kievan Rus although when Moscow gained any political significance, the former was as much a part of the history, as the Napoleonic wars are today.


Dynastic claims are never "a part of the history" unless officially renounced, and the Romanovs basically inherited the rightful claims of the Rurikids in that regard. As there were still no Russian or Ukrainian nations at that moment, any "reunification" can only be understood in the political way from the scientific perspective. It's not like Lithuania (and, subsequently, Poland) was never claiming sovereignity over the lands of Moscow, mind you (by the mid 16th century the full title of Sigismund II was "the king of Poland and the great prince of Lithuania, Russia, Prussia, Samogitia, Mazovia and others"), except it had much less rights for such claims.


----------



## Drakonica

If my english needs correction and you can do it, do it 



pimlicodude said:


> "Cat" is really /kʲʰæʔ/, where /ʰ/ shows aspiration. It is a palatalised k, followed by a puff of breath. And yes, the glottal stop at the end is natural English.
> 
> Have you tried the paper test for aspiration?


I can hear and say:
kos - IPA: [kɔs], AS: [kos] (not palatalised)
kiosk - IPA: [cɔsk], AS: [ḱosk] (palatalised)

And they are still different from:
cat - IPA: [kʲæʔ]

So I think I can hear aspirated "k" in some contexts.
And probably even pronounce it quite correctly (if I've heard them before).


----------



## Awwal12

pimlicodude said:


> They probably say "ze gepital", as an unaspirated k sounds like g to English native speakers


Probably, but that depends on a lot of random factors regarding the speaker and the listener (it's not like aspiration is completely absent in Russian - it's just entirely non-phonemic).
There's a pretty symmetrical problem with voiced consonants for English speakers in Russian; they tend to undervoice those or, as far as plosives go, not to really voice them at all.


----------



## jasio

pimlicodude said:


> Well, this gets into politics, and so these messages will probably be deleted. But maybe you can propose a compromise? Instead of Russia taking over the Ukraine, maybe the Ukraine should take over Russia? They could become one country, with the capital in Kiev. I think most Russians would actually accept that.


I don't think that the Ukrainians would want the burden of taking over that mess - even if it was realistic. Not even mentioning that nowadays, after multiple discoveries in the field and even the Russian propaganda proudly announcing their own war crimes against their "fraternal nation" (as they used to call it), I seriously doubt if there are any Ukrainians voluntarily wishing to live with the Russians in one country. Whatever the latter had originally intended to do, they may now forget it for at least two generations - or attempt to take over Ukraine by a brute force. As someone put it even before February 24th: Russia has nothing to offer Ukrainians - except for the guns and missiles aimed at their houses.

Besides, why so many people in the West fall into the Russian propaganda and continue to attempt to put Ukrainians and Moscovians in one basket? Because they both use Cyrillic script and speak East Slavic languages? History proves that even speaking one language (which they do not) is not enough to make a nation. Especially if you consider decades, if not centuries, of political and cultural oppression.


----------



## Drakonica

Awwal12 said:


> It's not like Lithuania (and, subsequently, Poland) was never claiming sovereignity over the lands of Moscow, mind you (by the mid 16th century the full title of Sigismund II was "the king of Poland and the great prince of Lithuania, Russia, Prussia, Samogitia, Mazovia and others"), except it had much less rights for such claims.


According to the Polish wikipedia,
Zygmunt II August – Wikipedia, wolna encyklopedia


> Sigismundus Augustus Dei gratia rex Poloniae, magnus dux Lithuaniae, nec non terrarum Cracoviae, Sandomiriae, Siradiae, Lanciciae, Cuiaviae, Kijoviae, *Russiae*, Woliniae, Prussiae, Masoviae, Podlachiae, Culmensis, Elbingensis, Pomeraniae, Samogitiae, Livoniae etc. dominus et haeres.


it was about one of subteritories of Poland and Lithuania called "Red Ruthenia".
Red Ruthenia - Wikipedia

There was also term "Województwo Ruskie" Ruthenian Voivodeship
Ruthenian Voivodeship - Wikipedia
And it did not mean the lands of all East Slavic nations.

And "Rusini" Ruthenians
Ruthenians - Wikipedia
did not mean all Eastern Slavs.


