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Comment by anticodon | Hacker News Reader

Can you tell a Russian from Ukrainian? Can you even tell an Ukrainian name from Russian name?

There's a bunch of phonetical differences:

  rus. Volk ~ ukr. Vovk
  rus. Aleksey ~ ukr. Oleksiy

Different suffixes:

   rus. Tarasov ~ ukr. Tarasenko, Tarasiuk

Ukrainian surnames often have no suffixes at all (more often than in Russia):

  rus. Melnikov vs. ukr. Melnyk
  rus. Kovalev vs. ukr. Koval

Although it doesn't say anything about a person's nationality for certain because of migrations.

This is akin to asking if someone can tell an German name from a French name. Sure, there are some shared ones, but for most intents and purposes locals can easily tell the two apart.

It's more like telling a German name from an Austrian name.

Russia really isn't that similar to the rest of the Eastern Bloc. Even in language, the other Slavic languages are pretty close to one another, whereas Russian is pretty different. Same for culture etc. Russia is trying very hard to create the impression, that it's all the same, in the hopes of eventually occupying neighbors again, but it really isn't.

Russian is a Slavic language and very similar to other Slavic languages especially Ukrainian and Belarusian. Far closer than German and French. I have family across 5 different Slavic countries and hear various Slavic languages regularly. You're just spewing complete bs for political reasons apparently.

I speak most of the languages you listed on a conversational level, but sure, it's easier to cry about astroturfing than consider that you might be wrong.

Cool story bud.

Wow. Can you tell a Korean person from Chinese person? Polish name from a Czech one?

Different cultures, different languages, it's obvious to the locals.

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