Genealogy / Duda Family [23]


Duda in Ukrainian means "pipe, fife" and in Cyrillic letters it is written as "дуда", and there is a saying in U.: "To play to someone's duda" meaning "to play to someone's pipe". There are, also, some derivatives of this word, as "dudity" (to fife), "dudar" (someone who plays "duda", piper, and also, "dudaryk", usually a young man who plays duda, and "Dudaryk" is the name of the popular men choir in Lviv (in Cyrillic letters it is written as "Дударик").

Personally, I knew several persons here whose surname was Duda. Here, this surname is quite usual, although not very much popular.
But the name may be in other languages, too. So, in this case you cannot tell a person's origin by his/her surname only.

Language / Polish/Ukrainian words similarities [209]


What a vivid illogicality – just runaround: you are quoting me writing about the quality of the car – and you have brought up the info from the Internet (everyone of us can do this!!) about the financial and other moves of the companies involved.

Of course, what else can you do: here we are driving these cars and have experience concerning its technical characteristics, price-quality correlation and so on (and BTW, by buying these UA-made cars one contributes to our country's economic development and employment rate: people are working and paid)

–and you, what can you say sitting at the computer, in North America as you say – you have not, perhaps, even touched these cars' steering wheel?

But of course, you have to ******** – to defame a UA company and its product – to deserve your pay.
But this time you failed!

Language / Polish/Ukrainian words similarities [209]


What you know is bull sh*t → forget it: outspoken anti-Ukrainian propaganda, spread by paid agents (do not be stupid – do not believe them! if you, of course, are not one of them).

Listen to me: the real things are just the opposite. The product of the Ukrainian-Korean cooperation is simply the BEST CAR in the world in its class: low price, economic, manoeuvrable, service-friendly, ergonomic, long service life. Of course, without any whistles and bells – just bread-and-butter car.

Language / Polish/Ukrainian words similarities [209]


Completely hopeless, you think?


Languages, pronounciation, literature, similar words, exposure to culture - but there are always bad boys who manage to derail such a fine conversation by bringing up heavy, bloody-stained topics like hatred, wars, killings, accusations.

Let's sting them with nettle - who can do this?

Language / Polish/Ukrainian words similarities [209]


Good.


That is better.


This is the best observation. You are quite an expert. Do you think we can ever be united?

Putin's imperial ambitions[/quote]
Oh, I always have a headache after having discussed sth that has to do with superpowers. Let us skip it otherwise I would have nightmares tonight. And our topic is Ukrainian-Polish (similar words). What would be your contribution to this?

Language / Polish/Ukrainian words similarities [209]

I think, that despite everything (or may be due to everything = our horrible past), Polish-Ukrainian relations have improved radically. What is remembered and appreciated here as point 1 is: It was Poland that was the first country that acknowledges Ukraine as a state. As point 2: Polish outspoken advocacy of Ukraine's joining the EC. Of course, shadows of the past may appear from time to time on both sides, but it is only natural.

And I do not know about Polish-Russian or, say, Polish-Croatian relations, it is business of representatives of these governments and nations. And I would not say that Poland should treat Russia and Ukraine the same way: Russia is a powerful nuclear superpower of the US and China calibre, having much influence in the world. And Ukraine is almost nothing in this respect – if Ukraine disappears today nothing significant will happen tomorrow, not many will even notice it in the outside world. And good neighbourly relations (maybe friendship in the future) between Poland and UA are very important in this unsafe world for existence of our countries.

But I believe we must stay on message: Polish-Ukrainian (neither Polish-Bulgarian, nor Ukrainian-Serbian, nor Polish-Czech etc. that are discussed elsewhere) similar words and here is an example: Polish "Mialem pecha" ("Ich habe Pech gehabt") is used also in this part of UA "Ya mav pekha".

Language / Polish/Ukrainian words similarities [209]

Some ideas, expressed at this forum are, euphemistically speaking, very brave and strange. I am a Slav, but who forbids me to admire South Koreans for their industrial and other achievements, for their reasonable behaviour etc. (and Ukraine, e.g., cooperates successfully in the area of car building with far-away South Korea, a Mongoloid nation, but has zero cooperation, as far as I know, in this field with our almost-neighbour Czech Republic, a Slavic nation).