----------



## Awwal12

Drakonica said:


> it was about one of subteritories of Poland and Lithuania called "Red Ruthenia".


That title was officially passed to kings of Hungary after Casimir III. Please note that it's a king-tier title, created by Pope for Daniel of Galicia. The title of the prince of Russia, on the other hand, originates from the much later Lithuanian claims on unifying the lands of Kievan Rus (originally Lithuanian princes were titled as princes "of many Russians" or "of many Russian lands", but with time they grew bolder).


----------



## pimlicodude

Drakonica said:


> United Kingdom is a descendant of British Empire.
> Till 1776 territory of Washington was a part of it.
> And now imagin that some day president of US decides, that it is time to reunion Great Britain with the Unitet States, and calls English people a spoiled Americans who has forgoten their roots and their language


*The* United Kingdom is a descendant of *the* British Empire.
Till 1776*,* territory of Washington *Washington D.C.* was a part of it.
And now imagin*e* that*,* some day*,* *the* president of *the* US decides*,* that it is time to reunion *reunify* Great Britain with the Unitet *United* States, and calls *the* English people *a* spoiled Americans who *have* forgot*t*en their roots and their language*...* *(sentence incomplete)*

It's not actually true to say the UK is a "descendant" of the British Empire, but that's for another thread.


----------



## pimlicodude

Drakonica said:


> If my english needs correction and you can do it, do it
> 
> 
> I can hear and say:
> kos - IPA: [kɔs], AS: [kos] (not palatalised)
> kiosk - IPA: [cɔsk], AS: [ḱosk] (palatalised)
> 
> And they are still different from:
> cat - IPA: [kʲæʔ]
> 
> So I think I can hear aspirated "k" in some contexts.
> And probably even pronounce it quite correctly (if I've heard them before).


Well /k/ is never velarised in English. We don't even know how to velarise a k. But before "o" maybe it is less palatalised than before "a" in "cat", while not becoming (overtly) velarised. So, yes, you do have to check all the combinations.


----------



## pimlicodude

Awwal12 said:


> Probably, but that depends on a lot of random factors regarding the speaker and the listener (it's not like aspiration is completely absent in Russian - it's just entirely non-phonemic).
> There's a pretty symmetrical problem with voiced consonants for English speakers in Russian; they tend to undervoice those or, as far as plosives go, not to really voice them at all.


Yes, Russian speakers can spot Englishmen from 10 metres away! If you say да, they have already "clocked you" as a non-native speaker, probably because the "d" is not properly voiced....


----------



## pimlicodude

jasio said:


> I don't think that the Ukrainians would want the burden of taking over that mess - even if it was realistic. Not even mentioning that nowadays, after multiple discoveries in the field and even the Russian propaganda proudly announcing their own war crimes against their "fraternal nation" (as they used to call it), I seriously doubt if there are any Ukrainians voluntarily wishing to live with the Russians in one country. Whatever the latter had originally intended to do, they may now forget it for at least two generations - or attempt to take over Ukraine by a brute force. As someone put it even before February 24th: Russia has nothing to offer Ukrainians - except for the guns and missiles aimed at their houses.
> 
> Besides, why so many people in the West fall into the Russian propaganda and continue to attempt to put Ukrainians and Moscovians in one basket? Because they both use Cyrillic script and speak East Slavic languages? History proves that even speaking one language (which they do not) is not enough to make a nation. Especially if you consider decades, if not centuries, of political and cultural oppression.


Er... The reality is more like 40% of Ukrainians speak Ukrainian, 30% Surzhyk and 30% Russian, but it is not a stable reality, because the same person who speaks Surzhyk can also drift into proper Russian or proper Ukrainian whenever. It's more like the situation in Gibraltar, where the British citizens there speak Llanito (Spanish and English mixed in one), but can also speak proper English and proper Spanish. 

Don't take all propaganda as true. Things need to be investigated first. The UN has determined that the U side has verifiedly shot prisoners, but the R side has not. The R side has done some (many) things too - but the real serious stuff is from the U side (read down to the end when you read the news).


