# Russian/Belarusian/Ukrainian: Comparison



## Marijka

Split from here.

Thanks, Etcetera, I was just curious to know point of view of Russian native speaker. Maybe we should make an experiment here and try to compare Polish to Ukrainian to Russian


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## Etcetera

It's a good idea. But then, we need a text to translate into these languages... Or you have something else in mind?


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## Jana337

> But then, we need a text to translate into these languages...


What a nice opportunity to convince some people to finally read the rules.  Sadly, notorious miscreants will not participate in this discussion. 

Jana


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## Marijka

Great idea, Jana !!  "Rules" are in Russian, Polish and Ukrainian  we can compare THEM


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## Etcetera

Oh dear, how many secrets WR has! I just read the English variant of the rules and ran, so I didn't notice that these rules were written in all Slavic languages!
Hmm, how strange. Russian and Polish texts are written in pretty informal tone, and the Ukrainian one is more formal!


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## Jana337

Etcetera said:
			
		

> Oh dear, how many secrets WR has! I just read the English variant of the rules and ran, so I didn't notice that these rules were written in all Slavic languages!
> Hmm, how strange. Russian and Polish texts are written in pretty informal tone, and the Ukrainian one is more formal!


Yes... All volunteers were translating from English (or at least I assume they did), and I didn't place too many restrictions on them.

Well, girls, if you think that the styles in the welcome sticky would make it unusable for a good comparison, you will have to team up and produce your own translations of whatever. If you decide to copy passages from some books (Sienkiewicz for example? ), please comply with our copyright rule (i.e. at most 4 sentences).

Jana


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## Etcetera

4 sentences would be alright, I think. And welcome sticky would also be good for comparison - at least, comparison of Russian and Polish.


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## übermönch

I'd say we actually don't have to reach far. The first sentence in the rules is more or less equal in all translations.

Ukr:
Допоможіть "запустити" слов’янський форум, поставте своє запитання!
Help "launching" the slavic forum, ask your question!
Pol:
Pomóż wystartować forum słowiańskiemu zadając jakieś pytanie.
Help the slavic forum by  asking  any questions. 
Rus:
Помоги "запустить" славянский форум, задай вопрос!
Help "launching" the slavic forum, ask a question!

Now we'd just have to equalize them. That'd be easier then anything else.


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## cyanista

übermönch said:
			
		

> I'd say we actually don't have to reach far. The first sentence in the rules is more or less equal in all translations.
> 
> Ukr:
> Допоможіть "запустити" слов’янський форум, поставте своє запитання!
> Help "launching" the slavic forum, ask your question!
> ...
> Rus:
> Помоги "запустить" славянский форум, задай вопрос!
> Help "launching" the slavic forum, ask a question!
> 
> Now we'd just have to equalize them. That'd be easier then anything else.



Somehow I find it hard to believe that both translators independently used the word "запустить/и". I imagine the Ukranian translator just copied the Russian variant in this case. But I'm sure there's a better word when talking about starting an activity - both in Russian and Ukranian.


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## Etcetera

May be... But it seems to me that we can say "запустить" about starting a forum. It must depend on the actual context. If there was no threads in the forum when it was created - this word is ansolutely OK. But if there were already some threads moved from Other Languages - undeed, a more appropriate word can be found.


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## SofiaB

I am speaking as an outsider. My friend born in Byelorus speaks Russian, Ukanian and Byelorus. she can more or less speak Polish. She says Ukrainian and Byelorus are almost the same and Polish is easy to understand although some words she does not know. She's from an area in the west of Ukraine,her mother is Russian, father Byelorus, I do not know if this matters.


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## Etcetera

Why, this matters. An interesting case. 
I somehow haven't thought about how close Ukrainian is to Belarusian. Frankly, it's hard for me to understand written Belarusian - this language, unlike Russian, uses phonetic spelling, and it's rather hard to recognise even those words which are in fact very similar to their Russian equivalents.


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## cyanista

That's true, Ukrainian and Belarusian are closer to each other than either of them to Russian.
In my (however small) experience, Russians don't understand _spoken_ Belarusian either, they can't understand many words I would have expected them to recognize or logically deduce the meaning from a similar-sounding root. You'd have to practice that.


