lutch - Profile

My mother's parents came from Austrian Galicia and their first language, so they claim, is Ukrainian. When they arrived in Brazil, late XIX century, Brazil needed farmers from Europe who had farming techniques in order to populate 'wild' areas of the country. So those first Ukrainian immigrants settled down in the southerns states of Brazil, namely the south of Paraná and the north of Santa Catarina states. The Brazilian government promoted the idea that Brazil was a great country and those Ukrainian immigrants would eventually have a chance to obtain their own independent Ruthenian State. That was a blatant lie to attract those people who had been under the Poles, the Austro-Hungarians and so on. So those Ukrainian immigrants would have been of "Ruthenian extract" I suppose. As a child, back in the 1960s, I used to go down there from São Paulo city to spend holidays with my Ukrainian family, an amazing experience. My grandparents were poor farmers. They didn't have basics, such as electricity, pipe water, telephone wasn't even a dream. However, the landscape was amazing. Their neighbours used to live more than a mile away. And I needed my mother to translate to me, my two brothers and my Italian father what was going on into Portuguese as Portuguese was a foreign language then. Back in the early 1970s I wanted to learn Ukrainian, but there were no books whatsoever. So my father bought me a Russian language course kit and I began to study Russian. When I was somewhat fluent I went back to see my relatives and to my surprise they couldn't understand Russian. The language they could understand well was Polish! Nevertheless, both my grandparents read the bible in Ukrainian and they also had song books in that language. So I can say that Russian and Ukrainian are quite different, more different than Spanish and Portuguese. And people who say that Ukrainian is easier than Russian are totally wrong. Ukrainian is MUCH MORE irregular than Russian.