----------



## Awwal12

jasio said:


> I seriously doubt if there are any Ukrainians voluntarily wishing to live with the Russians in one country


But they DO live with ethnic Russians in one country, as a matter of fact (10% of the population of Ukraine, even without Crimea, Donbass and whatnot), and there's no way around it.
I also happen to know a couple of Ukrainian nationals (granted, and overwhelming minority among my acquaintances) who actually do want to be incorporated into Russia. And, of course, ethnic Ukrainians of Russia have no problems with living in Russia at all.

Overall, the question for the majority of Ukrainian nationals is purely political: they have pretty much nothing agains living in one country with the Russians (if we exclude the die-hard nationalists), but they have big issues with the prospect of living in Russia as it is, and I seriously cannot blame them.

But we've terribly digressed, I'm afraid.


----------



## jasio

pimlicodude said:


> Er... The reality is more like 40% of Ukrainians speak Ukrainian, 30% Surzhyk and 30% Russian,


So? What's your point?
Speaking Russian at home does not make you Russian, just as speaking English at home does not make you English. After all, you can be an Irish nationalist without speaking even a word in the Gaelic language, can't you? Even the Ukrainian president himself, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, comes from a Russian speaking family, and he learned Ukrainian as an L2 language. As far as I am aware - much later than he learned English!



pimlicodude said:


> but it is not a stable reality, because the same person who speaks Surzhyk can also drift into proper Russian or proper Ukrainian whenever.


Especially after the Russians bombarded civilian infrastructure making threatening them to freeze in winter, they're keen to drift into Russian national identity. It's irony, in case you do not notice.

From our perspective Russia is basically a giant third-world country armed with nuclear weapons and making living by selling crude oil and gas. They have NOTHING or next to nothing to offer not only to the Ukrainians, but even to their own citizens. Not mentioning the rest of the world. Except for the said oil and gas, perhaps. You may think of them as an over-sized Nigeria.



pimlicodude said:


> It's more like the situation in Gibraltar, where the British citizens there speak Llanito (Spanish and English mixed in one), but can also speak proper English and proper Spanish.


Does it make them Spanish? Would it make them more Spanish, had Spain bombarded their houses?

Again - what's your point? Language alone has little to do with the sense of nationality. The Swiss natively speak three or four different languages. The Belgians speak two. German-speaking populations rule three distinct countries (ok... two and a half) and don't seem to consider each other compatriots. The Irish do not consider themselves English despite speaking almost exclusively English. American war of independence was between English speaking colonists and the English speaking empire. American Civil War was between two groups of the said English-speaking colonies (ok... former colonies by the time). Spanish speaking peoples rule almost all Latin America - and don't consider themselves "Spaniards". On the contrary - they have quite strong national LatAm identities with a sauce of hispanidad. Brazilians don't consider themselves "the Portuguese" just because of the language. So do not Galicians, despite speaking a dialect of Portuguese and having Portugal right on the other side of the river. The Arabs claim to speak the same Arabic language (which actually is not quite the case, as far as I am aware), and it does not give them a lot of a pan-Arabic identity. The Chinese language is called a language only for political reasons (and due to a common writing system), although in fact it's comprised of many very distinct and mutually unintelligible etnolects.

To make a long story short, your identification of the native language with the national identity does not hold water.



pimlicodude said:


> Don't take all propaganda as true. Things need to be investigated first. The UN has determined that the U side has verifiedly shot prisoners, but the R side has not.


Did Russia allow them investigate the Russian prisons in the first place?
I'm suspicious because so far Russia has not been widely known for treating humanly their prisoners - whether the prisoners of war or otherwise - nor for obeying laws of war. On the contrary - they're known for torturing and murdering the prisoners and bombarding, torturing and murdering the civilians: in Afghanistan, in Chechnya, in Georgia, in Syria... Why do you think that they would treat the Ukrainians differently? A sudden conversion?

Anyway, please provide me with the link to the report. I'll give it a chance.