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## Etcetera

Cyanista, I've asked my friend who is a native Russian with a very good knowledge of Belarusian, and she said that it's almost impossible for a Russian to understand a Belarusian because of phonetic differences between the two languages. But if the Belarusian would speak very slowly, then it'd be easier to understand him. Then, it's relatively easy for a Russian to understand written Belarusian - if he knows the rules of reading. 
Finally, in Belarusian there are words which exist in the dialect of Russian west, so a Russian from Smolensk would understand a Belarusian perfectly. That's my friend's opinion.


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## panjabigator

Thats interesting that Belarussian and Ukranian are more similar to each other than Russian....Do these countries share a bordeR? I though Russia cut between them...better look at a map to be sure!


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## Etcetera

Oh, please do look at the map! 
Ukraine and Belarus are neighbouring countries, and they both are Russia's neighbours.


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## panjabigator

Thanks Etcetera...I feel like a fool...I usually know geography pretty well!  I think i always underestimate Ukraine's size in my head...


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## Etcetera

Never mind. These things happen.


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## cyanista

Etcetera said:
			
		

> Finally, in Belarusian there are words which exist in the dialect of Russian west, so a Russian from Smolensk would understand a Belarusian perfectly.



Very likely to be true, as transitional dialects exist on every border between our countries.


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## xxatti

Can we add one of the south slavic languages to this comparison?? Perhaps Serbian or Bulgarian would be a good idea since they also use the cyrillic alphabet?


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## Etcetera

BTW, our principal goal was to compare Polish to Ukrainian to Russian. 
Let's decide what we are going to do here!


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## Anatoli

Etcetera said:
			
		

> BTW, our principal goal was to compare Polish to Ukrainian to Russian.
> Let's decide what we are going to do here!



I wonder why the topic says Belarusian, not Polish? We'll probably get much more input in Polish than Belarusian, anyway because the knowledge of Belarusian is quite poor in Belarus.

I like Belarusian songs and I think that it's easy to understand, again it all depends on exposure.

Not sure why but I find Polish easier to learn than Czech or Slovak.


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## Etcetera

If you look at previous page, you'll find that we've somehow switched to Russian/Ukrainian/Belarusian. Jana moved our posts to a new topic after posts by Sofia, Cyanista and me, and that's why this thread got its title.


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## Aquatarkus

I speak Russian in everyday life but can use Ukrainian pretty well. 
And I too find Polish easier to learn than Czech or Slovak, even than Bulgarian, though it uses cyrillic alphabet.


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## MGTom

panjabigator said:


> Thats interesting that Belarussian and Ukranian are more similar to each other than Russian....Do these countries share a bordeR? I though Russia cut between them...better look at a map to be sure!



Next explanation is that both language areas have been for an extended period (centuries) politically separated from Russia (Novgorod & Moscow) due to Polish dominance.

Being very superficially familiar wit the Belarus and Ukraininan language and familiar with Russian, it seems to me that the Polish influence is rather more expressed in Ukrainian than in Belarussian.

For a first lesson in Belarussian download: "Урок белорусского языка / Урок беларускай мовы / A lesson of belorussian" from rutracker.org (a Polish documentary on Belarus opposition in 2006, in Belorussian, some Polish (not strictly needed)). With my Russian and Slavic background (with exception of West Slavic, such as Polish), I had no problems understanding.

Russians may not understand Belarussian for their linguistic narrow-mindedness. Well, understanding "near foreigners" always takes motivation and a bit of experience.


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## Illya

All of you had forget that THE MODERN RUSSIAN derives from Church-Slavian language, NOT FROM THE ANCIENT RUSSIAN! The South Dialect of Russian is more close to the Ancient russian... Also, Belorusian and Ukrainian both derive from West dialect of Old Ruthenian (or Ancient russian), that's why they're quiet different. (Church-Slavian is situated between Southern and Eastern slavic group)


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## oveka

Ukr:
Допоможіть "запустити" слов’янський форум, поставте своє запитання!
Це щось!!! Казна що!

Допоможіть "закласти" слов’янський форум, задайте своє питання!


