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# 9. Older Ukrainian and the old forms alive today

**On this page**

1. [1. Periods](#1-periods)
2. [2. What Ukrainian inherited and changed](#2-what-ukrainian-inherited-and-changed)
3. [3. Middle Ukrainian](#3-middle-ukrainian)
4. [4. The new literary language](#4-the-new-literary-language)
5. [5. The 19th- and early 20th-century literary delta](#5-the-19th--and-early-20th-century-literary-delta)
6. [6. Old forms alive today](#6-old-forms-alive-today)
7. [7. How modern readers meet older texts](#7-how-modern-readers-meet-older-texts)
8. [8. How Mova handles older Ukrainian](#8-how-mova-handles-older-ukrainian)
9. [Sources for this chapter](#sources-for-this-chapter)

Modern Ukrainian is the latest stage of a written tradition that goes back to Kyivan Rus' in the 10th–11th century. A reader of modern Ukrainian meets the older stages in three ways: in older texts read at school and in church (chronicles, the Cossack chronicles, Kotliarevskyi, Shevchenko, the Bible, the anthem, folk songs); in older spellings of texts printed before the 1920s; and, most of all, in forms that are old but have never stopped being used. This last point is the character of the language described in [0. Introduction](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/00-introduction/): Ukrainian keeps old forms in living speech for a very long time, and its speakers use them without any sense of being old-fashioned. The vocative case, the synthetic future in *-му*, the remnants of the dual and short adjectives such as *винен* and *повинен* are ordinary everyday Ukrainian.

This chapter gives the periods in brief (§1), the sound changes that set Ukrainian apart (§2), the Middle Ukrainian written language and its first grammars (§3), the beginning of the modern literary language (§4) and older spellings (§5), and then the old forms alive today with counts (§6). §7 says how modern readers meet older texts, §8 what Mova does with them. Transliteration as in [8. Regional varieties, diaspora and surzhyk](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/08-national-varieties/).

Each older layer is described, as the varieties are in [8. Regional varieties, diaspora and surzhyk](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/08-national-varieties/) §1.2, as a **delta over the literary standard**: a table of what changes in orthography, phonology, morphology, syntax and lexicon, with an example and a source or count; what a table does not list is as in the standard. The Middle Ukrainian delta is in §3.1, the 19th- and early 20th-century delta in §5, and the old forms alive today, divided into standard forms and an archaic delta, in §6.

## 1. Periods

| period | dates (approximate) | written languages | typical texts |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Old East Slavic (Old Rus') | 10th–14th c. | Church Slavonic of the East Slavic recension; the vernacular in charters, inscriptions, law | Kyivan chronicles (in later northern copies), *Rus'ka Pravda*, *Slovo o polku Ihorevim* (late 12th c.), Galician gospels (Galician Gospel 1144) |
| Middle Ukrainian (Ruthenian, *prosta mova*) | 14th–18th c. | Church Slavonic of the Ukrainian recension; *prosta* (*rus'ka*) *mova*, the chancery and literary vernacular of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth; Polish; Latin | Peresopnytsia Gospel (1556–1561), Ostroh Bible (1581), Zyzanii's grammar (1596), Smotrytskyi's grammar (1619), Cossack chronicles (Samovydets, late 17th c.) |
| New (modern) Ukrainian | from 1798 | the new literary language on the vernacular; Russian and Polish as state languages | Kotliarevskyi's *Eneida* (1798), Kvitka-Osnovianenko, Shevchenko's *Kobzar* (1840), Franko, Lesia Ukrainka |
| standardised Ukrainian | from 1928 | one codified standard | the orthographies of 1928, 1933, 1946, 1960, 1990, 2019 ([6. Spelling rules and the 2019 orthography](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/06-spelling-rules/)) |

Danylenko & Naienko (2022) speak of **three languages** of Ukrainians that imperial policy targeted in turn: the Church Slavonic of the Ukrainian recension (russified from the 1620s to the 1790s), the *prosta* (*rus'ka*) *mova* (from 1720 to the 1790s) and the new literary language (1800–1914). The decree of 1720, which ordered that no "special dialect" be used in books printed in the Kyiv and Chernihiv presses, was the first Muscovite act aimed at the written language itself; the Valuev circular of 1863 forbade printing books in Ukrainian other than fiction.

The names changed with the periods. Smal-Stockyj, writing in German in 1913, used *Ruthenisch* for the language and explained that "Little Russian" (*Kleinrussisch*) came from the 14th-century geographical name *Russia minor* and gave a false impression, while "Ukrainian" was the name used "in the newest time" (Smal-Stockyj 1913, introduction). Galician grammars of the 19th century called it *руский язык* (Osadca 1862/1864). The name *українська мова* became general in the early 20th century.