----------



## pimlicodude

jasio said:


> So? What's your point?
> Speaking Russian at home does not make you Russian, just as speaking English at home does not make you English. After all, you can be an Irish nationalist without speaking even a word in the Gaelic language, can't you? Even the Ukrainian president himself, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, comes from a Russian speaking family, and he learned Ukrainian as an L2 language. As far as I am aware - much later than he learned English!
> 
> 
> Especially after the Russians bombarded civilian infrastructure making threatening them to freeze in winter, they're keen to drift into Russian national identity. It's irony, in case you do not notice.
> 
> From our perspective Russia is basically a giant third-world country armed with nuclear weapons and making living by selling crude oil and gas. They have NOTHING or next to nothing to offer not only to the Ukrainians, but even to their own citizens. Not mentioning the rest of the world. Except for the said oil and gas, perhaps. You may think of them as an over-sized Nigeria.
> 
> 
> Does it make them Spanish? Would it make them more Spanish, had Spain bombarded their houses?
> 
> Again - what's your point? Language alone has little to do with the sense of nationality. The Swiss natively speak three or four different languages. The Belgians speak two. German-speaking populations rule three distinct countries (ok... two and a half) and don't seem to consider each other compatriots. The Irish do not consider themselves English despite speaking almost exclusively English. American war of independence was between English speaking colonists and the English speaking empire. American Civil War was between two groups of the said English-speaking colonies (ok... former colonies by the time). Spanish speaking peoples rule almost all Latin America - and don't consider themselves "Spaniards". On the contrary - they have quite strong national LatAm identities with a sauce of hispanidad. Brazilians don't consider themselves "the Portuguese" just because of the language. So do not Galicians, despite speaking a dialect of Portuguese and having Portugal right on the other side of the river. The Arabs claim to speak the same Arabic language (which actually is not quite the case, as far as I am aware), and it does not give them a lot of a pan-Arabic identity. The Chinese language is called a language only for political reasons (and due to a common writing system), although in fact it's comprised of many very distinct and mutually unintelligible etnolects.
> 
> To make a long story short, your identification of the native language with the national identity does not hold water.
> 
> 
> Did Russia allow them investigate the Russian prisons in the first place?
> I'm suspicious because so far Russia has not been widely known for treating humanly their prisoners - whether the prisoners of war or otherwise - nor for obeying laws of war. On the contrary - they're known for torturing and murdering the prisoners and bombarding, torturing and murdering the civilians: in Afghanistan, in Chechnya, in Georgia, in Syria... Why do you think that they would treat the Ukrainians differently? A sudden conversion?
> 
> Anyway, please provide me with the link to the report. I'll give it a chance.


I could answer, but it's so off-topic that I don't think the moderators should allow it. I'll leave you to do your own research into all the themes discussed.


----------



## Drakonica

Awwal12 said:


> Overall, the question for the majority of Ukrainian nationals is purely political: they have pretty much nothing agains living in one country with the Russians (if we exclude the die-hard nationalists), but they have big issues with the prospect of living in Russia as it is, and I seriously cannot blame them.


None of the Ukrainian refugees currently living in Poland that I have heard about, doesn't share this opinion.
In fact even ≈ 1 milion of Russians decited this year, they dont want to live live in Russia anymore.



> the die-hard nationalists


What a strange term for people defending their country :-/


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## Lorenc

pimlicodude said:


> The reason Ukrainian has many Western words is because of centuries of Polish influence before the Ukraine was reunited with Russia in the 1600s.


A short quote might be of relevance. The noted linguist Yurii Sherekh lamented in a 1952 article [1] that "almost all Ukrainian words absent in Russian and present in Polish are customarily taken as Polonisms absorbed after the fourteenth century."
[1] Yury Šerech-Shevelov (1952) The Problem of Ukrainian-Polish Linguistic Relations from the Tenth to the Fourteenth Century, WORD, 8:4, 329-349


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## pimlicodude

Lorenc said:


> A short quote might be of relevance. The noted linguist Yurii Sherekh lamented in a 1952 article [1] that "almost all Ukrainian words absent in Russian and present in Polish are customarily taken as Polonisms absorbed after the fourteenth century."
> [1] Yury Šerech-Shevelov (1952) The Problem of Ukrainian-Polish Linguistic Relations from the Tenth to the Fourteenth Century, WORD, 8:4, 329-349


Yes. And if you look at the map I posted above in post #6, you will see that some areas around Lvov are shaded as "Western Ukrainian-speaking", and some areas on the east bank of the Dnieper (the left bank, as it is called) are "Ukrainian-speaking". Some Ukrainians have told me they regard the best Ukrainian as spoken in Poltava, east of the Dnieper, as it has fewer Polonisms....


