Russian or Ukrainian - how to tell some differences

[Stasia]

@Stasia How interesting! I didn't know I was speaking pidgin. Is it pidgin Germanic or pidgin French? [Today "pidgin English" is used in the Pacific region.]I know the French took over England at one point and made everyone speak the language so it had a great effect on English. Then I think they changed the vowels after that, once the English got rid of the French.

A pidgin is a mixture of two languages, so the most proper way to talk about it is by mentioning both source languages. "Pidgin English" is a mixture of English with native languages of the Pacific, you just don't mention the other languages because of the status difference (English considered a higher status language, while native languages have been discouraged as lower status).

English vowels... don't even get me started on that! While grammar is easy (as it is often the case with pidgins), you make up for that with your vowels!

[Corinnebelle]

[mention]Stasia[/mention] Some of those lower status languages are actually quite amazing in structure and so forth. They are far more intricate and unique than English, obviously since English is a pidgin.

Are the most common words in Russian, Ukrainian? Or some other language?

[Enzfj2]

[mention]Stasia[/mention] Some of those lower status languages are actually quite amazing in structure and so forth. They are far more intricate and unique than English, obviously since English is a pidgin.

English is not a pidgin sensu stricto, because it's a native language for half a billion people.
Old English, perhaps, was—as a mean of communication between Germanic-speaking peasants and French-speaking nobility, but inside either group people spoke their own language. When it became a native language, spoken by children, it could be classified as a creole. But it was several hundreds years ago, since then English developed into a language on its own right.

Are the most common words in Russian, Ukrainian? Or some other language?

Please clarify your question

[Corinnebelle]

Interesting! So English has evolved from a pidgin into a full fledged language. It has the ability to describe things in precise detail in flowery language. No doubt Russian is also such a language. Somehow, I think of a language as something that has one particular source. But this shows there are all sorts of languages.

Quote from Wikipedia article>

Pidgins may start out as or become trade languages, such as Tok Pisin. Trade languages can eventually evolve into fully developed languages in their own right such as Swahili, distinct from the languages they were originally influenced by. Trade languages and pidgins can also influence an established language's vernacular, especially amongst people who are directly involved in a trade where that pidgin is commonly used, which can alternatively result in a regional dialect being developed.

Are the most common words in Russian, Ukrainian? Or some other language?

Please clarify your question

Well common words like bread, milk, house, woman etc..

[Enzfj2]

Interesting! So English has evolved from a pidgin into a full fledged language. It has the ability to describe things in precise detail in flowery language. No doubt Russian is also such a language. Somehow, I think of a language as something that has one particular source. But this shows there are all sorts of languages.

Russian is not a pidgin or creole, because its grammar isn't so much simplified in comparison with it's parent Ruthenian (that's the word I lacked in some of my previous posts), it just adopted some vocabulary and grammatic constructs (very few) from the aboriginal Ugro-Finnic tribes and Mongol invaders.

Well common words like bread, milk, house, woman etc..

Swadesh list shows barely 10 non direct cognates out of 207 between Russian and Ukrainian, but about 30 identical words.
However, internet is full of examples of ridiculous Google translations, --- edit by mod ---

[Dana_Dany Danuta]

How Different Are Russian and Ukrainian???

[Basler Biker]

Couldn't read the topic from the start, sorry if I repeat something, but of course both language are quite different.

For the little that I know, the same vowel in Russian, can be pronounced different ways according to place in a word amongst other letters. Whereas in Kazakh, vowels sound always the same, so said my correspondent there.

So I just installed the Russian and Kazakh voices for Microsoft's TTS reader function, so I could listen to some of these Eastern (European/Asian) languages..

And when occasionally I hear Ukrainian, it does not sound like Russian to my Belgian ears unfamiliar with languages from those regions.

Also tried to use this (new) (free with a length restriction to 50 characters) TTS site:
Alice (Yandex Assistant)
https://sozder.kz/

The list of voices you can choose from is amazingly long. Worth testing it, it's free and you can download the generated audio in mp3 format to be used for any purpose .... should be largely sufficient to link audio to your private or even public vocabulary.

BB

[Enzfj2]

@Basler Biker You're right, Ukrainian vowels sound different from Russian, as well as some consonants; moreover, some combinations in Ukrainian are next to impossible to pronouce correctly for most Russians, esp. ж/ч/ц/ш + і/ю/я