You really have no idea of the extent of your ignorance on the subject of language.
That's pretty rich.
You are a victim of anti-russian propaganda.
Barbos, your level of ignorance on the subject of language is obvious from the content of what you post and has nothing whatsoever to do with anti-Russian propaganda, although I suspect much of your opinion is shaped by anti-Ukrainian propaganda. Your ideas about Ukrainian are utterly misinformed and frankly absurd. You apparently do not speak or read Ukrainian, so how would you even know what the scientific literature is like in Ukrainian? I have been exposed to a wide variety of Slavic languages since the 1960s, and I have seen plenty of technical materials published in the Ukrainian language even since Soviet times. Seriously, what you have been saying is not only wrong, but, to paraphrase the Austrian scientist, Wolfgang Pauli, what you have been saying about Ukrainian is so not right that
it isn't even wrong.
Again, there is zero amount of technical literature in ukrainian, not very little, zero!
Do you understand the difference between "zero" and "very little"?
Oh, definitely, but the problem is that you don't. You have to have realized at some point that "zero" was unsustainable hyperbole. Even in Soviet times, there was a technical literature in Ukrainian. I myself worked part time in the Ohio State University library, which was a major repository for Eastern European books. Because of my ability to read Cyrillic, I processed many technical materials that were in Ukrainian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, etc. And that was back in the late 1960s. Back then, Ukrainians did publish mostly in Russian, because there were very few ways to get published in Ukrainian and because the audience was much more limited. Nowadays, Ukrainian journals tend to be published not in Russian, but in English, because Ukraine has closer ties with the West, and academics in all countries tend to prefer to disseminate materials in English. Ukrainian scholars still publish a lot in Russian, because they all speak Russian and there are a lot more journals that simply won't accept materials written in Ukrainian. You can find lots of online references to science and other technical subjects in the Ukrainian language nowadays, but you simply haven't bothered to look. Instead, you seem to have some vague idea that there is something inferior about the Ukrainian language. It is very similar to the kind of jingoistic nonsense about Ukraine that has been spilling our of the mouth of your "benevolent tsar", who infamously remarked that
Ukraine isn't even a country. And that was before he ordered the invasion of Ukraine.
You have to take a book in russian or english and translate it to ukrainian when there are no ukrainian words to describe most of the terms in it. Russian had centuries to invent and borrow words at a very slow and natural pace.
You can do that for ukrainian but you would have people in Ukraine dying laughing.
Everyone who cares, speak and was educated in russian and is not going to use your new language tomorrow. You would have to wait until they all die, and then wait until all their students die.
The fact that ukrainian is similar to russian makes it harder not easier. People would rather switch to russian than to bother with this nonsense.
I suspect that most of what you know about Ukraine has come largely from Russian sources and Ukrainian ethnic Russians, who are largely opposed to Ukrainianization. So you have bought into a lot of the biased myths about Ukraine that seem to be floating around Russia, as it struggles with world condemnation for its unprovoked invasion of its neighbor. What drives scientific and scholarly publication has nothing to do with the linguistic properties of Russian or Ukrainian. It has to do with the need to publish and disseminate ideas. Ukrainians face the same problem that Bulgarians, Romanians, Poles, Czechs, and other countries with official languages that aren't familiar to most of the rest of the world. Russian is the eighth most popular language in the world, so it does not face the same issues when it comes to technical publications. That is why most of what you say about Ukrainian "isn't even wrong". You are focusing on the wrong thing when you blame the language for the relatively small (but still existent) amount of technical publications that appear in that language. Nowadays, however, Ukrainian journals tend to publish in English rather than Russian, because the politics inside the country have shifted to a more Western orientation.
It is utter nonsense. There is a video somewhere of ukrainian government meeting. And at the time ukrainian government had a bunch of people from Georgia (don't ask why and not USA Georgia, just Country Georgia). None of the georgians spoke ukrainian, some ukrainians spoke some ukrainian, but everybody in that meeting spoke russian. They started in ukrainian, I think, it clearly went nowhere. So guess which language they switched to?
Oh, what a surprise. Georgian is a Caucasian language--not even in the Indo-European family--and both countries had been absorbed into the Russian-dominated Soviet empire. What do you think this proves? That those languages are somehow inferior to Russian or that it just happened to be a common language that they spoke because of past Russian imperialism? Try to imagine how that might be analogous to the fact that so many international conventions these days are held in English rather than some other language. Could it be because the English Empire was the largest empire that ever existed on Earth? So Russia had a smaller empire. Does that make you feel inferior? Sorry, but your arguments are totally nonsensical at this point. If the Aztecs had spread their empire around the world, we would probably all be conversing in Nahuatl right now.
By the way, another language factoid. I don't know how it is now but during soviet time and decade after, Bulgaria did not bother too much with translating books and simply used russian ones. They all studied russian in school and they all spoke russian rather well. I have met a lot of people from Eastern Europe and USSR (Lithuania, etc) in US.
Yes, that is because Bulgaria and Lithuania, like Ukraine, did not have large empires that included populations that they could force to learn their languages. That is all. Can't you get that through your head? This has nothing to do with whether those languages are more or less able to express technical information. It has to do with how large and successful their armies were at conquering other nations.
