I attended a wedding in London last week. Meeting the bride’s father, Oleksandr, on the plane, I thought we would share a happy chat about his Ukrainian daughter getting married.
I expected him to be somewhat sad, yet happy, about his child leaving Ukraine given the decrepit state of economic and political affairs at home.
In the very least, I expected a conversation going back to the tower of Babel – that famous story from Genesis – and relevance to developments in Ukraine, Russia and the United Kingdom.
But Oleksandr maintained that people should stay where they were born and stick to their genetic fate. He used the “physics” of language to explain it.
Every time you use a word, it whispers a little story, he said.
These little tales help us understand our own history and mentality. An expert in etymology and professor of law, he started with the word “time.”
It comes from Latin tempus, which means progression, pace and speed. The Russian word for time (vremya) derives from vereteno or a spindle, he said.
Anastasia Haydulina and Luis Graham-Yooll tie the knot at the Camden Town Hall in London on Nov. 5. (Andrew Bicknell)
Digging further we arrive at varta ma, which means the sun in Sanskrit. So, in Russia, people think of time as something that follows a pretty predictable routine. It’s up in the morning and down in the evening, just like the sun. In the West, however, tempus is something that streams ahead.
Furthermore, when you take the Ukrainian word for time (chas), it comes from a word chastyna or a particle of something. Ukrainians then think of time as something that doesn’t progress. It’s even worse than a Russian sunny wheel. Ukrainian time is always the same.
According to Oleksandr, his daughter’s Ukrainian-Russian genes may get a little confused mixing up with the groom’s chemistry.
And in the greater scheme of the universe, the pendulum should follow its own verified path. We could, of course, argue back quoting success stories of the immigrant nations, such as the U.S. But Oleksandr also seemed to have a point.
He then moved on to space. When you know your etymology, this word should immediately summon you back to the Roman Empire when soldiers were driving wedges between certain intervals, or spatiums, into the ground.
The Western brain then thinks of the space as it does of time – a road that goes ahead marked by polls. If I have not confused you yet, imagine Russian prostranstvo.
When you dissect it, it’s a product of three words: progress, sides and creativity.
To make your life easier, think of Russian space as a circle with sun rays beaming out creatively in various directions. In other words, Russians are lost in space exploring every possible direction out there.
In Ukrainian, space is prostir, which is almost the same as in the Russian language but without the creative bit. So in a Ukrainian head, space is perceived as a circle with sun rays pointing in.
To cut it short, we are again in conflict with Western mentality, where Roman soldiers are building their space moving ahead. Ukrainians, though, seem to always go back where they started. How true if you apply this formula to our politics.
You can probably tell that my head was spinning by the end of the flight. But I landed with a very different conclusion than the bride’s father. Anastasia, who’s the wife of Luis now, has written her own little tale blending Eastern and Western etymology quite successfully.
She is not your ordinary Ukrainian girl traveling to London following that clueless notion of time and space. She was, in fact, hunted down by Bloomberg news before Luis put a ring on her finger.
And I am very encouraging of their union because whatever Luis is lacking in the creative department, Anastasia would fill in. And if she loses her sense of direction, Luis will be there like that Roman legionary on a mission to push it forward.
So foreign marriages can and will work when couples can speak the same language and enrich each other’s culture through it. Doing so won’t tear an umbilical cord away from their homeland.
It’s fascinating if we can take an elevator back to the first floor of that imaginary Babel tower and understand each other beyond space, time and history.
Kyiv Post Lifestyle Editor Yuliya Popova can be reached at [email protected].