## 2. What Ukrainian inherited and changed

The sound changes below separate Ukrainian from its Old East Slavic base and from its neighbours. They are the reason an old text looks different from a modern one even where the words are the same.

| change | Old East Slavic | modern Ukrainian | compare Russian |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| *ѣ* (*jat'*) became *i* | хлѣбъ, сѣно, лѣсъ | хліб, сіно, ліс | хлеб, сено, лес |
| *o, e* became *i* in a newly closed syllable | конь, печь, носъ | кінь (gen. коня), піч (gen. печі), ніс (gen. носа) | конь, печь, нос |
| *g* became [ɦ] | голова [g] | голова [ɦ] | голова [g] |
| *и* and *ы* merged into [ɪ] (written *и*); old *i* stays *і* | быти, сила | бути, сила [ˈsɪlɑ] | быть, сила |
| *e* before soft consonants stayed hard |  | день [dɛnʲ] | день [dʲenʲ] |
| final *-ъ, -ь* lost; the voiced consonant stays voiced at the end | дубъ | дуб [dub] | дуб [dup] |
| pleophony (*-оро-, -оло-*), as in all East Slavic | голова, молоко, ворота | голова, молоко, ворота | голова, молоко, ворота |

The alternation *i* ~ *o, e* (*кінь – коня, ніч – ночі, сіль – солі, осінь – осені*) is the most visible trace of the change in the closed syllable; it runs through the declension and is described in [4. Connected speech](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/04-connected-speech/) and [11. Nouns](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/11-nouns/). Krymskyi (1907, §II) records that the archaic dialects of Polissia and the Carpathians still have diphthongs (*уо, уы, іе* …) where the rest of the language has *i*: the change stopped there half-way ([8. Regional varieties, diaspora and surzhyk](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/08-national-varieties/) §1.3).

**Church Slavonic doublets.** Church Slavonic, a South Slavic language in origin, has no pleophony; it gave Ukrainian a learned layer of words in *-ра-, -ла-, -ре-, -ле-* beside the native ones, often with a different meaning: *голова* 'head' : *глава* 'chapter; head (of an organisation)'; *город* 'vegetable garden; (older) town' : *град* in high style and in *Царград* 'Constantinople'; *ворота* 'gate' : *врата* (church, poetic); *молодий* 'young' : *младенець* 'infant' (religious). Other Church Slavonic marks are the prefixes *пре-*, *пред-*, *воз-* in learned words (*прекрасний, предмет, предок, возз'єднання*). Chapter 19 §2.1 gives this layer as a part of the vocabulary.

**The vocative.** Old East Slavic had a vocative case in the singular, as Proto-Slavic did. Russian lost it (apart from frozen forms such as *Боже, Господи*); Ukrainian, like Polish, Czech and most South Slavic languages, kept it, and kept it productive (§6.1).

## 3. Middle Ukrainian

### 3.1 The *prosta mova*

From the 14th to the 18th century the Ukrainian lands were within the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and then the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, and from the mid-17th century the Cossack Hetmanate. Their written vernacular, called *prosta mova* or *rus'ka mova* (Ruthenian), was used for laws, charters, letters, polemics and chronicles; it shared much with Belarusian and took a large layer of Polish words, many of them Latin or German in origin. Church Slavonic of the Ukrainian recension remained the language of liturgy and high learning.

A passage from the *Chronicle of the Eyewitness* (*Litopys Samovydcja*), a Cossack chronicle of 1648–1702, in Orest Levytskyi's edition of 1878 (public domain), describes the year 1648:

> Того жъ року саранча барзо великая на усей Украинѣ была и барзо шкоди великіе починила, збожя поз̾едала и трави, же не било где сѣна косити. 'In that same year locusts, very great, were all over Ukraine, and did very great damage: they ate the grain and the grass, so that there was nowhere to mow hay.'

The **Middle Ukrainian delta** over the modern standard, as this passage and the rest of the chronicle show it:

| area | modern standard | Middle Ukrainian (*Samovydets*) | example | note |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| orthography | modern Cyrillic | Church Slavonic letters: *ъ* at word end, *ѣ* for *i*, *и/ы* without the modern distinction | *Украинѣ* read [ukrɑˈjinʲi], *сѣна* read [ˈsʲinɑ] | §5 |
| orthography | *-ся* joined | *ся* apart, also before the verb | *почали ся купити* 'they began to gather' | as in south-western dialects ([08](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/08-national-varieties/) §1.4) |
| morphology (adjective) | contracted *велика, великі* | uncontracted *великая, великіе* |  | survives in song (§6.5) |
| morphology (participle) | adverbial participles *-вши* | the same | *взявши, послишавши, скупивши* | unchanged (§6.6) |
| syntax | *у 1648 році* or *1648 року* | genitive of time placed first | *року 1648* |  |
| lexicon (Polish layer) | *дуже* | *барзо* (Pol. *bardzo*) |  | not in the standard |
| lexicon (Polish layer) | *що* 'that, so that' | *же* (Pol. *że*) | *же не било где сѣна косити* | not in the standard |
| lexicon (Polish layer) | *також*; *а, однак* | *тежъ* (*też*), *зась* (*zaś*), *яко тежъ* 'as well as' |  | not in the standard |
| lexicon (vernacular) | *збіжжя* 'grain' | *збожя* |  | the same word, older shape |

