Ukrainian Festival in Toronto and Ukrainian language!

This Weekend, Sept 16^th to 18^th, 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 20^th 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.