Why Russian and Ukrainian Nouns Change their Spelling [View all]

[MineralMan]

You might encounter Ukraine as spelled in the Cyrillic alphabet. If you do, you'll notice that the spelling of the end of the word changes. As the subject of a sentence, it is spelled Ukraina, and pronounced oo-cry-ee-na. But, the ending of the word changes, depending on how it is used in a sentence. It is universally mispronounced by English speakers.

Both Russian and Ukrainian are highly inflected languages, with different word forms for nouns, adjectives, and verbs, depending on their usage in sentences. If you studied Latin in school, you'll recognize this phenomenon.

For nouns, they are declined depending on their case, number, assigned gender, and other factors. There are six cases in regular use, with a couple of others that only apply to a few words. It's complicated, to say the least, and for English speakers the highly inflected Slavic languages present a real challenge when learning them.

Adjectives are also declined similarly and change depending on usage.

For information on noun cases in Russian and Ukrainian, see this link:

http://masterrussian.com/aa071600a.shtml

Verbs in Russian are also complex. Verb conjugation gives verbs different spellings and pronunciation, depending on usage and tense. English has that, too, but it's far more complicated in Russian. Even worse, Russian and Ukrainian use a long list of verb prefixes to change the meaning of the verb. For example, the verb that translates to "To go" has maybe 30 to 40 possible prefixes available. Learning all of those is another challenge.

Finally, both languages use no definite articles, such as "a, an, and the," and no helper verbs like is, are, was, and were. All of those things are handled differently than in English.