### 3.2 The first grammars: Zyzanii 1596 and Smotrytskyi 1619

The first grammars written in the Ukrainian lands are grammars of Church Slavonic, written for the brotherhood schools that defended Orthodoxy against the Counter-Reformation. Lavrentii Zyzanii's *Hrammatika slovenska*, printed in Vilnius in 1596 together with a short Church Slavonic–Ruthenian vocabulary, the *Leksys*, was a school book: Zyzanii addressed it to pupils (*спудеї*) and modelled it on the Greek grammars of the Lviv brotherhood school (the *Adelphotes* of 1591) and on Greek and Latin school grammars of his time, translating some passages word for word (Vozniak 1911). Meletii Smotrytskyi's *Grammatiki slavenskija pravilnoe sintagma* (Jevje, 1619) became the standard Church Slavonic grammar of the Orthodox Slavs for two centuries; it was reprinted in Moscow in 1648 without the author's name, and that edition still carried traces of Zyzanii (Vozniak 1911).

Vozniak (1911) compared their terminology and found Zyzanii's "more popular", Smotrytskyi's more Church Slavonic. The case names show the line from Zyzanii to the present:

| case | Zyzanii 1596 (Vozniak's list) | modern Ukrainian term |
| --- | --- | --- |
| nominative | именовный | називний |
| genitive | родный | родовий |
| dative | дателный | давальний |
| accusative | виновный | знахідний |
| vocative | звателный | кличний |
| instrumental | творителный | орудний |

The modern terms are 19th- and 20th-century Ukrainian coinages (Simovych 1919 uses *називний, родовий, давальний, знахідний, кличний, орудний, місцевий*, the last in the form *місцевий*), but the system of seven cases with a vocative is in Zyzanii already.

## 4. The new literary language

The modern literary language begins with Ivan Kotliarevskyi, a Poltavan, whose travesty of Virgil, the *Eneida*, was printed in its first three parts in 1798. Simovych (1919) asks "who but the Poltavan Kotliarevskyi first began to write in the popular language?" and notes that all writers before Shevchenko were from the Dnieper lands; he also advises readers to set aside "some Muscovite words of Kotliarevskyi" and the church words of Kvitka. The opening lines, in modern spelling:

> Еней був парубок моторний І хлопець хоч куди козак, Удавсь на всеє зле проворний, Завзятіший од всіх бурлак. 'Aeneas was a lively lad, and a fellow every inch a Cossack; he turned out quick at every mischief, bolder than all the vagabonds.'

Everything in it is modern Ukrainian except the uncontracted adjective *всеє* 'all (n.)' (modern *все*) and the preposition variant *од* (modern standard *від*, [08](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/08-national-varieties/) §1.3); *удавсь* with the short reflexive *-сь* is standard today.

Taras Shevchenko's *Kobzar* (1840) and the work that followed made this vernacular the language of high literature. A stanza of his *Testament* (*Заповіт*, 1845):

> Як умру, то поховайте Мене на могилі, Серед степу широкого, На Вкраїні милій. 'When I die, then bury me on a burial mound, amid the wide steppe, in my dear Ukraine.'

The form *Вкраїні* for *Україні* is the euphonic alternation of *у/в* that the standard still uses ([4. Connected speech](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/04-connected-speech/)): after a vowel, *Україна* may begin with *в*.

## 5. The 19th- and early 20th-century literary delta

A reader of Ukrainian printed before the 1920s meets a delta over today's standard that is mostly orthographic, with some forms and words. The library's own grammars and the texts of §4 show it.

| area | modern standard | 19th / early 20th c. | example | where / source |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| orthography | modern Cyrillic | Church Slavonic letters *ъ, ѣ, ы, і* | *Украинѣ, року, сѣна* | Middle Ukrainian and its 19th-c. editions |
| orthography | *-ся* joined | *ся* apart from the verb | *розвинула ся, береть ся* | Galician print; Simovych 1919 |
| orthography | apostrophe | none | *пять, девять, звязати* | Simovych 1919, Nechui-Levytskyi 1913 |
| orthography | *ї* | *йі* | *йіх* for *їх* | Nechui-Levytskyi 1913 |
| orthography | *і* | *ї* after consonants for *i* from old *e, ѣ* (Zhelekhivka, from 1886) | *сїно, дїло, Зизанїй* | Galician print; Vozniak 1911 |
| orthography | *-ія* in loans | *-ия* | *нация, поезия* | Galician print |
| orthography | synthetic future one word | two words | *писати му* | Simovych 1919 |
| orthography (1928–1933, diaspora) | *кафедра, ефір, Афіни, радості* | *катедра, етер, Атени, радости* |  | Pravopys 1928; since 2019 again permitted variants (genitive *-ости*) |
| morphology (adjective) | contracted forms | uncontracted in verse | *всеє* (Kotliarevskyi) | §4, §6.5 |
| morphology (infinitive) | *-ти* | *-ть* freely in verse | *стать, співать* | Kotliarevskyi, Shevchenko (§6.7) |
| lexicon / form | *від* | *од* | *од всіх бурлак* (Kotliarevskyi) | [08](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/08-national-varieties/) §1.3 |
| lexicon / form | *інші* | *иньчі*, *меньш* (soft *н* before consonants written) |  | Simovych 1919 |
| lexicon | standard words | Russian words in the Dnieper writers, church words in Kvitka |  | Simovych 1919 |