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## Awwal12

pimlicodude said:


> Some Ukrainians have told me they regard the best Ukrainian as spoken in Poltava, east of the Dnieper, as it has fewer Polonisms...


Well, the dialects of the Kiev-Poltava area are what standard Ukrainian has been based upon in the first place. West Ukrainian is basically just another word for Rusyn (or the other way around); there are minor phonetic and morphological nuances, but the main differences, indeed, lie in the vocabulary (in particular, it has a noticeably larger share of Polonisms and Germanisms, as the influence of Polish and German on those dialects lasted longer and was more direct).


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## Awwal12

Drakonica said:


> What a strange term for people defending their country :-/


People defending their country may be nationalists, or Communists, or Christians. However, the point is all of them will see the future of their country differently.


Drakonica said:


> In fact even ≈ 1 milion of Russians decited this year, they dont want to live live in Russia anymore


The largest part just doesn't want to fight and die in a war in which they see no real point (and I totally cannot blame them). And that's much more stimulating than simply "not wanting to live in Russia".


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## Awwal12

pimlicodude said:


> The UN has determined that the U side has verifiedly shot prisoners, but the R side has not.


I wouldn't hold my breath. The main point is that the cultural differences between all post-Soviet East Slavs are nearly non-existent, and they will normally act in a similar manner (statistically speaking) when placed in similar conditions. Nuances of national propaganda or differences in state organization won't be able to affect it much. In particular, both Russian and Ukrainian troops lack strong discipline, which means that in many circumstances they will simply act as they see fit. Likewise, in neither of the armies the officer staff (which is basically just a degraded form of the Soviet officer corps) is particularly obsessed with humanitarian issues or rules of war. And neither state needs to worry much about it now: Russia exerts a complete control over its own mass media, while Ukraine has an unlimited media backup from the Western countries.

One thing is for certain: people who have started this war should be regarded as criminals, against their own nation at the very least.


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## pimlicodude

Awwal12 said:


> I wouldn't hold my breath. The main point is that the cultural differences between all post-Soviet East Slavs are nearly non-existent, and they will normally act in a similar manner (statistically speaking) when placed in similar conditions. Nuances of national propaganda or differences in state organization won't be able to affect it much. In particular, both Russian and Ukrainian troops lack strong discipline, which means that in many circumstances they will simply act as they see fit. Likewise, in neither of the armies the officer staff (which is basically just a degraded form of the Soviet officer corps) is particularly obsessed with humanitarian issues or rules of war. And neither state needs to worry much about it now: Russia exerts a complete control over its own mass media, while Ukraine has an unlimited media backup from the Western countries.
> 
> One thing is for certain: people who have started this war should be regarded as criminals, against their own nation at the very least.


Well, the big man was hoping it would be like Operation Danube in 1968, when the Soviet troops rolled into Prague and toppled Dubcek. That was what was intended, not an out-and-out war. But Z did not play along with the script.


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## Awwal12

pimlicodude said:


> Well, the big man was hoping it would be like Operation Danube in 1968


In which case the results come from an indirect intent. That, however, doesn't make them inculpable. Hope just isn't enough when you plan something that affects other people, even more so at the national level.
I don't even mention that starting a war of aggression alone is criminalized by the Russian criminal code.


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## swintok

Awwal12 said:


> But they DO live with ethnic Russians in one country, as a matter of fact (10% of the population of Ukraine, even without Crimea, Donbass and whatnot), and there's no way around it.
> I also happen to know a couple of Ukrainian nationals (granted, and overwhelming minority among my acquaintances) who actually do want to be incorporated into Russia. And, of course, ethnic Ukrainians of Russia have no problems with living in Russia at all.
> 
> Overall, the question for the majority of Ukrainian nationals is purely political: they have pretty much nothing agains living in one country with the Russians (if we exclude the die-hard nationalists), but they have big issues with the prospect of living in Russia as it is, and I seriously cannot blame them.
> 
> But we've terribly digressed, I'm afraid.



"And, of course, ethnic Ukrainians of Russia have no problems with living in Russia at all."