And often, Slavic nations in the past have been brothers of Abel-Cain type to each other.
Being a Slav does not forbid me to condemn, let us say the Slavic nation X, for their atrocities against a non-Slavic nation A etc. A good neighbour or non-neighbour, be it a person or a state, Slavic or non-Slavic, is simply good and vice versa. I think we have had and still have enough nationalism, chauvinism, Nazism inside countries etc. to create still another type – Slavic nationalism.

Language / Polish/Ukrainian words similarities [209]


Usually I do not ask Polish students specially, where in Poland they come from, but a great deal comes from the western part of Poland and what they study, as I have learnt, includes Civil Engineering, Mathematics, Sociology, History of Ukraine. What I usually ask them if I meet them (museums, literary events, cafés etc.) is a) if they or their parents/grandparents have any connection to Ukraine (had previously lived here, or have relatives here or are of Ukrainian ethnicity -and their good knowledge of Ukrainian is due to the fact that they maybe speak U. sometimes in the family) and their answer has always been "no" up till now and b) facts about Ukraine, and again surprisingly, they know much.

I simply know nothing about Ukrainian diploma recognition, but one of my friends had been working for years as a high school teacher at the Lublin University, and another is still working in Poland as a soft ware developer for a Polish company. I can only draw a conclusion.

BTW, the majority of foreign students in Lviv are from China, I think. And the majority of tractors I have seen on our fields (Lviv Region) are small-size tractors from China!

Zai Zien!

Language / Polish/Ukrainian words similarities [209]


I meant to be it again.


And here is what surprises me:
An observation:
I have noticed that for native Russian speakers, starting to speak Ukrainian is sooo painful and it take so loooong time before they try, whatever ethnicity they may be: Ukrainians, Jews or Russians. Examples: as back as in 1997 brothers Klychkos (predominantly ethnic Ukrainians) promised in a TV interview to start using U. The first time they spoke U. publicly that I know of was several months ago (15 years later) during the election campaign providing evidence that Ukrainian is really a foreign language for them. Then, Mr. Azarov the Premier (of Jewish ethnicity), can hardly say sth in U. without a written text. I have never heard my neighbour (Russian ethnicity) saying a word in U. after having lived decades in Lviv, although everybody speaks U. to her. And I know of tens of such cases - And in contrast to them, Polish students studying in Lviv, with whom I have had chance to talk, can speak almost impeccable Ukrainian after having stayed in Lviv only for 1 year and even if the language of instruction is English.

How can one explain that?

Language / Polish/Ukrainian words similarities [209]


It is a little bit complicated with Ukrainian. E.g., now I speak the Ukrainian that is actually not my native language (or strictly speaking, not "my native Ukrainian"). As a child I spoke, like all people around, literary Halychyna Ukrainian, HU, (the language of I. Franko, Osyp Makovey, Mykhaylo Pavlyk etc.), but when I started to go to school, it was the period when the standard Ukrainian language (SUL) based on the Poltava dialect was introduced, which for us (especially schoolchildren) was a sort of another language (both grammatically and lexically).

Here are only some points as an example:
a) we used Present Perfect structures along with the Past Indefinite saying e.g. "Ya mayu to vzhe zrobleno/napysano, prochytano" along with "Ya to vzhe prochytav/napysav/prochytav" etc. meaning "I have already done that" and "I did this". Nowadays you can hardly hear Present Perfect structures - they may not be even understood by the new generation.

b) the reflective particle "self", "sya", was a separate word and it was moveable in a sentence, so you could say: "Ya vzhe sya vmyv" or "Ya vzhe vmyv sya" (I have already washed myself) etc., which is not the case in SUL.

c) hundreds of words have been replaced in all areas, here are some from the area "School, Education" (these were the first words we had to change for new ones): "atrament, bibula, lawka, geografiya, radyrka, studiya na universyteti, vyshkil, hodyna" for new ones: "chornylo, promokartka, parta, heohrafiya, rezynka, nawchannya w uniwersyteti, nawchannya, urok".