The Zhelekhivka spelling (from Jevhen Zhelekhivskyi's dictionary of 1886) was the norm of Galicia and Bukovina until the 1920s. For the corpus GRAC, VESUM has a separate module for Zhelekhivka texts and, since 2021, one for the original spelling of Lesia Ukrainka's works (Shvedova et al. 2022; §7). Such modules are deltas in exactly the sense of this manual: rules applied on top of the standard lexicon.

## 6. Old forms alive today

The counts in this section are of 2026-11-06, over UD Ukrainian IU 2.18 (122,750 syntactic words; mostly written texts; CC BY-NC-SA, counted, never quoted) and UD Ukrainian ParlaMint 2.18 (109,166 words; parliamentary speech 2003–2022; CC BY-SA, quoted with sentence ids), train + dev + test, and over the Leipzig news sample of 2024 (14.2 million words, CC BY).

The old forms divide into two kinds. Some are **in the standard** and need no delta at all: they are old in origin and ordinary in use. Others form an **archaic delta**, used in verse, song, church and solemn style. The table sums up §§6.1–6.8.

| area | old form | status today | example | count / source |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| morphology (case) | vocative | standard, productive | *пане Голово, Тарасе, мамо* | IU 158, ParlaMint 2,011 (§6.1) |
| morphology (tense) | synthetic future *-му* | standard, frequent | *писатиме* | 62% / 10% / 67% of imperfective futures in IU / ParlaMint / news 2024 (§6.2) |
| morphology (adjective) | short forms *винен, повинен, ладен, годен, згоден, кожен* | standard, closed set |  | IU 50, ParlaMint 124 `Variant=Short` (§6.5) |
| morphology (participle) | adverbial participles *-чи, -вши* | standard | *читаючи, прочитавши* | IU 428, ParlaMint 160 `VerbForm=Conv` (§6.6) |
| morphology (participle) | impersonal *-но, -то* | standard, official prose | *зроблено* | [13](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/13-verbs/) |
| morphology (number) | dual remnants, instrumental *-има* | standard in a few nouns | *очима, плечима, дверима* | IU *очима* 16 (§6.3) |
| morphology (number) | dual *-і* after *два, три, чотири* | archaic delta, dialect and literary | *дві руці* for *дві руки* | Simovych 1919 (§6.3) |
| morphology (tense) | pluperfect *був* + past | archaic delta, rare | *читав був* | IU 8, ParlaMint 1 (§6.4) |
| morphology (adjective) | uncontracted long forms | archaic delta: song, verse | *добрії, зеленая, всеє* | Nechui-Levytskyi 1913 (§6.5) |
| morphology (verb) | 1pl *-м* | delta: verse, song, casual speech | *запануєм, ходім* | anthem (§6.7) |
| morphology (verb) | 2sg *єси* 'art' | archaic delta: prayer | *що єси на небесах* | §6.7 |
| morphology (infinitive) | *-ть* | colloquial and verse delta | *сказать* | IU 0.9%, ParlaMint 0.5% (§6.7) |
| lexicon | Church Slavonic and old words | archaic delta: church, solemn, poetic | *уста, чоло, десниця, перст, глаголати* | VESUM `:arch` 9,526 lemma lines (§6.8) |
| lexicon | old words in ordinary use | standard | *аби, бо, либонь, мовляв* | §6.8 |

