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https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2026/aug/04/war-lesson-learning-ukrainian-culture-ukraine>
"Almost as soon as I returned from my first reporting trip to Ukraine, in
October 2022, I decided to start Ukrainian lessons. Not as an act of
solidarity, exactly, but as a marker that I was committed to returning. I
wanted to know some Ukrainian in order to feel less helpless, to edge towards a
better understanding of what I was reporting, and to be more courteous to those
whom I encountered. And I hoped, in time, to be able to pull myself through a
piece of poetry in the original.
I began meeting Olha, my teacher, by weekly video call later that autumn. She
was in Ivano-Frankivsk, her home town in the far west of Ukraine, I was in
London. With endless patience and humour, she led me by the hand through the
unfamiliar letters of her language, those elegant, sensuous shapes of the
Cyrillic alphabet.
I have not yet fully internalised them, as I have the Roman alphabet, whose
shapes are so much part of me that I don’t see them any more. The unfamiliarity
of Cyrillic characters, by contrast, allows me to enjoy the exhilarating
ski-slope swoop of the Л (l), the generous expanses of the Ю (yu), and the
majestic architecture of the Ж (zh), which spreads out its arms and legs like
candelabra. (Enjoy, please, the extravagant double Ж in Запоріжжя –
Zaporizhzhia – which has a particularly graceful etymology: it means “beyond
the rapids”.) And, though I shrink from trying either to write or decode the
curlicued Ukrainian cursive, just forming these letters is a joy for the hand:
the twin sweep of a З (z) and the harsh angles of a Д (d), which I like to
write as a triangle with a pair of sharp, inward-facing tails dangling from it.
Then there is the special category of Cyrillic letters reserved only for the
Ukrainian language. You may see, for example, on a Ukrainian necklace or
bracelet, or on a T-shirt, the letter Ї – like our letter I, surmounted by a
diaeresis. The character, which expresses the sound “yi” – as in Kyiv (Київ) –
is absent from the Russian variant of the alphabet, and thus operates as a
subtle signifier of allegiance. In occupied Mariupol, in 2022, the letter Ї was
seen scrawled in chalk on the streets – a single letter as an act of defiance.
I enjoy the fact that in the transliteration of my surname, Гіґґінс, there is
another Ukrainian-only letter, Ґ, which, from its jaunty upturned serif, one
can tell is the rare hard g, most commonly employed for loan words; it was
removed from the alphabet in Stalin-era reforms, and formally given back a
place in the Ukrainian alphabet after the fall of the Soviet Union and
Ukrainian independence in 1991.
There is a text artwork that I love, by the sculptor Nathan Coley, installed in
a library in Edinburgh, which consists of the sentence: The Basic Material is
Not the Word but the Letter. I often think of it when navigating a forest of
Cyrillic signs. Thick accumulations of Ukrainian consonants conspire against my
tongue and my memory: airless crushes of them, like the compressed folds of a
concertina. I cannot tell you how many repetitions it took to memorise
незважаючи на (
nezvazhayuchy na) – “despite” in Ukrainian. It seemed
important to master this phrase. How else could I say, “despite the war”?
Emblematic of the many sound collisions in Ukrainian is the magnificent single
letter Щ, expressed in English as “shch” – as in “fresh cheese” , as one of my
grammar books puts it. After much deliberation, I have only come up with one
word in English (with the exception of those we have borrowed, such as borshch)
that contains this fricative-affricative alliance: “pushchair”. Four whole
letters in English for a single pair of glorious, fat loops in Ukrainian."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