And for years, we had been using these two our "languages": one at home and with friends and neighbours, and the other one - at school, then at the Institute and work - till the time the HL has almost stopped to be used. Separate words are still used, but with the aim to spice your language, or to show that one is from Halychyna when one meets Halychyna people outside it. But no more.

But paradoxically, people in Poltava, whose language we speak here now, usually do not speak this language, but prefer Russian. So, my "first Ukrainian" you, FlaglessPole, would have understood even better.

Language / Polish/Ukrainian words similarities [209]


What would you call them then? Turanians? In how much then have you been influenced by this "Turanian theory" by Mr. Duchinsky? Of course, he had followers in Russia, as Mr, Vernadsky und Ko., saying that Russia is a successor state of the Golden Horde. But I believe that Karlo Marx was right strongly denying it.

Language / Polish/Ukrainian words similarities [209]

Oh, please, please, do not try to drive a wedge between us. May be this "practically the same language" was a little bit overstrained due to my being impressed by so many common words, as I have never tried to compare Russian with Polish (maybe due to the calibre of the countries: one usually compares Russia with US or China etc.), and considered that it was Ukrainian that was more similar to Polish.

But, really, what I now see is that in the future, let's call it, Fraternal Union of Slavic Nations, the transition to using Russian would be, due to this close similarity, quite painless for Poles.

Language / Polish/Ukrainian words similarities [209]

I think the list of common words is long enough to provide an undeniable evidence that Polish and Russian are, practically, the same language.

Language / Polish/Ukrainian words similarities [209]

Well, it is rather an unexpected and brave opinion.

The Advertisement on PF: "Largest collection of Ukrainian language books. Ships from Lviv". Interesting! I have not seen any ships in Lviv. Has Lviv become a port?

Language / Polish/Ukrainian words similarities [209]


Do not see your point - please explain! Was pure and plain Russian bad for praising comrade Stalin? In was location (town, village) was it?


It depends. Usually, when a country is occupied by other powers, only either Communists or nationalists fight for independence. Other forces, as a rule, collaborate with the occupiers. Examples: Vietnamese communists fighting against the French (successfully), Yugoslav communists with Comrade Tito fighting against Nazis (successfully), the Chinese communists with Mao fighting against the Japanese (successfully), Bask nationalists fighting for independence, Irish nationalists fighting the British (successfully), Kurds (referred to both as nationalists and Marxists) fighting for independence. And in the end, Polish nationalists under Kosciuszko fighting for independence. Would you describe them as displaying "do-it-for-the-tribe chest thumping jitterbug"?

Language / Polish/Ukrainian words similarities [209]


Yes, it is. And there is a very effective way of creating nationalists and namely this one:

Occupy/liberate (any other words for this?) a country, stay there, establish your rule there, restrict the rights of the native inhabitants including the right to use their language (as far as our topic is a linguistic one), etc. and in the end you will have: nationalists, then, if you stay longer, terrorists, and the way back (again to the normal state) may last long: decades, centuries.

But again, do not do this: the occupying country itself may suffer from its aggression, and may even collapse. And there are examples of this, aren't there? I think you can give some, will you?

Language / Polish/Ukrainian words similarities [209]


I failed to mention 2 other periods favourable for the development of the Ukrainian language: 1.5 years of the Ukrainian People's Republic and approximately the same period of the Western Ukrainian People's Republic (both quickly and effectively military suppressed by other Slavic nations) and the last years of the Soviet Union period (so, I would not say that the SU period had been the worst for Ukrainian - all depended upon who had been in power in the Kremlin - and as said the last SU years had been favourable: why - a long story again, so I would name only one aspect: it was allowed, among other things, to start to use Ukrainian at industrial enterprises as a working language and many technical terms were created at that period mostly by "translating" technical terms from Russian according to the rules of word-building of the Ukrainian language, as "otmostka" → "vidmostka" (blind area), also, by finding words that had not been in use for more than 50 years, so e.g. I learnt for the first time that the Ukrainian word for a "ball bearing" was "kulkova valnytsya", which at first sounded very funny/unusual for all, or in some other ways).

