English is a language that loves to simplify. We have more words than any other language, and yet an average American doesn’t know more than 3,000 of them and uses less than 1,000 on a daily basis.
The words we do know, we’re forever trying to make shorter. For example, when a person wants to say: “Good day, good sir. What have been the happenings in your esteemed life, for I do hope they have been clement?” he or she may now simply say: “S’up”. I’ve even noticed lately the progression from “S’up” to “S’uh”, dropping out yet another sound.
Ukrainian does not have this tendency towards simplification. In fact, it’s the exact opposite. I think that being locked indoors on too many cold, winter nights has caused Ukrainians to inflate their language in an effort take up more time. All the Slavic languages are like this, and are considered so difficult that Ukrainian Peace Corps volunteers are required to live with a host family for six months instead of the usual three.
The Ukrainian word for “hello”, that most basic of words in any language, is ten letters long and begins with three consonants back to back. The Ukrainian word for hello is zdravuistea. When that’s the first thing you’re trying to pronounce, you know it’s uphill from there. “Good-bye”, by the way, is do pobachinea. And, yes, you must separately pronounce the last two vowels. Ukrainians have a lingual dexterity that would shame a fly-eating amphibian.
There very few short words in Ukrainian. The word “use” is vikorictovoovati. I’m not making this up. We groan about the long words to our language teacher a lot, so it was with glee that she taught us the word for “fashion”: modna. “See, it’s a short word,” she said. Then the French speakers in my cluster pointed out where the word originally came from. If there’s a short word in Ukrainian, it’s probably a borrowed word.
But bringing up modna let’s me point out another bit of frustration with the Ukrainian language: words that sound like English words but mean something completely different. Modna means “fashion”, but fason means “model”. Plosha means “square”, but square means “public garden.” Shodenik means “journal”, journal means “magazine” and magazine means “store”.
This confusing echo to the Latin-based languages (to which Ukrainian is distantly related; somewhat like a bastard second cousin) can be seen in its alphabet. The Ukrainian Cyrillic alphabet (not to be confused with the Russian Cyrillic alphabet) has 33 letters and is just close enough to the Latin alphabet to drive you nuts. Especially because while some of the some of the Cyrillic letters correspond to our alphabet (“B”, “A”, and “E”, for example), others don’t. “H” is pronounced N, “C” is pronounced S, and “P” is pronounced R. When you see PECTOPAH on a sign, it’s actually read “Restauran”, and you know it’s a place to go eat.
Oh, Cyrillic also has a letter that looks like “b”, and, like a Southern Baptist having sex, it makes no sound at all.
The other left over part of once being related to Latin is verb conjugations. Most Latin languages have two sets of verb conjugations. Ukrainian tries to be big daddy and have four.
Believe it or not, none of this is what really makes Ukrainian so difficult. What makes Ukrainian so difficult is that it is an inflected language. That is, the nouns change depending on how they are used in the sentence.
Meat with cheese. Cheese with meat. In English, the words don’t change. That’s because English is uninflected. Translate them into Ukrainian, though, and you find that Meeyaca z’cirom is different from Cir z’meeyacoyoo.
Old English used to be inflected, as was Old Norse, but both were inflected in different ways. After the Norse conquered England and found that they couldn’t understand the women they were taking as wives (“Husband” is from Old Norse, “Wife” is from Old English), the result was a simplification where the resulting Middle English was uninflected. And this simplification continued right into “’Nuff o’ dis his’tree”.
There are seven ways nouns can change in Ukrainian, and each of these is called a “case”. All nouns change, including names. So my name, at turns, is Daniel (nominative), Daniela (genitive), Danielom (instrumental) and Danieli (locative), depending how it’s used in the sentence. And, once the nouns change, every adjective, pronoun, number or participle used with them must change to agree with their case, gender and number.
Have a headache yet? I get them all the time.
Since six of the cases are common (there are, in fact, seven of the bastards), since there are three genders (including neuter), and there are two ways to number nouns (singular or plural) there are at least 24 variations for any given word. “My” could be miye, moya, moye, moyemoo, or moyeem depending on the number, gender and case of the noun it is possessing. Moyeeh is the form of “my” used when I possess a direct object that is animate and there’s more than one of it.
Advil. I so need Advil.
Ukrainian students learning English can’t get over that most words that don’t change. “What is miye in English?” “My.” “What is moya in English?” “My.” “What is moyeeh in English?” “My.” They think it’s the easiest language in the world.
So now I’m done complaining about how complicated Ukrainian is (did you know there are actually three words for “year” depending on how many years you’re talking about?), and I’ll leave you with one last Ukrainian word:
It is a word that, like some other Ukrainian words, is a concept that takes a sentence to describe. The word is zamourduvaty, and it means “to work someone so hard that they die of exhaustion.”
It’s how I feel at the end of language class.