### 6.1 The vocative

The vocative (*кличний відмінок*) is the case of address. It is alive and productive: every noun that can be addressed has it, new words and foreign names take it (*Джоне, Мері* stays indeclinable but *Тарасе, Олено, пане Президенте*), and its absence in address is felt as Russian-influenced speech. The 2019 orthography gives the endings (Pravopys 2019 §§74, 87; full paradigms in [11. Nouns](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/11-nouns/)):

| class | endings | examples |
| --- | --- | --- |
| 1st declension (*-а/-я* nouns), hard | *-о* | *сестро, Ганно, книжко* |
| 1st declension, soft and mixed | *-е, -є* | *земле, душе, Маріє, Ілле* |
| 1st declension, affectionate soft | *-ю* | *бабусю, Галю, доню, матусю* |
| 2nd declension (masc.), hard and most mixed | *-е* | *брате, Тарасе, пане, козаче* (with *к > ч*), *друже* (*г > ж*), *пастуше* (*х > ш*) |
| 2nd declension, soft; some hard with suffixes | *-ю, -у* | *краю, Ігорю, діду, синку, батечку* |
| plural (all) | = nominative | *брати, колеги, пані* |

Two rules of the norm concern address formulas. In a name with patronymic **both** words take the vocative (*Оксано Іванівно, Маріє Василівно; Тарасе Івановичу*), and in address to a woman with a common noun and surname both take it (*пані Гаркуше*-type forms; Pravopys 2019 §74, notes 1–2).

Counts. Words with `Case=Voc`: IU 158 (13 per 10,000 words), ParlaMint 2,011 (184 per 10,000). In ParlaMint the most frequent vocative lemmas are *шановний* (777), *колега* (511), *депутат* (155), *народний* (150), *пан* (45) and *голова* (35), from the formulas *шановні колеги*, *шановні народні депутати*, *пане Голово*:

> Дякую, пане Голово. 'Thank you, Mr Chairman.' (`ParlaMint-UA_2022-01-25-m0.u94.p1.lang1.s1`) За вами слово, пане Президенте. 'You have the floor, Mr President.' (`ParlaMint-UA_2022-01-25-m0.u98.p4.lang1.s1`)

**Where usage differs from the norm.** In name-and-patronymic address, spoken Ukrainian often uses the nominative, a pattern widely attributed to Russian influence, since Russian has no vocative. Among proper names that head an address (UD relation `vocative`) in ParlaMint, 66 are in the vocative and 103 in the nominative, and the share changes with the session: 2003, 17 vocative : 6 nominative; 2004, 28 : 19; 2014, 4 : 7; the National Security Council meeting of 2014, 10 : 5; 2022, 7 : 66. Both patterns are in the same speeches:

> Дякую, Тарасе Івановичу. (vocative, 2022) Дякую, Тарас Іванович. (nominative, 2022) Григорій Миколайовичу, письмове є у вас? (name nominative, patronymic vocative, `ParlaMint-UA_2003-10-14-m0.u130.p1.lang1.s2`)

The 2022 figures come largely from a few sessions and the habits of whoever chaired them, so they describe those transcripts, not a trend. What they show is that in the most formal spoken setting of the country both forms are used side by side, and that the vocative with common nouns (*пане, колеги, друзі*) is untouched by the variation. Vocatives of common nouns in address, including affectionate ones (*мамо, тату, друже, брате*), occur in the news sample too: *мамо* 59, *друже* 29, *брате* 9 times in 2024 (*тату* is not counted, since it is also the indeclinable *тату* 'tattoo').

### 6.2 The synthetic future

Ukrainian forms the future of imperfective verbs in two ways (details in [13. Verbs](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/13-verbs/)):

- **analytic**: *буду, будеш, буде …* + infinitive: *буду писати*;
- **synthetic**: infinitive + *-му, -меш, -ме, -мемо, -мете, -муть*: *писатиму, писатимеш, писатиме*.

The synthetic form grew from the infinitive plus forms of the old verb *яти/имати* 'take' (*писати иму* 'I take to write'), and was still written as two words in Galician print (*я писати му*, Simovych 1919, §§ on tense). Russian has only the analytic type; Ukrainian kept both, and the synthetic one is not bookish.

| corpus | synthetic (*писатиме*) | analytic (*буде писати*) | synthetic share |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| UD IU (written) | 104 | 65 | 62% |
| UD ParlaMint (speech) | 31 | 269 | 10% |
| Leipzig news 2024 (approx.) | 20,034 | 9,913 | 67% |
| Leipzig news crawl 2018 (approx.) | 21,770 | 9,627 | 69% |
| Leipzig Wikipedia 2021 (approx.) | 1,883 | 2,250 | 46% |

The UD counts take imperfective finite verbs with `Tense=Fut` (excluding *бути*) and auxiliary *бути* in the future attached to an infinitive. The Leipzig counts are approximate: forms ending in *-тиму, -тимеш, -тиме, -тимемо, -тимете, -тимуть* (with *-ся/-сь*) against an adjacent future form of *бути* + a word in *-ти(ся)*. The two forms differ by text type: edited news prefers the synthetic form two to one, parliamentary speech prefers the analytic one nine to one, and encyclopaedic Wikipedia is in between. Neither form is old-fashioned in any of them.

