Ukrainian

Description

Ukrainian is spoken by approx. 39 million people in the Ukraine and by several million people abroad (e.g. in Canada, USA, Brasil). It belongs to the Eastern branch of the Slavonic group of the Indo-European language family. Ukrainian is a solid inflectional language, although it has not reached the degree of synthetic optimization charactersistic of some other Slavonic languages (Russian, Belorussian, Polish). The authors provide a brief but fairly comprehensive description of the phonetic segmentation, and present a new system of conveying the traditional Cyrillic script by Latin characters in order to reconstruct the original Ukrainian spelling. The overall pattern of the grammar is given from the communicative point of view. The main part-of-speech categories are being analysed with respect to their sentence functions. References are occasionally made to typologically different languages so as to highlight some important grammatical traits of Ukrainian. The so-­called synthetic Future tense, Pluperfect tense, the Vocative case and other recessive properties of Ukrainian are being treated as a sequel to the slackening of its synthetic evolution. The sketch is supplemented with an original Ukrainian text and substantial bibliography, which contains the most essential writings on Ukrainian.