# One Ukrainian local dialect almost identical to Croatian?



## Gavran

Hello everybody. (My first post! Yay!)

I'm trying to verify an old story a friend of mine told me. Back in the old(ish) days he was a member of a student exchange organisation and travelled a lot. One of the places he visited was Ukraine. So he said that on one particular trip, after they crossed the border, they entered a bus. The driver talked to them in what sounded like almost straight Croatian but it turned out it was his local dialect, that this dialect is inexplicably similar to Croatian and that people in that particular (sub)region speak it normally. 

Probably everybody is aware of this, but for the record, Ukrainian and Croatian are as different from each other as two Slavic languages can be.

Here comes the mythic element of the story. This happened a ong time ago. He was (obviously) a student at the time with priorities being: fun, company, alcohol, more fun, some more alcohol. Not "getting to know weird aspect of foreign cultures". I tried to pry information out of him but he has no clue where exactly this was, not even which country they were entering Ukraine from.

Does anyone have any idea if there is any sense in this? Original Croats most probably arrived from what is today western Ukraine and a part of that region is called "Bijela Hrvatska", but since then languages have mutated very much so I can't think of a simple explanation for this. Apart from alcohol, but they were on the road and apparently sober at the time.


----------



## ahvalj

I suspect that could have been one of the ethnic Serbs living in Ukraine:
Срби у Украјини — Википедија, слободна енциклопедија


----------



## Gavran

Dankešen  But I have a feeling this particular event happend very near the border and the map ther shows that all those areas are well inside Ukraine.


----------



## ahvalj

But the largest area of the historical Serbian settlement is located near the modern Ukrainian/Russian boundary ,-)


----------



## Gavran

Yeah... and the pattern suddenly emerges


----------



## Gavran

Hm, ok, some new revelations here. I had a conversation today and it turns out it was a region next to Hungarian border, in Trans-Carpathia. Incidentally, I'm going there in August and will be able to verify firsthand.


----------



## Easy Tiger

The infamous Rusyn dialect of Ukrainian spoken in Carpathian region where the Hungarian border is, it does somewhat differ from ordinary Ukrainian and does resemble Serbo-Croatian more than Ukrainian does, and that's where croats considered White Croatia to be located. So under effect of alcohol and unexpectedness that story is pretty much possible


----------



## Awwal12

Easy Tiger said:


> and does resemble Serbo-Croatian more than Ukrainian does


Not in any meaningful manner, I am afraid.


----------



## Easy Tiger

Slightly, but does, for example "бачити" in ukrainian and "видит" in rusyn, or rusyn "єдний" and Ukrainian "єдиний", or ukrainian "дещо" and rusyn "дешто"


----------



## Awwal12

Easy Tiger said:


> Slightly, but does, for example "бачити" in ukrainian and "видит"


Standard Ukrainian does have "видіти" (cf. Rus. видеть, Old East Slavic видѣти), even though it's considered dated. "Бачити" (Bel. бачыць, Rus. dial. бачить), on the other hand, is a loan from Polish. Looks more like a random archaicism.


Easy Tiger said:


> or ukrainian "дещо" and rusyn "дешто"


Reflexes of *čьto vary greatly through East Slavic dialects in general. Cf. Bel. што, Russian что [што] and dial. шо < *ščo. Nothing really specific here.


----------



## dihydrogen monoxide

Awwal12 said:


> Standard Ukrainian does have "видіти" (cf. Rus. видеть, Old East Slavic видѣти), even though it's considered dated. "Бачити" (Bel. бачыць, Rus. dial. бачить), on the other hand, is a loan from Polish. Looks more like a random archaicism.
> 
> Reflexes of *čьto vary greatly through East Slavic dialects in general. Cf. Bel. што, Russian что [што] and dial. шо < *ščo. Nothing really specific here.



You could say baciti pogled in BCS.


----------



## Awwal12

BCS baciti "to throw" is most likely unrelated. The Polish word is supposed to come from mis-analyzing the proto-Slavic/Old Polish *obačiti (from *oko) as *o-bačiti rather than *ob-ačiti.


----------