### 6.3 Remnants of the dual

Old East Slavic had a dual number. Modern Ukrainian has none as a category, but forms of it survive:

- the **instrumental plural in *-има*** of a few nouns that come in pairs or were once dual: *очима* 'with (the) eyes', *плечима* 'with (the) shoulders', *грошима* 'with money' (beside *грішми*), *дверима* 'through the door' (beside *дверми*). IU has *очима* 16 times, *дверима* 4, *грошима* 1 (counts only).
- **nominatives after *два, три, чотири*** with the old dual ending *-і* in the 1st declension: Simovych (1919) cites *дві корові, дві руці, обидві половині* (Nechui-Levytskyi), *чотирі парі* (Fedkovych) beside the ordinary plural *дві корови*, and notes that the old form spread from *два* to *три* and *чотири*. The standard today uses the plural (*дві руки*); the dual form is dialectal and literary.

### 6.4 The pluperfect

The pluperfect (*давноминулий час*) is *був/була/було/були* + the past tense: *я читав був* 'I had read', *він з'їв був*. Simovych (1919, §§ on tense) still lists it as one of the four tenses of the indicative, and describes the conditional past built on it (*як би ти не ходив був на вечорниці* 'if you had not gone to the evening party'). Today it is rare and literary, often with a nuance of an action begun and undone ('had been about to'). In UD IU, 8 sentences have an auxiliary *бути* in the past attached to a past-tense verb; ParlaMint has 1. The related particle *було* (*пішов було, та повернувся* 'he set off, but came back') is common in speech.

### 6.5 Short and long adjectives

Old East Slavic distinguished short (nominal) and long (pronominal) adjectives. Modern Ukrainian adjectives are long and mostly contracted (*добрий, добра, добре*; old *добрая, доброє*). Short forms survive in a closed set: *винен* 'guilty, owing', *повинен* 'obliged', *ладен* 'ready', *годен* 'able, fit', *згоден* 'agreeing', *здатен* 'capable', *рад* 'glad', *певен* 'sure', *повен* 'full', and the pronominal *кожен* 'each', *жоден* 'none'. UD tags them `Variant=Short`: IU has 50 such tokens (*кожен* 29, *повинен* 5, *здатен* 3, *згоден* 2, *годен* 2, *ладен* 1 …), ParlaMint 124, of which *повинен* 21, *кожен* 14, *потрібен* 8, *жоден* 4. They are ordinary speech, not archaisms.

Uncontracted long forms (*добрії, зеленая, молодая, всеє*) are old forms of song and poetry. Nechui-Levytskyi (1913) cited them from folk songs and called them a remnant of the "dead old language" not to be used in literary prose; they are still sung ([08](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/08-national-varieties/) §6).

### 6.6 Old participles

The old short active participles gave modern **adverbial participles** (*дієприслівники*): present *-чи* (*читаючи* 'reading', *ідучи* 'going'), past *-ши, -вши* (*прочитавши, принісши*). These are standard and common: UD tags them `VerbForm=Conv`, 428 in IU and 160 in ParlaMint. The *Chronicle of the Eyewitness* already uses them as today (§3.1).

The long active present participles in *-чий* (*читаючий, існуючий*) are a different matter. A small number are adjectives of long standing (*лежачий* 'lying', *сидячий* 'sitting'), and *-чий* adjectives such as *гарячий, колючий, смердючий* are native. The productive participle *-ючий* used as in Russian (*існуючий* 'existing', *блокуючий* 'blocking') is treated as a Russianism by normative works: VESUM lists nearly 3,500 such participles as `:bad`, with replacements such as a relative clause (*що існує*) or an adjective (*чинний, наявний*); they occur more than 730,000 times (410 per million) in GRAC (Starko & Rysin 2025). This is a case where usage, in edited writing as well, and the norm are far apart; [13. Verbs](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/13-verbs/) gives the forms.

The impersonal forms in *-но, -то* (*зроблено* 'it has been done', *сказано, взято*) continue old neuter short passive participles; they are standard and especially common in official prose ([13. Verbs](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/13-verbs/)).

### 6.7 Old endings in verbs

- **1st person plural *-м*.** Beside *-мо* (*ходимо, будемо*), poetry, song and casual speech use the short *-м*: *запануєм*, *ходім!* 'let's go', *станем*. The anthem (text by Pavlo Chubynskyi, 1862; official wording of 2003) has *Запануєм і ми, браття, у своїй сторонці* 'we too, brothers, shall rule in our own land', with the short *-м* and the old collective plural *браття* 'brothers', which Simovych (1919) gives as a second plural of *брат*. Its opening line, *Ще не вмерла України і слава, і воля* 'the glory and freedom of Ukraine have not yet died', is in the past tense with the old *l*-participle agreeing in the singular with two subjects.
- **Old 2nd person singular of *бути*.** *єси* 'thou art' survives in prayer: *Отче наш, що єси на небесах* 'Our Father, who art in heaven', with the vocative *Отче*; the 3rd person *є* serves all persons in the present.
- **Infinitives in *-ть*.** The short infinitive (*читать* for *читати*) is a dialect and colloquial form, also old in the literary language (Kotliarevskyi, Shevchenko use it in verse). In UD IU it is 0.9% of infinitives and in ParlaMint 0.5% (22 of 2,384 and 16 of 3,409; ParlaMint mostly *сказать, передать* in spontaneous speech). In surzhyk it is about three in four ([08](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/08-national-varieties/) §5.3).

