[mova] Yushchenko's command of Russian, as well as characteristics of his Ukrainian

[Max Pyziur]

> I don't know how well Yushchenko speaks Russian vis-à-vis Putin, but
> noticed in the same comparative vein an interesting observation in the
> latest NY Review of Books (www.nybooks.com/articles/17957)that:
> "Yushchenko and Tymoshenko speak better Ukrainian than Kuchma and
> Yanukovych do. They also speak better Russian."!

I noticed that also but failed to include it in my original posting.  The
sentence which you cite along with the experience of watching the
Yushchenko/Putin joint press conference made me want to raise that much
more the issues in my original posting.

> As a personal observation, I am amazed at the variety and quality of the
> Ukrainian language that is posted on the various web journals, including
> Den', Zerkalo Nedili, Postup, Lviv Gazette etc. Paradoxically, even many
> of the "central" and "eastern" authors are more easily understood by me
> than some of the "western" ones.

Those of us here in North America who are steeped in the use of American
English use various heuristics (I'm overusing that word) when listening
and speaking with others to gleen a sense of social class and regional
orientation.  It's a way of expediting understanding.  I'm curious if that
sort of sense is developed in Ukraine with Ukrainian (e.g. he/she sounds
like a boatmen from Poltava).

Somewhat related to this, I noticed that Katya Chumachenko after a few
sentences of introduction in Ukrainian spoke in English.  Unlike her
husband's  Ukrainian which had a certain colorful, melodic quality playing
off internal rhymes, assonance, and alliteration, Chumachenko's English
was fairly bland and prosaic.

Thinking a bit about this I recalled that if I had never seen Condoleezza
Rice speak on television I would have never known that she was Black or
from Alabama; nothing in her speech betrays those origins.  Similarly,
Katya Chumachenko's speech conveys nothing of her origins - no
regionalisms, no metaphors - it's syntactically very clean.  In my
experience, Ukrainian-American generational counterparts of Chumachenko's
impart some mix of regionalisms (accent or signature phrases) and
occasionally even challenged syntax (Ukrainian sentence structure with
English words); this gives speech some sort of character and uniqueness.

> I would guess that the speaking knowledge of Russian by Ukrainian citizens
> runs even a larger gamut and would be hard-pressed to be understood by St.
> Petersburg residents.
>
> Adrian B.

MP
pyz at brama.com