--- title: Ukrainian compared with English — a lesson of Mova's school · trees and pragmatics description: «Ukrainian compared with English», a lesson of the language course of Mova's primary school, sentence by sentence with dependency trees and pragmatics. It begins: Ukrainian and English are distant cousins in the same huge language family, but they solve the same jobs in different ways, like two cook --- [Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/33-ukrainian-compared-with-english/) [home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [corpora](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/) / [school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/) / [Language](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/) / Ukrainian compared with English # Ukrainian compared with English Lesson 33 of the language course of Mova's primary school: 15 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: [the lesson at school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/school-run/language/33-ukrainian-compared-with-english/). - [0](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/33-ukrainian-compared-with-english/0/) — Ukrainian and English are distant cousins in the same huge language family, but they solve the same jobs in different ways, like two cooks making soup from different recipes. - [1](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/33-ukrainian-compared-with-english/1/) — English shows who does what mostly by word order; Ukrainian shows it mostly with word endings, so Danylo can say "Собака бачить кота" or "Кота бачить собака" and both mean "the dog sees the cat". - [3](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/33-ukrainian-compared-with-english/3/) — Ukrainian is written in the Cyrillic alphabet of 33 letters, some of which look like English letters but stand for other sounds, and some of which belong to Ukrainian alone. - [4](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/33-ukrainian-compared-with-english/4/) — Neither way is better: English uses order and small words like "a", "the", "to" and "with", Ukrainian uses endings, and both get the meaning across. - [5](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/33-ukrainian-compared-with-english/5/) — Ukrainian uses the Cyrillic alphabet with 33 letters; some look like English letters but sound different: "В" sounds like v, "Н" like n, "Р" like r. - [6](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/33-ukrainian-compared-with-english/6/) — Ukrainian has no words for "a" or "the" (no articles); "Кіт спить" can mean "a cat sleeps" or "the cat sleeps", and the situation shows which. - [7](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/33-ukrainian-compared-with-english/7/) — Ukrainian nouns change their endings to show their job in the sentence: "мама" (mum), "мами" (of mum), "мамі" (to mum), "маму" (mum, as the object), "мамою" (with mum), "на мамі" (on mum), "мамо!" (calling Mum); these forms are called cases, and Ukrainian has seven. - [8](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/33-ukrainian-compared-with-english/8/) — English mostly uses word order and small words instead of cases, but pronouns like he, him and his still change a little. - [9](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/33-ukrainian-compared-with-english/9/) — The calling form is called the vocative: "Мамо!", "Тарасе!" for Taras, "Олено!" for Olena; Old English had a calling form too but lost it. - [10](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/33-ukrainian-compared-with-english/10/) — Because endings show who does what, Ukrainian word order is freer: "Кота бачить собака" still means "the dog sees the cat". - [11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/33-ukrainian-compared-with-english/11/) — Ukrainian has two words for "you": "ти" for friends and family, and "ви" for teachers, strangers or several people; old English had "thou" and "you" in a similar way. - [12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/33-ukrainian-compared-with-english/12/) — "Kiev" came from the Russian spelling; "Kyiv" follows Ukrainian, and after the \#KyivNotKiev campaign started in 2018, many governments, airports and newspapers switched to "Kyiv". - [13](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/33-ukrainian-compared-with-english/13/) — Ukrainian nouns have grammatical gender, a grammar label, not boy or girl: "стіл" (table) is masculine, "книга" (book) feminine, "вікно" (window) neuter. - [14](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/33-ukrainian-compared-with-english/14/) — "Дякую" (DYAH-koo-yu) means thank you, "будь ласка" means please or you're welcome, and "привіт" means hi. - [15](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/33-ukrainian-compared-with-english/15/) — Among the major Cyrillic alphabets, the letter "ї" (sounds like "yi", as in "Україна") is used only in Ukrainian and the closely related Rusyn; "ґ" (a hard g) is another special Ukrainian letter. - ← previous: [Sign language](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/32-sign-language/) - next →: [Mandarin compared with English](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/34-mandarin-compared-with-english/) - ↑ back to [Language](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/)