How to make sense of Ukrainian prefixes.
Something I mentioned in an earlier blog is that Ukrainian uses prefixes where English normally allows a preposition. That's a lot of grammar talk so let's get straight to examples.
In colloquial everyday English we really love to add on prepositions like on, off, through, up to our verbs. It's not so common in literary English but our everyday life is full of it. Can you tell me exactly what's the difference between:
"I'll cook you up something nice to eat"
and:
"I'll cook you ( )something nice to eat"?
There's not a huge difference, really, but still, we throw in an "up" somewhere and there is some shade of difference to it. It seems random but there are rules. We'd never say "I like to cook up" for example. You can tell people you like to cook up a steak, cook up a pile of food, cook up some dinner. There's some rule that you're specifying what you're cooking "up," some quantity. Maybe you could say there's some kind of emphasis on finishing it, getting it done. It's hard to say but there is a shade of change to it.
You could do the same with "to read up on" something. If I don't know much about a topic I may tell you I'll read up on it. A little bit, some, etc.
Another English example is to read into something. This is tricky as hell for English learners, because what do we have now? If I read into what you're saying, it's actually got very little to do with what read originally means. "Into" has really changed, substantially, what the speaker is saying. I'm not saying that any text is being parsed or picked apart by my eyes right now — it's gone a bit metaphorical, non-literal.
A more concrete example is to read through something. If I tell you I will read through a book, I mean I'll finish it. This is actually a direct parallel to what прочитати accomplishes from читати. It's gone from imperfective — an unfinished process — to perfective — a finished process. This kind of meaning is often the first, maybe even the only time Ukrainian learners are taught how "Ukrainian prefixes work," but it's actually a narrow context, and not even the highest-volume one.
The most important, by far, by volume, is to make a very small semantic change to a verb — one that would probably just be done by an English preposition. This is perhaps easiest with very physical verbs like внести, винести — to carry in and to carry out. English is also straightforward here — in and out have some very concrete uses that are easy to draw a diagram for.
The tough thing for learners of Ukrainian is that they use prefixes for all four of these families of changes. This means that a) roots to words are buried, and b) very important changes are done by the same dozen or so prefixes. They do a LOT of work.
What Learn Ukrainian By The Roots proposes to do is make it easier than ever to see and understand the core roots earlier than ever, and to understand what those dozen prefixes are up to, early. I cannot make a complex system of four different uses into a simple one — it's just not honest. But I can show you that English does the same thing, just differently, with prepositions and phrasal verbs.
Let's look at a Ukrainian root to see this in action. Пис- is the root for write. You'll likely encounter it first as писати, to write, підписати, to sign (a contract), or as the noun підпис, a signature. Now here's what the book does with it — breaking down what the prefixes mean, while also making sure you're ready for the big wide world of список, переписати, описати and many others.
Sure, in the first couple weeks you'll tell me this doesn't matter — you need to say "ice latte, please," "where do I pay," and all that. But very quickly, if you want to get serious about Ukrainian and not just "barely survive" each conversation, you'll have to tackle it head-on. As mentioned, this means you go from feeling like you need to memorize thousands of individual units, to suddenly realizing your task is: about one dozen prefixes, 200 of the most important roots, and another 300 more if you're really into it. Around 512 tasks. The Ukrainian language goes from insurmountable cliff to steady, doable slope from that perspective.
If English did the same as Ukrainian, every phrasal verb or verb with a preposition would be written throughread, upread, outread, throughgo, upgo, outgo. And it's why Ukrainian dictionaries can be very hard- entire massive sections start with popular prefixes like пере-, під-, ви- and so forth, and why it's hard to get a grasp on the language. You've got to train yourself to find the roots, learn the roots, get a sense of the prefixes. And it all comes together.
We'll close off with just another screenshot of a root with its prefix combos laid out. This one is гляд- look, glance. It's distantly related to English glance, in fact- the etymology paragraph helps you see that and memorize that. The tables here help you see the big picture.