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## Awwal12

Marijka said:


> Split from here.
> 
> Thanks, Etcetera, I was just curious to know point of view of Russian native speaker. Maybe we should make an experiment here and try to compare Polish to Ukrainian to Russian


The comparison would greatly depend on the subject; poetry is one matter, official documents are another, and everyday speech is totally the third one.
It also would depend on what exactly you want to compare. Despite a huge amount of Polish loanwords and calques in Ukrainian, its synthax and morphology are much, much closer to Russian ones.


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## oveka

Awwal12 said:


> The comparison would greatly depend on the subject; poetry is one matter, official documents are another, and everyday speech is totally the third one.
> It also would depend on what exactly you want to compare. Despite a huge amount of Polish loanwords and calques in Ukrainian, its synthax and morphology are much, much closer to Russian ones.


Які ж ми злиденні!


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## ahvalj

oveka said:


> Які ж ми злиденні!


George Shevelov "Ukrainian", in:_ ~ · 1993 · The Slavonic languages: _990–991 (https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_7IkEzr9hyJWWV3OWtRZzl6cFU/edit?usp=sharing)

_The crucial influence in the Middle Ukrainian period (the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries), especially after the Union of Lublin of 1569, which created the Polish commonwealth (Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine) until about 1720, *was Polish*. It shaped much of the administrative language of the time, mediated in the expansion of the western word-stock concerning culture, technology, abstract thinking and so on: words from Latin, Czech, German (there were also direct borrowings into Ukrainian from German), Italian, French and other languages. Moreover, under the conditions of the general bilingualism of the nobility, educated and urban classes, a situation arose in which, time and again, it was irrelevant whether a native or a Polish word was used, so that gradually *not only were new words introduced for new notions but quite a few native words were crowded out by Polonisms*. This influx abated after 1720 when most of the Ukraine became a Russian province, but it resumed in the nineteenth century, although on a narrower scale, because the intellectuals occasionally saw in Polonisms and/or loan translations from Polish a means to counteract expansion of Russianisms. *Of the almost innumerable Polonisms* adopted in the Middle Ukrainian period a part (about 50 per cent) were lost subsequently, *but Modern Ukrainian is still closer in its word-stock to Polish than to any other Slavonic language*. This was, of course, a result of Polish political domination but not less so of cultural seduction._


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## ahvalj

How the literary language in the land that later became Ukraine looked like before the Polish influence can be seen e. g. here: http://izbornyk.org.ua/oldukr2/oldukr2.htm

_Азъ, милостію человѣколюбивааго бога мнихъ и прозвитеръ Иларионъ, изволені__емь его от богочестивыихъ епископъ священъ быхъ и настолованъ въ велицѣмь и богохранимѣмь градѣ Кыевѣ, яко быти ми въ немь митрополиту, пастуху же и учителю._
_Быша же си въ лѣто s̃ф̃н̃θ̃ (6559 [1051]), владычествующу благовѣрьному кагану Ярославу, сыну Владимирю._


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## marco_2

ahvalj said:


> How the literary language in the land that later became Ukraine looked like before the Polish influence can be seen e. g. here: http://izbornyk.org.ua/oldukr2/oldukr2.htm
> 
> _Азъ, милостію человѣколюбивааго бога мнихъ и прозвитеръ Иларионъ, изволені__емь его от богочестивыихъ епископъ священъ быхъ и настолованъ въ велицѣмь и богохранимѣмь градѣ Кыевѣ, яко быти ми въ немь митрополиту, пастуху же и учителю._
> _Быша же си въ лѣто s̃ф̃н̃θ̃ (6559 [1051]), владычествующу благовѣрьному кагану Ярославу, сыну Владимирю._



Still, it is a *literary *language, strongly influenced by Old-Church-Slavonic (_градъ, священъ, _some calques from Greek, etc.), not a vivid Ruthenian speech.


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## ahvalj

marco_2 said:


> Still, it is a *literary *language, strongly influenced by Old-Church-Slavonic (_градъ, священъ, _some calques from Greek, etc.), not a vivid Ruthenian speech.


Of course: this was meant as an illustration of the layer replaced by later Polish borrowings. There are no documents of the southern East Slavic vernacular of that time, as far as I know.


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## ahvalj

And, by the way, the language of the 11th century still shouldn't be called Ruthenian: dialect boundaries of the pre-Mongol and pre-Lithuanian times, as far as we can tell, nowhere corresponded to the future boundaries between Ruthenian and the remaining East Slavic (later Russian) — the boundary between Lithuania and the Horde split several dialectal groups.


