Ще раз про вік української мови

This article explores the origin and early history of the Ukrainian language. It emphasizes that Ukrainian began to form concurrently with other Slavic languages following the disintegration of the Proto-Slavic ethnolinguistic community in the mid- 1st millennium AD. Although reliable data on the earliest history of the Slavs and their language is lacking, it can be hypothetically reconstructed through comprehensive research involving ancient archaeological cultures and linguistic evidence. Historical accounts suggest that every ethno-tribal community typically had its own language. According to scholarly data, the Slavs emerged on the historical stage no earlier than the late 3rd millennium BC, across a broad expanse of Europe — from the Vistula–Oder basin in the west to the lower courses of the Dnieper's left tributaries in the east, and from the Pripyat River in the north to the steppe zone in the south. Thus, the entire eastern area of the Slavic homeland lay within the borders of present-day Ukraine. Many researchers identify the Trzciniec–Komariv culture (15th–11th centuries BC) as the archaeological equivalent of the early Slavs. It was succeeded in this region by a succession of Proto-Slavic agricultural and pastoral cultures. From the 5th–6th centuries AD, their cultural continuity can be traced without interruption. During the 7th–8th centuries, predominantly Proto-Ukrainian state-like tribal unions emerged, whose consolidation eventually led to the formation of the early Ukrainian polity known as Rus' (Kyivan Rus'). The history of the vernacular Ukrainian language is commonly divided into three stages: the adoption and assimilation of Proto-Slavic ethnolinguistic heritage (6th–7th centuries); the linguistic features of the pre-literary period (8th–10th centuries); and the emergence of new, mainly phonetic, traits caused by the reduction and loss of the ultra-short vowels o and e (written as ъ and ь), starting in the late 11th and continuing into the first half of the 12th century.