### 6.8 Archaic words

Some old words are restricted to church, solemn and poetic style: *уста* 'lips' (everyday *губи*), *чоло* 'brow', *десниця* 'right hand', *перст* 'finger', *глаголати* 'speak', *благословенний* 'blessed', *отче* (vocative of *отець*). Others are old but entirely ordinary: *аби* 'so that', *бо* 'because', *либонь* 'probably', *мовляв* 'so to say, as they say' (from an old form of *мовити* 'speak'), *вельми* 'very' (now bookish), *ніж* 'than'. VESUM tags 9,526 lemma lines `:arch` (archaic or, in some cases, dialectal) out of 442,458 (count of 2026-11-06; CC BY-NC-SA, counts only). ParlaMint tags 7 tokens `Style=Arch`.

## 7. How modern readers meet older texts

**At school and in church.** The school canon runs from the *Slovo o polku Ihorevim* (read in modern translation) through Kotliarevskyi and Shevchenko to the 20th century. The Bible and the liturgy keep Church Slavonic words and old forms (*єси, отче, во віки віків* 'for ever and ever'). Folk songs keep the long adjectives, the short *-м*, dual remnants and dialect forms (§6.5, chapter 37).

**In modernised editions.** Most readers meet 19th- and early 20th-century literature in editions with modern spelling. These editions differ in how far they normalise. Shvedova, Prydvorova & Skibina (2022) compared the two collected editions of Lesia Ukrainka, in twelve volumes (1975–1979) and in fourteen (2021), and found that the 2021 edition renders the author's language more faithfully but normalises her spelling inconsistently. GRAC replaced the 1970s texts with the 2021 ones (1,225 texts, about 1.5 million tokens: letters 0.56 million, poetry 0.33, prose 0.23, journalism 0.15, historical works 0.12, folklore records 0.08) and added to VESUM a separate module of normalisation rules that apply only at lemmatisation, so the text keeps its original look. Separate modules are needed because of homonymy: the token *ма* in old texts is mostly a verb form ('has', western dialect), in modern ones an address to a mother ('ma'). The authors note that for a closed subcorpus such rules can be hand-tuned, but in a growing corpus the extra rules multiply and the method loses its efficiency.

**In the original.** Middle Ukrainian texts (the Cossack chronicles, polemics, charters) are read in the original by historians and in editions such as Levytskyi's *Samovydets* (§3.1). The Institute of the Ukrainian Language publishes the old monuments (among them the Galician Gospel of 1144, the Peresopnytsia Gospel of 1556–1561) and is preparing a *Dictionary of the Ukrainian language of the second half of the 17th–18th centuries*, following the dictionaries of the 14th–15th and of the 16th–first half of the 17th centuries (Puriaieva, Kotsa & Babenchuk 2022).

## 8. How Mova handles older Ukrainian

**Mova has no model of older Ukrainian.** It holds no Old East Slavic or Middle Ukrainian treebank (Universal Dependencies has Old East Slavic treebanks; none is in Mova's collection), no normaliser for older spelling, and no lexicon of archaic forms.

- **The delta principle, and the missing layer.** An older layer is the standard model plus a delta (§§3.1, 5, 6). Mova has no delta layer yet: no place to store the spelling rules and word replacements of a period and switch them on for a text. The nearest hooks are VESUM's style tags (`:arch`, `:alt`, `:bad`, `:slang`) read through `kg`, and VESUM's own period modules (Zhelekhivka, Lesia Ukrainka), which Mova does not hold.
- **What the old forms of §6 meet in Mova today.** The `kg` crate's grammar code (`kg/src/gram.rs`) has a slot for each of the seven cases, including the vocative (`v_kly`), and for the future (`futr`) and past; it reads them from VESUM tags, so *пане, Тарасе, писатиме, винен* are analysed. The simple-sentence parser (`kg/src/uk.rs`) has no rule for an address member, so a sentence with a vocative is not turned into a fact with an address role. The style tag `:arch` is dropped by `Gram::from_vesum`, which skips tags it does not know.
- **Older spelling.** `kg::morph::norm` lowercases, unifies apostrophes and strips stress marks and invisible characters; it does not map *ѣ* to *і*, join *ся* to the verb, insert apostrophes (*пять → п'ять*) or map 1928 forms. A text in Zhelekhivka or in Middle Ukrainian spelling is mostly "word not in VESUM" to the parser.
- **The English parser on UD Ukrainian** (`en xpos-fill`, `en parse-eval`; LAS 73.43 / 78.17 with own / gold tags on IU dev, 2026-11-06) maps UD features to English tags, in which the vocative, the dual remnants and the future type have no place: `Case=Voc` is lost in the tag, and both future types become present-tense tags.
- **What would be needed.** A normaliser from older spellings to the 2019 one, built as VESUM's Zhelekhivka and Lesia Ukrainka modules are (rules applied only at lemmatisation, the text kept as written); an address (vocative) role in the `kg` fact schema; and an Old East Slavic treebank (the TOROT-based UD treebanks have open licences) for any work on texts before 1700. None of this is built.