Response:
KOBZA - Українці Росії - Гарантуйте нам в Росії життя та здоров'я!
Kyiv Post. Independence. Community. Trust - Opinion - Letters to the Editor - Nalyvaichenko to OSCE: Rights of Ukrainians in Russia systematically violated
KOBZA - Українці Росії - Открытое письмо Комиссару национальных меньшинств ОБСЕ господину Максу Ван дер Стулу (рос.)
Disappearing books: How Russia is shuttering its Ukrainian library
Head of Moscow's Ukrainian library convicted of incitement against Russians
Russian court jails Ukrainian film-maker for 20 years over terror offences
Russia’s Ukranians

Of course, this in part has to be understood as part of the overall erosion of democratic rights, free speech, and civil society in Putin's Russia, but not entirely so.  It is interesting that Putin justified the start of his invasion of Ukraine in 2014 as protecting the rights of Russian speakers in a country where one can be educated from pre-school through to post-secondary in the Russian language.  In contrast, there is not a single Ukrainian-medium school in all of Russia.


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## Awwal12

Propaganda of both sides aside, Russian in Ukraine and Ukrainian in Russia are in highly asymmetrical sociolinguistic situations. In Ukraine, Russian is the typical native language of the huge Russian minority (~10-12%, as it was stated above) as well as the first language for a good half of the Ukrainian nationals in general. In Russia ethnic Ukrainians constitute about 1,5% of the population, mostly dispersed, and only for a fraction of those Ukrainian is the first language. For the larger part Ukrainian in Russia exists in the form of non-codified rural dialects of the "Russian language" (spoken by people who list themselves as ethnic Russians in censuses and polls), but, rest assured, most of those speakers don't want their children to be taught in Standard Ukrainian. Russian is still a relatively major language of science, culture and international communication; Ukrainian is none of that. Considering that all Ukrainians in Russia are bilingual in the first place, that naturally results in very little objective demand for school education in Ukrainian. Even in Chuvashia (the area of compact settlements for most Chuvashes and the formal place of Chuvash statehood, which simplifies many things) lots of more pragmatically oriented parents prefer to send their children into Russian schools, as they realize that learning in Chuvash will unavoidably happen at the expense of their Russian, which will hamper their future career prospects.

Curiously, most ethnic Ukrainians of Russia I happen to know are particularly strong supporters of the special military war (apparently they're especially vulnerable to the Ukraine-related propaganda for some natural reasons).


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## Drakonica

swintok said:


> there is not a single Ukrainian-medium school in all of Russia.


Really? Aren't there even schools for ethnic Ukrainians with Ukrainian as an additional language?


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## Awwal12

If nothing has changed in the last 4 years (it might have), there's an Ukrainian school named after Pavel Popovich in Moscow, with education in Ukrainian. Which perfectly illustrates my point above: very few people want their children to study there, the classes are reported to be always incomplete. Before that there were two schools, suffering from the same tendencies.


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## pimlicodude

swintok said:


> It is interesting that Putin justified the start of his invasion of Ukraine in 2014 as protecting the rights of Russian speakers in a country where one can be educated from pre-school through to post-secondary in the Russian language.


That used to be the case, but since 2014 things have tightened up. Russian-language schooling is no longer available in the Ukraine. This follows a decree in 2020 that such schools should "gradually" be moved over to the Ukrainian language. See Русскоязычные школы на Украине постепенно перейдут на украинский язык обучения  - ТАСС

Your entire post misses the point. The reason why there WAS Russian-language schooling in the south and east of the Ukraine is because the local language there is Russian. It is a human-rights issue - in Finland, the 5% Swedish-speaking minority have schooling in Swedish, and Swedish is an official language throughout the country. Maybe you should write to the Finnish PM suggesting such schools be closed down, the Swedish language be eliminated from radio and TV (=the Ukrainian policy to impose quotas of 70% Ukrainian language, rising higher in late years), that Swedish language newspapers only be permitted where a full translated version in Finnish is also offered (commercially impossible; this is the Ukrainian law, by the way); and the use of Swedish in courts only be permitted where all participants in a case agree (=the Ukrainian law). What is human rights in Finland should be human rights in the Ukraine too.

