This Weekend, Sept 16th
to 18th, I had the opportunity to attend the Ukrainian Festival in
Bloor West Village, the largest Ukrainian festival in North America and one of
the most colorful street festivals of Toronto during the summer time. More info
can be found in http://www.ukrainianfestival.com/
For the organizers,
is the 20th year anniversary of this event and an opportunity to
show the best of Ukrainian culture to this multicultural city; for the visitors,
is an opportunity to get closer to Ukrainian culture, and the interest for this
event can be heard in the number of languages that can be spot among the people
who attend to this event; for Ukrainian community in Canada, the second biggest
community outside Ukraine (The largest community lives in Russia) is one more
year of contributions to Canadian Culture since the first immigrants arrived
around 1891; for me, it is a special moment to meet with one of my communities,
know people, taste Ukrainian food and speak in Ukrainian with somebody else, no
matter if it is with the vendor, to ask questions to the person who assist me in
a stand or just to make jokes with people I meet.
To complete this short article, I
will leave here a list of some interesting facts about the Ukrainian language.
Some of them are my translation to articles found: One is https://surmasite.wordpress.com/ Цікаві факти про українську мову (Intersting facts about the
Ukrainian language, written by Olha Dekhter), another is found in http://irpin.today/?p=4123 Українська мова 20 цікавих фактів! (Ukrainian language,
20 intersting facts). A couple of points were added by me.
- Modern Ukrainian
language has aprox. 256 thousand words.
- According to the lexicography
the closest language to Ukrainian is Byelorussian – almost 84% of the Ukrainian lexicon is
common with this language. Then come Polish and Serbian (70% and 68%) and then
comes Russian with 62% of common lexicon. If we compare the phonetic and
Grammar, Ukrainian has between 22 to 29 rules in common with Byelorussian, Czech
language, Slovak and polish. With
Russian, there are only 11 Rules in common.
- In Ukrainian there are 7 cases of declinations. One
of them is the Vocative.
- In Ukrainian, The letter most used is the
letter “П” (P). The least used letter of the alphabet is the “Ф” (F).- Ukrainian has a distinctive variation of the Cyrillic letter “Г” (H) that is “Ґ” (G). In other hand,
most known words of Greek origin that use the letter “Г” (Gamma) has “H” as their pronunciation
in Ukrainian: Some examples: Grammar = “граматика” (Hramatika); Bibliography =
“бібліографія” (Bibliohrafiya); Galaxy (From Greek γαλαξίας , or Galaxías) in Ukrainian is
“галактика” (Halaktika); Category = “категорія” (Katehoria);
- The names used to
designate young animals are neuter gender. Examples: теля (Calf), котеня (kitten), жабеня (Little Frog).
- Ukrainian language is very rich in
Diminutives. The example that most articles mention is “вороги” (Enemy) – “вороженьки”.
- Ukrainian
modern literature officially started with the edition of the poem “Енеїди”
(Eneyida) by Ivan Kotlarevsky in 1798. However, Ukrainians have
special regards for the literary work of Taras Shevchenko, who is considered the
founder of the modern Ukrainian literature and the national poet of Ukraine.
His collection of poems can be found in “Kobzar”. But the poem "Заповіт" (Testament), was translated to more than 60 languages being the
most popular Ukrainian poem and the one which the most translations to other
languages.