Language / Polish/Ukrainian words similarities [209]

I think you are very much right.
The thing is that this year Ukraine celebrates its only 23rd anniversary of independence after more than 500 hundred years of being dependent/enslaved in different forms. So, in conditions of dependence, the use of the Ukrainian language had been either banned or restricted (with the only exception of some 50 years of East Halychyna – or you would incorrectly say East Galicia – being under the Austrian Empire and some 4 years of the German occupation of the part of the USSR in '41-44), often many Ukrainians had had to use other languages to occupy governmental any posts, change their ethnicity in documents etc. - in the result the language had not been developing much and had been used primarily in the country side. Even now, only 40% of Ukrainian citizens use it in everyday life, the majority consider it "a country side language" or are even ashamed to use it. (I think that it is no wonder – any enslaved nation usually experiences this – e.g. no more than 15% of the Irish in Eire speak their Celtic language after some 90 years of independence – please correct me if I am wrong - and it is very difficult to turn back to "your new native tongue" if your father and mother told your fairy tales or sang songs in your childhood in another language, and if this another language is more powerful, more widely used or more important in the world than yours, as English or Russian are. Another nation – Kurds – has the Kurdish language been already recognized?).

And any restricted use or non-use of any language, or if the speaking community is restricted to the country side (thank you, country side people, for having preserved the language!) results, of course, in the fact that the language stops to develop.

So, what we have in the result with Ukrainian: it is structurally much archaic and complicated, has not got rid of unnecessary endings, etc. Only one example: "tsya" (feminine for this as in "tsya kvitka" this flower - the Genetive case is then: "tsiyeyi kvitky", the Dative case: "tsiy kvitci", the instrumental case: "tsiyeyu kvitkoyoo" - which is much difficult even for Ukrainians esp. kids starting to speak. And there are other aspects, too. But it is already a long story.

Language / Slavic accent correction [110]


As far as the accents, Polish and Ukrainian, are pleasant, so there is no need to correct them, is there? Let the English native speakers enjoy them!!!

Language / Slavic accent correction [110]


Vlad, you asked a very important question (and I was not ready to answer it at first). But the atmosphere in Ukraine (or at least here) is, I believe, that a very-very low percentage of voters elect based on parties’ programs or have familiarized themselves with them (some parties even did not have their election programs).

It is interesting how it is in Poland and other countries.

To stay a little bit on-top (accent, language): A part of voters in UA voted (as they confess) for Yanukovych only because he had promised to make Russian the second language. So here we have languages as a nation-dividing factor: not the accent, not the ethnicity, not the confession, sometimes even not the performance. But the language and connected with it culture, values etc. And ethnic Russians in Ukraine are very patriotic of their language, literature, culture etc. (here we can draw some comparison to Ukrainians in Canada in contrast to Ukrainians in the Russian Federation).

Language / Slavic accent correction [110]


I am greatly sorry, but I cannot. I stated only that she had been popular here and that people loved her, but nothing about her performance as the Prime Minister etc.


I would agree with that, partially :). She had been so persuasive, so energetic, contacted people, spoke to them not only through media but live, at numerous meetings, so that people were simply carried away by her speeches - and believed her (that she would try or was trying to change the life for the better), and the life seemed lighter, full of prospects, there were hopes - and that must be an important factor = leader contacting and positively influencing the nation. And that in contrast to the present situation when the leaders cannot even speak, and when they speak they are becoming the laughing stock not only in Europe but the whole world.

History / Poles and Russians -- love-hate relationship? [209]


I think he does (if i may join your dialogue), because Alexander Suvorov was the commander of the Russian Army that crashed the Polish uprising led by Kosciuszko which brought about the 3rd partition of Poland among Russia, Prussia and Austria.

Language / Slavic accent correction [110]


I have thought Poles (alongside Slovaks) to be the most "pure" Slavic nation.