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## ahvalj

I have found a good video contrasting the differences between two accents in Ukrainian:
http://www.radiosvoboda.org/content/article/25383439.html

[.........]

The left and center persons have a pronounced Russian accent, whereas the right person has a strong (I would even say caricature) West Ukrainian accent.


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## Pribina

Thanks for the video. Never having attempted to learn either Ukrainian or Russian (but I do read Russian content on the internet from time to time), the Ukrainian spoken by the person on the right seems much easier for me to follow.


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## ahvalj

Interestingly, this radio station has a journalist in Belgrad, Mihajlo Ramać, who speaks the similar way, which I always regarded as a Serbo-Croatian accent.


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## Awwal12

ahvalj said:


> And, by the way, the language of the 11th century still shouldn't be called Ruthenian: dialect boundaries of the pre-Mongol and pre-Lithuanian times, as far as we can tell, nowhere corresponded to the future boundaries between Ruthenian and the remaining East Slavic (later Russian) — the boundary between Lithuania and the Horde split several dialectal groups.


I doubt that borders are able to split anything by themselves. The main cause seemingly was the desertion of steppe and directly adjacent areas (especially in the XIV-XV centuries); as a result, virtually all local population was captured, killed or fled into the forestal areas to the north. The Old Muscovite dialect was replaced by a new dialect (of mostly South Russian origin) exactly around the XIV century - although the newcomers had adopted the North Russian cultural complex, which remained intact (and later spreaded south as the Moscow influence grew).
And since then there was no other territory that could provide a proper dialect continuum; the thick forests and swamps between Vyazma and Bryansk were very scarcely populated and had no normal roads at all.

(I must stress, however, that Ruthenian was a written literary standard of the Lithuanian principality, not some single spoken dialect.)


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## ahvalj

Awwal12 said:


> I doubt that borders are able to split anything by themselves.


Great Duchy of Lithuania: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Великое_княжество_Литовское#mediaviewer/File:VKL-1462-ru.png
East Slavic dialectal map of 1914: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Диале...ile:Dialektologicheskaia_Karta_1914_goda.jpeg

Krivichis were split between all the three major post-Kievan states, Great Duchy of Lithuania, Novgorod-Pskov and the North-East, and played a major role in all three areas: (Николаев СЛ · 1994 · Раннее диалектное членение и внешние связи восточнославянских диалектов: 26 — https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_7IkEzr9hyJVEUtNk5BVF94YkU/edit?usp=sharing)



Awwal12 said:


> The main cause seemingly was the desertion of steppe and directly adjacent areas (especially in the XIV-XV centuries); as a result, virtually all local population was captured, killed or fled into the forestal areas to the north.


You speak about the south, whereas there is no linguistic boundary between Belarusian and Russian further to the north. 



Awwal12 said:


> The Old Muscovite dialect was replaced by a new dialect (of mostly South Russian origin) exactly around the XIV century - although the newcomers had adopted the North Russian cultural complex, which remained intact (and later spreaded south as the Moscow influence grew).


Sources?
What do we know about the Old Muscovite dialect? I know nothing except for scarce features listed in the above work by Nikolayev.

The former Krivichian area within what is now Russian (Николаев СЛ · 1988 · Следы особенностей восточнославянских племенных диалектов в современных великорусских говорах. I. Кривичи: 115 — https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_7IkEzr9hyJazYzS01XTVk3cnM/edit?usp=sharing) constitutes the major part of the Middle Russian dialects: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Диале...viewer/File:Диалектологическая-карта-1965.png and the correspondence is too striking to maintain the old view that the Middle Russian is merely the result of a linguistic interchange between the once opposed North and South Russian.


