LECTURE 1

1. LECTURE 1 Theme: Introduction. Ukrainian Alphabet.

4. PLAN • 1. Introduction. • 2. Major differences of the Ukrainian and English Languages. • 3. Ukrainian Alphabet.

6. Ukrainian (Українська) • Ukrainian is an Eastern Slavonic language closely related to Russian and Belarusian. It is spoken by about 51 million people in Ukraine (Україна) and in many other countries, including Argentina, Armenia, Brazil, Canada, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Poland, Romania, Russia and Slovakia.

8. Ukrainian (Українська) • The recorded history of the Ukrainian language began in 988, when the principality of Kiev (Київ) was converted to Christianity. Ukrainian religious material, including translations of the Bible, was written in Old Slavonic, the language used by missionaries to spread Christianity to the Slavic peoples.

9. Ukrainian (Українська) • In the 13th century, Ukraine became part of Lithuanian and an early form of Belarusian became the main language. The remaining parts of Ukraine were taken over by Poland during the 16th century and Latin and Polish were used for official purposes.

10. The first page of Ivan Fedorovych's Azbuka (Alphabet book), printed in Lviv, 1574

12. Ukrainian (Українська) • The Cossacks later moved into eastern Ukraine and during the 17th century, their leader, Bohdan Khmelnytsky, invited Russia to help against Polish domination in 1648. During the reign of Catherine the Great, the Cossacks moved to the eastern frontiers of Russia, but Ukraine remained under Russian domination, and the Russians considered the Ukrainian language as little more than a dialect of Russian.

13. Ukrainian (Українська) • A decree in 1876 banned the printing or importing of Ukrainian books. In spite of this, there was a revival of Ukrainian poetry and historiography during the 19th century.

14. Ukrainian (Українська) • Ukraine enjoyed a brief period of independence from 1918 to 1919, then was taken over by the USSR and declared a Soviet Republic. During the Soviet era, Russian was the main language of education and employment and Ukrainian was sidelined. • Ukraine declared independence in 1991. Since then many Ukrainian émigrés have returned to Ukraine, particularly from central Asia and Siberia.

15. Current usage • The Ukrainian language is currently emerging from a long period of decline. Although there are almost fifty million ethnic Ukrainians worldwide, including 37.5 million in Ukraine (77.8% of the total population), only in western Ukraine is the Ukrainian language prevalent. In Kiev, both Ukrainian and Russian are spoken, a notable shift from the recent past when the city was primarily Russian speaking. The shift is caused, largely, by an influx of the rural population and migrants from the western regions of Ukraine but also by some Kievans' turning to use the language they speak at home more widely in everyday matters.

16. Current usage • In northern and central Ukraine, Russian is the language of the urban population, while in rural areas Ukrainian is much more common. In the south and the east of Ukraine, Russian is prevalent even in rural areas, and in Crimea, Ukrainian is almost absent.

17. The Ukrainian alphabet • А а Б б В в Г г Ґ ґ Д д Е е Є є Ж ж З з И и І і Ї ї Й й К к Л л М м Н н О о П п Р р С с Т т У у Ф ф Х х Ц ц Ч ч Ш ш Щ щ Ь ь Ю ю Я я

18. The Ukrainian language possesses an extremely rich grammatical structure inherited from Indo-European: • Nouns have grammatical gender, number, and are declined for 7 cases; • Adjectives agree with the noun in case, number, and gender; • Verbs have 2 aspects, 3 tenses, 3 moods, and 2 voices. • Furthermore, many verbs show traces of Indo-European gradation. This often explains the difference between the infinitive and its present root form of the verbs. • The spoken language has been influenced by the literary, but continues to preserve characteristic forms. The dialects show various non-standard grammatical features, some of which are archaisms or descendants of old forms since discarded by the literary language.

19. Major differences of the Ukrainian and English Languages. • Cyrillic writing • two forms of "you" address: formal and informal • absence of articles • a relatively loose word order in sentences • three genders of nouns • nouns change their endings (cases) depending on their functions in the sentence • besides grammatical tenses (present, past, future), forms of verbs express the idea of completed or progressive action.

20. The 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.

21. The Ukrainian Alphabet • A unified Ukrainian alphabet (the Skrypnykivka, after Mykola Skrypnyk) was officially established at a 1927 international Orthographic Conference in Kharkiv, during the period of Ukrainization in Soviet Ukraine. But the policy was reversed in the 1930s, and the Soviet Ukrainian orthography diverged from that used by the diaspora. The Ukrainian letter ge ґ was banned in the Soviet Union from 1933 until the Ukrainian independence in 1990.

22. The Ukrainian Alphabet • 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.

23. The Ukrainian Alphabet

24. Ukrainian vowels: • A a (English A) • O o (English O) • У у (English U) • Е е (English E) • И и (English Y) • І і(English I)

25. Classification of vowels • Two different classification of vowels can be made: a historical perspective and a modern perspective. From a historical perspective, the Ukrainian vowels can be divided into two categories:

26. Classification of vowels • Hard vowels (in Cyrillic: а, и (from Common Slavic *ы), о, and у or transliterated as a, y (from Common Slavic *y), o, and u; ) • Soft vowels (in Cyrillic: е, і and и (from Common Slavic *и) or transliterated as e, i and y (from Common Slavic *i)). The iotified vowels are considered to be soft vowels

27. Classification of vowels • From a modern perspective, the Ukrainian vowels can be divided into two categories: • Hard Vowels (In Cyrillic: а, е, и, і, о, and у or transliterated as a, e, y, i, o, and u). This category as can be seen from the table is different from the historical hard category

28. Classification of vowels • Iotified Vowel (In Cyrillic: я, є, ї, and ю or transliterated as ja, je, ji, and ju). To this category can also be added the combination of letters йо (transliterated as jo)

30. ДЯКУЮ ЗА УВАГУ!