FROM THE BOTTOMS TO THE TOPS: COMMON SLAVIC AND INDIVIDUAL FEATURES OF THE UKRAINIAN LANGUAGE

Abstract

Difficult questions about the origin of human language in general andindividual national languages in particular are only sometimes consciously learned by students, and therefore language teachers avoid their consideration in language classes, even though the program requires it. Senior specialized school, especially its philological component, involves the study of issues of the Ukrainian language origin history, its periodization, the emergence of Slavic writing, and familiarization with the place of the native language among other languages of the world. Therefore, knowledge about this should become one of the worldview beliefs about the native language importance, and the responsibility for its preservation. Forming a conscious language personality is a long-term process that begins in the family, continues in educational institutions, and throughout life. Although Ukrainianist teachers have a sufficient supply of traditional and innovative didactic materials, they lack educational and methodological work on general linguistic issues, which until recently were not the focus of attention when learning the language at school. The article can be useful for them when studying questions about the world's language classification, related languages, about the distinctive features of the native language. It deals with the preservation of Proto-Slavic and the emergence of new, special features of the Ukrainian language using the example of its vocalism subsystem. The vowels that have been adopted and preserved in the Ukrainian language from its proto-base are identified – А, О, У, Е; the changes they underwent are described. In addition, the sounds adopted during the disintegration of the Proto-Slavic language by proto-Ukrainian dialects, which were later lost in Ukrainian; their variations in the form of phonemes of the modern Ukrainian literary language are described. If necessary, a comparison of the phonetic features of the Ukrainian language with the features of other languages that belong to the Slavic branch of the Proto-Indo-European language family is provided.It is planned to continue the examination of the distinctive features of the Ukrainian language on the example of units of other levels of the language system.