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## Awwal12

ahvalj said:


> Great Duchy of Lithuania: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Великое_княжество_Литовское#mediaviewer/File:VKL-1462-ru.png
> East Slavic dialectal map of 1914: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Диале...ile:Dialektologicheskaia_Karta_1914_goda.jpeg



I really don't see what you're trying to show there. Correlation doesn't mean causation, and, quite obviously, spreading of old states was defined by the same geographical factors.


ahvalj said:


> Krivichis were split between all the three major post-Kievan states,  Great Duchy of Lithuania, Novgorod-Pskov and the North-East, and played a  major role in all three areas


Kriviches ceased to exist in the XI century in the first place - at least in any socially relevant meaning. And then there was the consolidation around the new feudal entities. Sure Kriviches (and other tribes) predefined some features of later Old Russian dialects, but we cannot know for sure which and where exactly. We cannot ignore contact phenomena and migrations (which, btw, were large enough to shift the very average physical portrait of later Russian and Belarusian populations compared to the early East Slavic tribes).


ahvalj said:


> The former Krivichian area within what is now Russian (Николаев СЛ ·  1988 · Следы особенностей восточнославянских племенных диалектов в  современных великорусских говорах. I. Кривичи: 115 — https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_7...it?usp=sharing) constitutes the major part of the Middle Russian dialects: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Диалек...�та-1965.png  and the correspondence is too striking to maintain the old view that  the Middle Russian is merely the result of a linguistic interchange  between the once opposed North and South Russian.


I'm afraid I don't see the point again. Well, at all. Middle Russian dialects quite definetly demonstrate strong contact features (often obviously late ones). And basic features of the late East Slavic macro-dialects most definetly don't go back to the tribal age (exactly why Nikolayev just ignores them and concentrates on what he believes to be most archaic features).


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## ahvalj

Awwal12 said:


> I really don't see what you're trying to show there. Correlation doesn't mean causation, and, quite obviously, spreading of old states was defined by the same geographical factors.


 I am trying to show that the boundaries of the later Belarusian and Ukrainian language areas largely correspond to the boundaries of the Great Duchy of Lithuania. If not the Mongol invasion, or if some other political changes had divided the East Slavic territory in some other ways, the modern language boundaries most probably would have been quite different, and the very number and nature of these languages could have been different as well.



Awwal12 said:


> Kriviches ceased to exist in the XI century in the first place - at least in any socially relevant meaning. And then there was the consolidation around the new feudal entities. Sure Kriviches (and other tribes) predefined some features of later Old Russian dialects, but we cannot know for sure which and where exactly. We cannot ignore contact phenomena and migrations (which, btw, were large enough to shift the very average physical portrait of later Russian and Belarusian populations compared to the early East Slavic tribes).


My remark was an answer to your phrase _"I doubt that borders are able to split anything by themselves"._ The speech of descendants of Krivichis, who found themselves in three different political entities, developed into three (later two through the elimination of Novgorod-Pskov) languages — thus, the political borders were able to split something by themselves. 

The features of Krivichian dialects are very prominent and are still quite discernible (e. g. the special development of _ъ_ before palatal consonants): 2/3 of Nikolayev's paper are dedicated to them. 



Awwal12 said:


> I'm afraid I don't see the point again. Well, at all. Middle Russian dialects quite definetly demonstrate strong contact features (often obviously late ones). And basic features of the late East Slavic macro-dialects most definetly don't go back to the tribal age (exactly why Nikolayev just ignores them and concentrates on what he believes to be most archaic features).


The question is whether this contact zone is simply geographical, or it has its own ancient dialectal background. Why does it go from the northwest to the southeast? Why does it largely correspond to the ancient boundaries of Krivichian and of what Nikolayev calls "dialects of the literary type"? 

Anyway, what I am trying to explain in this thread is that the development of three East Slavic languages, Belarusian, Russian, and Ukrainian, as such and within their actual boundaries, was rather casual, and the political circumstances may have perfectly induced several other scenarios. By the way, the south-western, future Ukrainian, dialects, as the most ancient and numerous, were probably the most diverse (as suggested by the number of ancient tribes mentioned in the chronicles and by the remnants of ancient isoglosses in the modern Ukrainian dialects), so it is scientifically incorrect to speak about the "Old Ukrainian", since the later Ukrainian language, more than the two others, is a result of leveling and spreading of originally local innovations into southern lands of the Great Duchy of Lithuania.


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## ahvalj

Back to the accents in Ukrainian, in this video (again, not from the YouTube) http://www.radiosvoboda.org/content/article/25311978.html the woman speaks what Russians perceive as the thick genuine Ukrainian accent, neither West Ukrainian nor Russian. This is the accent from the Ukrainian jokes Russians tell.


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