31 Comments
It's just that on this level you haven't been in a situation where you need a whole Ukrianian sentence to translate 2 English words :)
What do you mean by 'articulated'? In General American English (as well as most British) final plosives tend not to disappear, with the exception of some dialects where d/t is converted to a glottal stop. You might mean that they are released (as opposed to unreleased, where the articulation stops at closure), but in most variants of English, stop release is in free variation, i.e. both occur, perhaps with some distinction depending on suprasegmentals and register, as well as different ratios of release depending on each consonant (e.g. /g/ is more often fully voiced than /b/ or /d/)
Sorry for the rant, but I had to clarify the additional complexity involved in phonetics.
I was raised in a semi-ukrainian speaking household with my grandparents, and I was told to refer to my grandfather as дідо
That is either a regional thing or a sweet nickname (what do you call these in English?) - like "sonny" or "mommy" or "granny".
my family uses дідо too, although in my ukrainian lessons we learn grandfather as дідусь.
There is no "дідо" in the standard Ukrainian, but there is "діду," which sounds similar. "Діду" is the vocative case of "дід." This case is used when addressing people.
Lemko is so different from the 'mainstream' Ukrainian that some people consider it a language of its own. This is a debated topic and different people have different opinions about this.
Ukrainian Wikipedia has an article called Lemko language. It has a comparison of Lemko with literary Ukrainian (look at the 'Приклади лемківської мови': click on the «[показати]» link to the right to open it).
Of course, even with those differences, Lemko is still related to literary Ukrainian, they share a lot of words and grammar, so learning literary Ukrainian will help you understand Lemko better. But still please keep in mind that literary Ukrainian is not 100% same as your native language, and take what you learn with a grain of salt.
Listen to it here for now at Forvo: http://www.forvo.com/search-uk/%d0%b4%d0%b5%20%d0%b4%d1%96%d0%b4/
Neither Merriam-Webster nor Oxford online dictionary list this word. It is probably dialectical or regional.
If Де is "where" and дід is "grandfather" how is this a question? Do you have to say this in a questioning way to show it is a question?
To tell the truth, the only way to determine a written expression as question in the Eastern Slavic languages is to look at its punctuation mark, because affirmative and interrogative expressions often look same. So, if you see ?, it's a question then. Examples (in Russian, excuse me for that, I'm still not really familliar with Ukranian): Это фрукт. - This is a fruit. Это фрукт? - Is this a fruit? Тебе нужна помощь. - You need help. Тебе нужна помощь? - Do you need help? So you should pay high attention to ? marks when you both read and write. It's not really easy to try to understand what people try to point on when they ignore punctuation marks - that occurs really frequetly on the Russian, and Ukranian Internet - and it's not easy to understand even for native speakers (source: I am a native speaker).
In my family, 'Дідо' was a respectful way of speaking to your Grandfather. To use the word 'дід' ('old man's) instead was considered very disrespectful. "Дідусь", "Дідуньо' are also respectful ways to call one's Grandfather. NEVER 'дідо'.
«Дідо» is dialectal. In literary Ukrainian, «дід» is used instead.
I asked my dad who speaks fluent Ukrainian (his mom straight from Ukraine) about "did", and he said that is a slang term like "gramps" or "old man". He said it is "jido". Thoughts?
Why don't you use an article in English translation? There are more sentences like this without articles.
We don't use "the" with one's own family members. You could use possessive adjectives (or pronouns? not sure what you call them) like my, your, etc. But in a sentence like this, it would usually (but not always) be a little redundant.
when do we use 'і' instead of 'а' .... While both means same in ukrainian which is "and"
To be completely honest, Ukrainian is much easier to pronounce than Russian..... That's just my opinion.....