History / Poles and Russians -- love-hate relationship? [209]


What a pity!!! Also, because I was just going to ask about the units of measuring the strength of love during/after such sessions (?) (cracked bottles, glasses?)

Language / Slavic accent correction [110]


BTW, how can one fully define persons, nations who call themselves "Slavs/Slavic nations", only by the language they speak?
The question is in this connection that today I have read a WIKI article about the Kazan Tartars trying to revive their ancient name Bulgaria (Volgaria). So, the related question: Suppose they join the European Bulgarians (, build a sort of confederation with them) and accept a Slavic language as their native one as well, would they be a Slavic nation too?

Still another question: Why do we use the word "Slavic" in English, but not a word like "Slovian" (or Slovic)? According to the article (an abstract from which see below) + many others, the word Slav/Slavic is connected rather with the word "slovo" ("word"), and more to it: there are countries that have the root "slov" in their names: Slovakia, Slovenia. Could one introduce it into use in English?

Origin of the word Slav poland-claritaslux/blog/origin-word-slav/
What is the origin of the word Slav? The Slavs or Slavic people are obviously most of the people of Eastern Europe, the Poles, Czechs, Slovakians, Ukrainians, Russians, and Serbians etc. Their languages and cultures are very similar.

The word 'Slav' or 'Slowianin' comes from the Slavic term for word; 'Slowo'. 'Slowo' means 'word' (słowo in Polish letters but pronounced swovo). The Slavs identified themselves as those who could understand their word or language. Slavic could be interpreted as "someone who understands".

History / Poles and Russians -- love-hate relationship? [209]


How often do you take part in such manifestations?

History / Poles and Russians -- love-hate relationship? [209]


How is the mutual love manifested in this love-hate relationship?


Do you want the Russian Federation to collapse as the SU under the liberal Gorbi regime did?

I think, the first, who would secede from the Federation in the first month of democracy, would be, of course, the Chechens. The second, their brothers, the Ingushens. The third - the Kazan Tartars (6 million strong nation, dreaming all the time about re-gaining their lost statehood) etc.

Language / Slavic accent correction [110]


The main thing I have failed to mention concerning accent is that I speak English with an accent and, despite this fact, I have never felt anybody's displeasure in this connection.

I would agree with you, and with the others, that there are some common Slavic accent peculiarities, one of them being, as already mentioned by **************, palatalization of consonants (Ukrainian translation: пом'ягшення приголосних звуків), as e.g. the word "tick" [tik] may be incorrectly pronounced as [t'ik] with palatalized [t'] as in the UKrainian word "тільки" [t'il'ky] ("only"). And vice versa, native English speakers here often pronounce the U-word "тільки" as [til'ky] or [tilky].

Language / Slavic accent correction [110]


By the way, the most popular speaker of Ukrainian with an accent is Yulia Tymoshenko. I had heard her speaking many times both live (she had visited Lviv several time to speak to the public) and on TV; she had spoken with a noticeable accent (the Ukrainian word "povidomyv" she would pronounce as "pavidomyf" = Russian way of pronouncing "o" in an unstressed position + reducing final sonants to voiceless consonants - not the case in Ukrainian), and: I had never noticed that anybody would make a negative remark about her accent: People here like, no - love her.

Mr. Yanukovych speaks Ukrainian, I would say, roughly with the same level of accent, but, in contrast, there are remarks all the time, both regarding the content and the accent. Here he enjoys no popularity.

So, concerning us in Lviv, we are exposed to hearing people speaking both Ukrainian and English with an accent continuously. And an accent seems to have become as much a norm as no accent.

Language / Slavic accent correction [110]

As far as I hear people speak here Ukrainian or English with an accent all the time (sometimes very much correct Ukrainian or English but with an accent: Chinese, Polish, Nigerian etc. students, local Russians who have switched to speaking Ukrainian, tourists etc) I got used to it as I got used to snow in winter. I have even never thought of an accent as something negative. Moreover, I find it even funny!

That is why I asked this question.