## Sources for this chapter

- Vozniak, Mykhailo. 1911. Hramatyka Lavrentija Zyzanija z 1596 r. *Zapysky NTŠ* 101–102. Lviv. Public domain. Library `books/v/vo/vozniak-1911-hramatyka-lavrentiia-zyzaniia-z` (`uk-gram-vozniak-1911-zyzanii`).
- Smal-Stockyj, Stephan. 1913. *Ruthenische Grammatik.* Berlin–Leipzig: Göschen. Public domain. Library `books/s/st/stockyj-1913-ruthenische-grammatik` (`uk-gram-smal-stockyj-1913`).
- Osadca, Myxajlo. 1862 (2nd ed. 1864). *Hramatyka ruskoho jazyka.* Lviv. Public domain. Library `books/o/os/osadtsa-1862-hramatyka-ruskoho-yazyka` (`uk-gram-osadca-1864`); OCR of poor quality, cited for its title only.
- Simovych, Vasyl'. 1919. *Hramatyka ukrajins'koji movy.* Kyiv–Leipzig. Public domain (`uk-gram-simovych-1919`).
- Krymskyi, Ahatanhel. 1907–1908. *Ukrainskaja grammatika.* Moscow. Public domain (`uk-gram-krymskyi-1907`).
- Nechui-Levytskyi, Ivan. 1913–1914. *Hramatyka ukrajins'koji movy.* Kyiv. Public domain (`uk-gram-nechui-levytskyi-1914`).
- *Litopys Samovydcja*, ed. Orest Levytskyi. 1878. Kyiv. Public domain. Library `books/s/sa/samovydets-1878-litopys-samovydtsia` (`classics-uk-litopys-samovydtsia`).
- *Ukrajins'kyj pravopys* 2019 (§§74, 87). Official document (`uk-gram-pravopys-2019`).
- Kotliarevskyi, Ivan. 1798. *Eneida*; Shevchenko, Taras. 1845. *Zapovit*; Chubynskyi, Pavlo. 1862. *Šče ne vmerla Ukrajina* (official text of the anthem, 2003). Public domain; quoted from memory of the standard texts, modern spelling.
- Danylenko, Andrii & Halyna Naienko. 2022. Movne rosijščennja v pidrosijs'kij Ukrajini. *Ukrajins'ka mova* 2022(1). Library card CC BY 4.0; the article prints CC BY-NC-ND 4.0, so paraphrased only (`danylenko-2022-rosishchennia`).
- Shvedova, Maria, Nataliia Prydvorova & Ilona Skibina. 2022. Normalization of Early Modern Ukrainian texts: the case of Lesia Ukrainka. COLINS 2022. CC BY 4.0 (`shvedova-2022-lesia-ukrainka-normalization`).
- Puriaieva, N. V., R. O. Kotsa & B. V. Babenchuk. 2022. Studiji z istoryčnoji linhvistyky v Instytuti ukrajins'koji movy NAN Ukrajiny. *Ukrajins'ka mova* 2022(1): 52–64. Library card CC BY 4.0; the article prints CC BY-NC-ND 4.0, so paraphrased only (`puriaieva-2022-istorychna-linhvistyka`).
- Starko, Vasyl & Andriy Rysin. 2025. An electronic Ukrainian dictionary as a derussification tool. eLex 2025. CC BY-SA 4.0 (`starko-2025-dictionary-derussification`); paraphrased.
- Universal Dependencies 2.18: UD Ukrainian IU (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, counts only), UD Ukrainian ParlaMint (CC BY-SA 4.0), ud-treebanks-v2.18; Leipzig `ukr_news_2024`, `ukr_newscrawl_2018`, `ukr_wikipedia_2021` (CC BY), counts of 2026-11-06.
- Mova: `kg/src/gram.rs` (`Gram::from_vesum`, `CASE_NAMES`), `kg/src/morph.rs` (`norm`), `kg/src/uk.rs`; `en/src/main.rs` (`xpos_fill`).
- [← previous 8. Regional varieties, diaspora and surzhyk](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/08-national-varieties/)
- [next → 10. Word classes](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/10-word-classes/)
- [↑ back to Ukrainian: a reference manual for Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/)