 | Ukrainian language: Encyclopedia II - Ukrainian language - Language structure
Ukrainian language - Language structure
Cyrillic letters in this article are romanized using scientific transliteration.
Ukrainian language - Comparative grammar
Old East Slavic (and Russian) o in many cases corresponds to Ukrainian i, as in pod->pid "under". The historical o is sometimes restored in certain declensions of Ukrainian words, such as rik (nom): rotsi (loc) "year". Also, the letter Г renders different consonants in Old East Slavic and Ukrainian, see language notes in Cyrillic alphabet. Ukrainian Г is the voiced cognate of Old East Slavic Х (and so is often transliterated as Latin h), while the Russian (and Old East Slavic) one is pronounced the same as English g, as in good. Russian speakers from Ukraine often use the 'soft' Ukrainian Г, in place of the 'hard' Old East Slavic one.
Ukrainian case endings are somewhat different from Old East Slavic, and the vocabulary includes a large overlay of Polish terminology. Russian na pervom etazhe "on the first floor" is in the prepositional case. The Ukrainian corresponding expression is na pershomu poversi. -omu is the standard locative (prepositional) ending, but variants in -im are common in dialect and poetry, and allowed by the standards bodies. The x of Ukrainian poverx has mutated into s under the influence of the soft vowel i (k is similarly mutable into ts in final positions). Ukrainian is the only modern East Slavic language which preserves the vocative case.
Ukrainian language - Phonetics
Further information: Ukrainian phonology, and [[]], and [[]], and [[]], and [[]], and [[]], and [[]], and [[]], and [[]]
The Ukrainian language has six vowels, [a], [e], [i], [ɪ], [o], [u], and two semivowels [j], [ʋ].
A number of the consonants come in three forms: hard, soft (palatalized) and long, for example, [l], [lʲ], and [ll] or [n], [nʲ], and [nn]. Ukrainians tend to pronounce long sounds where the letters are doubled in other languages, English or Russian, for example.
The divergence in pronunciation of the Ukrainian [ɦ] and Russian [g] (Cyrillic г) has already been discussed above. Another phonetic divergence between the two languages is the pronunciation of /v/ (Cyrillic в). While in Russian it is pronounced as [v], in Ukrainian it is pronounced as [ʋ] (a labiodental approximant somewhat in between the [v] in "victory" and the [w] in "water").
Ukrainian language - Alphabet
Main article: Ukrainian alphabet
The alphabet of the Ukrainian language consists of 33 letters and is derived from the Cyrillic writing system. The modern Ukrainian alphabet is the result of a number of proposed alphabetic reforms from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in Ukraine under the Russian Empire, in Austrian Galicia, and later in Soviet Ukraine. It was officially established at a 1927 international Orthographic Conference in Kharkiv (although the Ukrainian letter ge, ґ, was banned in the Soviet Union from 1933 until 1990).
The alphabet comprises thirty-three letters, representing thirty-eight phonemes (meaningful units of sound), and an additional sign—the apostrophe. Ukrainian orthography is based on the phonemic principle, with one letter generally corresponding to one phoneme, although there are a number of exceptions. The orthography also has cases where the semantic, historical, and morphological principles are applied.
The letter щ represents two consonants [ʃʧ]. The combination of [j] with some of the vowels is also represented by a single letter ([ja]=я, [je]=є, [ji]=ї, [ju]=ю), while [jo]=йо and the rare regional [jɪ]=йи are written using two letters. These iotated vowel letters and a special soft sign change a preceding consonant from hard to soft. An apostrophe is used to indicate the hardness of the sound in the cases when normally the vowel would change the consonant to soft.
A letter is repeated to indicate that the sound is long.
The phonemes [ʣ] and [ʤ] do not have dedicated letters in the alphabet and are rendered with the digraphs дз and дж, respectively. [ʣ] is pronounced like English ds in pods, [ʤ] is like g in huge.
See also Drahomanivka, Ukrainian Latin alphabet.
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