Ukrainian language

Comparative grammar

: Cyrillic letters in this article are romanized using scientific transliteration.

Related Topics:
Cyrillic - Romanized - Scientific transliteration

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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 ? renders different consonants in Old East Slavic and Ukrainian, see language notes in Cyrillic alphabet. Ukrainian ? is the voiced cognate of Old East Slavic ? (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 ?, in place of the 'hard' Old East Slavic one.

Related Topics:
Nom - Loc - Consonant - Cyrillic alphabet - Voiced

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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, which sounds ungrammatical to the Russian ear. -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).

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