Language

Both modern Russian and modern Ukrainian derive from the Ukrainian of the 1oth century. Until about 700 years ago, Ukrainian was Russian, and Russian was Ukrainian. In 863, two missionaries were sent from Constantinople to oversee the newly “converted” people of the Ukraine. These brothers invented an alphabet that coped with the sounds of the Slavic dialect they chose for their first Bible translations, prompting the start of the written history of Ukraine. Unlike the western Church, which demanded that all its adherents speak and read Latin, the Orthodox Church invested heavily in translation into local languages, giving rise to early local-language literacy.