As my last blog post I wanted to bring attention to my family roots, the dialects of the Polish and Ukrainian language. My father’s side is Polish and my mother’s side is Ukrainian. Both have made comments here and there, mentioning that both languages are quite similar. But in what ways? I began to dig, asking my very Ukrainian grandmother and doing some research on my own. This is what I found, both Polish and Ukrainian are Slavic languages from the Indo-European family. And during the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Ukraine came under the domination of Poland this resulted in cultural Polonization. Gradually, the official language of Ukrainian provinces under Poland was changed to Polish. As a result, many Ukrainian nobles learned the Polish language. This could explain why the west of the modern day Ukraine has much closer vocabulary and dialect use of the Polish language. To get technical, both Ukrainian and Polish orthography is largely phonetic. There is a consistent correspondence between their spelling system of language, sounds, and letters. As for grammar, both languages have a relatively free word order, and are considered a highly inflected language. This meanings a language that changes the form or ending of some words due to the way they are used in a sentence. There are no articles, and often subject pronouns are dropped. Adding to that, nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and numerals are inclined by numbers, cases, and gender.
I watched an interesting video of a man who spoke Polish and a women who spoke Ukrainian, trying to have a simple conversation. It was interesting the way the women picked up on a few common spoken words. I recommend watching about 5 or so minutes since the video is so long. Let me know what you thought and if you know any other slavic languages who are also similar. Or feel free to express your family’s roots if they have any correspondence to one another.
Something that stood out to me while I was reading your post was your comment that Ukrainian and Polish orthography are both very phonetic. I remember learning in Linguistics that it is quite the opposite with English. Dr. Luthin would say over and over, "Spelling is not your friend." The more I learn about language, and the more I apply this to English, the more I understand what he meant by that. English words are often spelled in ways that seem to have no correlation to the way they sound. (Colonel? Indict? Island? Etc.) These weird spellings are part of makes English so hard for speakers of others languages to learn it. Our rules are evasive and inconsistent. That's just something I thought of while reading your post. Really cool how you looked into your heritage!
ReplyDeleteThat was fascinating, Mary. Nice that you decided to explore your family's linguistic roots, too. Were either of those languages spoken in your home (or your grandparents' homes), and did they ever try to teach you? Also, what period was the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in power? That's a piece of history I know nothing about!
ReplyDeleteThat was a cool video! It was interesting to see how the girl became more confident about what they were saying as they went through the discussion topics. I feel the same when I'm trying to practice my Spanish. With context and time listening to a person, I can pick up much more of what they are saying than if I just jump into a conversation.
ReplyDeleteThis reminded me of what Yessie says about talking with the other foreign exchange student from France. Although they don't speak the same language, the Latin roots and language similarities allows them to figure out more of what each other are saying.