Ukrainian is not the community language anywhere in Russia - and so why would schooling in Ukrainian be offered? You could argue that the dialect in Voronezh, Rostov and Krasnodar was actually a Cossack subvariant of Ukrainian and they should have had schooling in Ukrainian in the 1920 and 1930s, but this is a historic issue. The people there don't speak Ukrainian today.

It's amazing that so much discussion of this country boils down to people quoting CIA propaganda.... usually false!


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## pimlicodude

Awwal12 said:


> Propaganda of both sides aside, Russian in Ukraine and Ukrainian in Russia are in highly asymmetrical sociolinguistic situations. In Ukraine, Russian is the typical native language of the huge Russian minority (~10-12%, as it was stated above) as well as the first language for a good half of the Ukrainian nationals in general. In Russia ethnic Ukrainians constitute about 1,5% of the population, mostly dispersed, and only for a fraction of those Ukrainian is the first language. For the larger part Ukrainian in Russia exists in the form of non-codified rural dialects of the "Russian language" (spoken by people who list themselves as ethnic Russians in censuses and polls), but, rest assured, most of those speakers don't want their children to be taught in Standard Ukrainian. Russian is still a relatively major language of science, culture and international communication; Ukrainian is none of that. Considering that all Ukrainians in Russia are bilingual in the first place, that naturally results in very little objective demand for school education in Ukrainian. Even in Chuvashia (the area of compact settlements for most Chuvashes and the formal place of Chuvash statehood, which simplifies many things) lots of more pragmatically oriented parents prefer to send their children into Russian schools, as they realize that learning in Chuvash will unavoidably happen at the expense of their Russian, which will hamper their future career prospects.
> 
> Curiously, most ethnic Ukrainians of Russia I happen to know are particularly strong supporters of the special military war (apparently they're especially vulnerable to the Ukraine-related propaganda for some natural reasons).


Awwal12, I asked a Ukrainian, very nationalist, someone who constantly proclaims his hatred of Москали, and someone who is from Ivan-Frankovsk what the Ukrainian equivalent of Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky is. The frank answer is there is no equivalent: no great classical literature has been written in Ukrainian, because Ukrainian writers in the 19th century wrote in ... Russian. He told me that to learn Ukrainian, you can only turn to modern fiction novels as there are no classical works at all.


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## jasio

pimlicodude said:


> Awwal12, I asked a Ukrainian, very nationalist, someone who constantly proclaims his hatred of Москали, and someone who is from Ivan-Frankovsk what the Ukrainian equivalent of Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky is. The frank answer is there is no equivalent: no great classical literature has been written in Ukrainian, because Ukrainian writers in the 19th century wrote in ... Russian. He told me that to learn Ukrainian, you can only turn to modern fiction novels as there are no classical works at all.


Ask him, if he happened to read Taras Shevchenko or Lesya Ukrainka. Or even Ivan Franko, by whom his own home town was named in 1960's (originally it was named Stanislaviv, to commemorate the first son of the city founder, Andrzej Potocki, when it was founded 300 years earlier). Or if he read any other author listed by the most popular unreliable source of information: Ukrainian literature - Wikipedia. 

Also take into consideration that calling Ukrainian a dialect of Russian and denying the Ukrainian nationality is not a modern thing. It dates back at least to 19th century - that's why (and because of migrations) the Ukrainian language is more prevalent in the Western Ukraine, which at the time did not belong to the Russian empire.


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## pimlicodude

jasio said:


> Ask him, if he happened to read Taras Shevchenko or Lesya Ukrainka. Or even Ivan Franko, by whom his own home town was named in 1960's (originally it was named Stanislaviv, to commemorate the first son of the city founder, Andrzej Potocki, when it was founded 300 years earlier). Or if he read any other author listed by the most popular unreliable source of information: Ukrainian literature - Wikipedia.
> 
> Also take into consideration that calling Ukrainian a dialect of Russian and denying the Ukrainian nationality is not a modern thing. It dates back at least to 19th century - that's why (and because of migrations) the Ukrainian language is more prevalent in the Western Ukraine, which at the time did not belong to the Russian empire.


Why would I ask him that? Those are poets and playwrights. There is no Ukrainian equivalent of the great novelists, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gogol (Ukrainian, wrote in Russian), Pasternak, Lermontov (prose and poetry), Pushkin (prose and poetry), Turgenev. 

