Interesting facts concerning ukrainian language
According to the scientists, the Ukrainian language is the oldest of all living Slavic languages. It comes from the ancient Old Slavic language which was the cradle of the Slavic language group. The Russian language is younger than Ukrainian and comes from the Ukrainian church language with the inclusions of the Tatar and Finnish languages.
The earliest mention of the Ukrainian language is dated to the year of 858, and the first time the Ukrainian language was given the status of a literary language was in the late XVIII century when the first edition of "The Aeneid" appeared in 1798. Its author was Ivan Kotlyarevsky who is considered the founder of the modern Ukrainian literary language.
According to the genealogical classification the Ukrainian language belongs to the East Slavic subgroup of the Slavic group of the Indo-European language family. Genealogically closest to the Ukrainian language is Byelorussian.
Ukrainian is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world and ranks 26th as to the number of speakers. It is native to 37 million people and the second language for another 15 million. It is widespread in Ukraine, Russia, Moldova, Canada, the US, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Romania, Poland, Brazil and Slovakia.
Ukrainian influences the neighboring languages: Polish, Russian, Byelorussian. Many languages include such Ukrainian words as “hopak”, “Cossack”, “bandura”, “borsch”.
Modern Ukrainian consists of three dialects: northern, south-eastern and south-western. Besides, there is mixed Russian-Ukrainian dialect which is not considered literary.
According to the dictionary of the National Academy of Science, modern Ukrainian has 256 000 words and is included in the list of languages that are successfully developing.
The first primer published in Ukraine was "ABC-book" printed in 1574 in Lviv by the first printer Ivan Fedorov. One copy of this publication was found in Rome in 1927. At present it is kept in the library of Harvard University (USA). Facsimile edition of this “ABC-book” was made in Kiev in 1964 and 1974.
In 1918-1920 the Ukrainian language was the official language of the People's Republic of Kuban.
Ukrainian is one of the most beautiful languages in the world. The linguists of Italy recognized it as the second melodious language (after Italian), while at the Language competition in Paris in 1934 it was recognized as the third most beautiful language in the world (after French and Persian) according to such criteria as phonetics, vocabulary, phraseology and sentence structure.
The most commonly used letter of the Ukrainian alphabet is “P” as it is with this letter that most Ukrainian words begin, while “F” is the least popular letter. The words beginning with it are mostly borrowings. The longest word in the Ukrainian language is the word "dihlordifeniltrihlormetilmetan" (the name of the chemical, which is used for pest control). This word contains the 30 letters!
