Anyone interested in the ongoing crisis in Ukraine should read Mark Liberman’s Language Log post providing necessary details usually omitted from the usual East-West, European-Russian dichotomies served up in the press. There are a couple of maps, one electoral and one linguistic, and links to a number of informed discussions elsewhere (with representative quotes). I want to call attention in particular to Tobias Schwartz’s post at A Fistful of Euros (which has been doing a great job covering the crisis in general) along with the comments by DoDo and frequent LH commenter Alexei.
“December 3, 2004 by languagehat
Anyone interested in the ongoing crisis in Ukraine […]”
Oh, so there was a crisis in Ukraine in 2004…
Now that in March 2014 Ukraine is very much at the forefront of the world news, we often see Russian-speaking regions of Ukraine being opposed to Ukrainian-speaking regions. And more than once I have wondered: “How different Russian and Ukrainian are from each other?” I’m sure Mr Hat, who is a speaker of Russian, will have a clue about that. Aren’t these two languages mutually intelligible? Are they anything like the Hindi/Urdu pair?
No, they’re not; there’s a good discussion going on in this thread, and John Cowan has a pretty comprehensive answer.
Is it still a crisis after ten years?
This came up in Random. I have nothing to add except “how soon we forget!”
Art is long, memory short.