And Shevchenko's prose works were in ...  (drum roll) ... (wait for it) .... in Russian! See https://ru.wikisource.org/wiki/Тарас_Григорьевич_Шевченко#На_русском_языке_2 

There really is hardly anything in Ukrainian that is considered a classic of world literature, which is why many Ukrainians love Russian literature.


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## jasio

pimlicodude said:


> There really is hardly anything in Ukrainian that is considered a classic of world literature, which is why many Ukrainians love Russian literature.


But what's your point, actually? 
Mine is very clear: despite the Russian propaganda, the Ukrainian language is not a Russian dialect, and the Ukrainian nation is separate from the Russians. Existence or non-existence of the 19th century classic world literature has completely nothing to with this. So has the language in which Taras Shevchenko published some works of his.


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## Awwal12

jasio said:


> despite the Russian propaganda, the Ukrainian language is not a Russian dialect


The whole "dialect vs. language" global holywar is pretty pointless, as there is no objective difference. What actually prevents us from saying that Russians speak a dialect of Polish? The established literary standard, probably? But Ukrainian definitely has it too (and some isolated languages don't, to that matter). So unless one wants to believe in absurdities like the popular "the Ukrainian language was invented by the Austrian general staff in the early 20th century", we must agree that Ukrainian is, well, Ukrainian.

Still, it doesn't prevent the fact that the cultural weight behind Russian and Ukrainian is very unequal, even if we disregard the literature of the 19th century completely.


jasio said:


> and the Ukrainian nation is separate from the Russians


Which is the main objective fact that Putin seems to be missing, judging on his article published in 2021 at least. Marxists would call it idealism; I simply call it being out of touch with objective reality. Even if the Ukrainian nationhood was relatively weak by 1991, now it's sufficiently well grounded.


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## pimlicodude

jasio said:


> But what's your point, actually?
> Mine is very clear: despite the Russian propaganda, the Ukrainian language is not a Russian dialect, and the Ukrainian nation is separate from the Russians. Existence or non-existence of the 19th century classic world literature has completely nothing to with this. So has the language in which Taras Shevchenko published some works of his.


No, you made a detailed point, that there were great classical writers in Ukrainian. And when refuted, you immediately abandon that point entirely, and claim you never intended to make it, but are only saying the Ukrainian language is not a Russian dialect. Which precisely ZERO people in this thread have disputed.


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## pimlicodude

Awwal12 said:


> Which is the main objective fact that Putin seems to be missing, judging on his article published in 2021 at least. Marxists would call it idealism; I simply call it being out of touch with objective reality. Even if the Ukrainian nationhood was relatively weak by 1991, now it's sufficiently well grounded.


Yes, but none of that justifies trying to impose the Ukrainian language (acknowledged by Jasio not to be Russian) on the eight Russian-speaking provinces of the Ukraine. Look up the 1897 Czarist census and tell me what were the two main languages spoken in Odessa (hint: neither of them was Ukrainian).


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## Awwal12

pimlicodude said:


> Yes, but none of that justifies trying to impose the Ukrainian language (acknowledged by Jasio not to be Russian) on the eight Russian-speaking provinces of the Ukraine.


It doesn't, and the current language policy of Ukraine isn't commendable to say the least (much like many other things in modern Ukraine aren't). But, of course, it's not like that policy somehow validates the military invasion.


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## pimlicodude

Awwal12 said:


> It doesn't, and the current language policy of Ukraine isn't commendable to say the least (much like many other things in modern Ukraine aren't). But, of course, it's not like that policy somehow validates the military invasion.


Well, I don't support the unimpressive way the SMO has been conducted (which is not your point at all), but a country absolutely does have the right to go to war with a neighbouring country that is joining a military alliance directed against it. That point was established in 1962 in the Cuban missile crisis. Israel regularly bombs Iranian troops in Syria for precisely the same reason. It's not right to pretend that this isn't an acknowledged point. Would America accept Chinese nukes in Toronto? My problem with the SMO isn't the fact of the invasion, by the "fixing to lose" way it has been conducted. (Arguably the real problem was the failure to invade in 2014.)


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