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East and West

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Clarissa

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At the graduation ceremony, I was sitting next to my Ukrainian colleague.

“Have you noticed how many last names that are just like ours there are in this region? They all sound so familiar,” she said as we listened to the names of our graduates.

“What do you mean???” I asked. “There are no last names that sound familiar here.”

“But listen: Wiezniewski, Kaczmarek – they are all just like ours.”

“These are Polish last names,” I said.

“Yes, exactly. So familiar.”

And this is how we discovered the only real difference between East and West of Ukraine.

4 responses to “East and West”

  1. cliff arroyo Avatar
    cliff arroyo

    A student of mine while living abroad shared an apartment for a time with a Ukrainian and a Russian. She said that she and the Ukrainian could understand each other if each spoke their own language but it didn’t work at all with the Russian and the Ukrainian translated and if she wasn’t around they had to use English.

    For me (non-native but fluent Polish speaker) Ukrainian sounds a lot like a Slovak speaking Russian with a lot of Polish words thrown in (or a Pole trying and failing to speak Russian). Belarussian sounds like a Russian trying to speak Polish and neither failing nor succeeding.

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  2. Michael Blekhman Avatar
    Michael Blekhman

    I am fully bilingual, Russian and Ukrainian being my two native tongues.

    As a professional linguist and person writing prose in both of those languages, I must say that you are mistaken: those are different languages, and different mentalities. More than that: I don’t know a single Russian who would read a Ukrainian book and understand a single sentence.

    Again: I love both Russian and Ukrainian, but (and) they are absolutely different. Saying that Ukrainian is close to Slovak and Polish, sounds a bit naïve to me. Just as saying that Portuguese is ‘Spanish spoken by a Pole’. 🙂

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  3. cliff arroyo Avatar
    cliff arroyo

    I’m not sure what you think I wrote.

    A Polish speaker told me she was able to communicate with a Ukrainian speaker, each using their own language but she could not do so with a Russian speaker.

    My subjective impressions about what Ukrainian and Belarusian sound like are just that – my subjective impressions. I am pretty sure though that linguistic analysis would show greater lexical correspondence between Polish and Ukrainian than between either of those languages and Russian.

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      The Ukrainian of the West Ukraine is more like Polish, and this is why it sounds very fake and weird to those from us in the East.

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A conservative literary critic and college professor

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