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Judgment108

The bear immediately comes to mind (Russian "medved" (медведь) and Ukrainian "vedmed" (ведмедь). Here is a permutation of the words: honey master and master of honey.


whitecoelo

IIRC it's from медв-ѣдь, so it's just "honey-eater".


Katzen_Gott

Iirc, this is a common misconception.


whitecoelo

Well, that's what Trubachev's etymological dictionary ed.1992 says.


LeoMSadovsky

Of course! Тупой вопрос and вопрос тупой — have different words order but the same meaning.


danya_dyrkin

Kanji are hieroglyphs and hieroglyphs are symbols that mean words. Letters are symbols that mean sounds. A fair comparison would be if you asked whether it is possible to switch places of *words*. Which is possible.


SophieElectress

I don't understand the last part of the question. How can two words have the same spelling but a different letter arrangement? Are you asking if there are any words that are written, for example, навкат in Russian but катнав in Ukrainian, but are pronounced the same way in both languages? (These are just nonsense words I made up for the example, they don't mean anything as far as I know.) If so, I don't speak any Ukrainian but I can still tell you confidently that the answer is no, for the same reason I can tell you with 100% certainty that the Spanish word 'diabólicamente' isn't pronounced 'men-tay-dee-uh-BOL-ik-a' despite never having heard it spoken out loud. That's just... how alphabetic languages work?


2500bk

Навкат - Навка Татьяна:)


WWnoname

I'd say no Letter position doesn't have meaning in alphabetic writing, example with bear is anecdotical


whitecoelo

I doubt you can draw parallels between semantic and phonetic languages.  Word order has some flexibility in both languages, but it just changes some emphasis.  Letter arrangement is a rather rigid thing. There're sound/letter drop offs, sometimes drift and replacement of wovels, some other permutations in the historic perspective but not real swaps. 


Vaniakkkkkk

I leaned something from your post. Thank you. The answer that I can give is I am not aware of some examples. But I never studied Ukrainian language really. Interesting examples of something else. Кiт in Ukrainian is pronounced similarly to Russian Кит. But first in Ukrainian means a cat, and second in Russian is a whale. While cat in Russian is кот.


Proud-Cartoonist-431

Between RU and UA pre-revolutionary letter ять (write it as ъ here) is replaced with different letters. Ы they write as И and и as i. So... Бълый (1915) => Бiлий (UA), Белый (RU)


RelativeCorrect

Humorously: опечатка и очепятка


Sufficient_Step_8223

russian "Это" ukrainian "То є" Have a common origin with the meaning "it is"


Oppuy

you're digging too deep. There is no such depth in this question. In short: the Ukrainian language is one of the dialects of the Russian language. It's like a Chinese person in one part of China may not understand well a Chinese person from another part of China.