Abstract

For the last 150 years there were several attempts to write down Ukrainian language with Latin alphabet, including the attempts of adopting several laws that took place after declaration of independence of Ukraine in 1991. But there were not practical and popularize. The main reason is that they haven’t kept the spirit of the Ukrainian language, some Cyrillic letter handed combination of several Latin letters and the same distorted sound (phonetics) of Ukrainian language. But the social processes that take place in Ukraine since the declaration of its independence, i.e. significant emigration of workers that counted in the millions, and also problems with communication with the families that stayed in Ukraine using modern computers and technologies which are equipped only with Latin keyboard without access to Cyrillic alphabet, call for a great need for a creation of the opportunity to use Latin alphabet to record the Ukrainian language, which would retain its nature and was easy to use. This article presents a new version of Latin alphabet for the Ukrainian language. It does not replace the Cyrillic alphabet – but a parallel alternative for it and for all other versions of the alphabet that are used to record the Ukrainian language. This alphabet I called “Ukrainka” in honor of Ukrainian ladies who represent the majority of our emigrants. “Ukrainka” is completely unified alphabet, without any disadvantages from their predecessors. The main idea is in replacing one letter of Cyrillic alphabet to exactly one Latin letter – a transliteration of 1:1, does not break and does not introduce any new rules in Ukrainian spelling and phonetics, thus saving the Ukrainian language. There are other advantages: – no change in letters, regardless of their position in the word; – the word written in the Cyrillic “Ukrainka” always looks the same (the same set of letters) and there are no several options to write the same word; – saved Ukrainian language peculiarity to soften the consonants – saved not only a soft sign but also an apostrophe as a dividing option for separating from certain sounds in the middle of a word; – for the letters Ж, Ч, Ш, it’s used letters that mean the same in other languages with the Latin alphabet, namely Ž, Č, Š, and for Є, Ю, Я, Щ picked up letters graphically similar as the above – Ě, Ŭ, Ă, Ş. The main element of this article is a table of characters, the description justifying their introduction and showing how to use in computers, as well as examples of different tests transliteration.

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