[mova] Ki-yev or Ky-yiv ? or Kiev or Kyiv?

[Mykola Ponomarenko]

Thank you, pane Znayenko (tsej "znaye" shcho kazhe :))  for your  detailed
response to my not very serious post.  I would like to answer it and finish
this subject, which is, for me, frankly, of no interest.

There are much more serious problems with Ukrainian language IN UKRAINE than
spelling of word Kyiv HERE. This spelling is of no interest to 99.9999 % of
Ukrainian population, why I should bother? Only the diaspora is wasting huge
amount of time on issues like this, because the diaspora does not speak
Ukrainian and is interested to adopt English for spelling for Ukrainian
words. Which is, again, of no interest to majority of Ukrainians in Ukraine,
who use Cyrillic to spell Ukrainian words!!!  Ukrainians would live
perfectly well with spelling Kiev, even Ukrainian nationalists. They do not
care how Kyiv is spelled in USA, they only care how word Kyiv is pronounced
in Ukraine!

"Kyiv" is very difficult word for English speakers. And there are NO CORRECT
spelling to reflect Ukrainian pronunciation, because there are no sound "i"
(with two dots) in English.

I have responded to Irena's question just for the fun of it. Sorry.

Good buy!
-- Mykola Ponomarenko


On 10/17/06, M T Znayenko <znayenko at andromeda.rutgers.edu> wrote:
>
> I would like to respond to Mykola.  I am an American/Ukrainian and a
> scholar in East European Studies.  To me, saying occasionally Kiev, is
> completely natural because I view it as an americanized form (like
> Munich), and have no complex that it may have been based
> originally on the Russian transliteration.
>      However,  Library of Congress  has since the fifties used
> the form Kyiv, originally with two dots " over the "i", now left out for
> practical reasons.  When I write or publish, I use the LC forms
> consistently,  not only in citations but also in the text.  All of my
> colleagues in the humanities and social sciences do the same.
> I am not happy with it, but it is orderly and clearly delineates
> differences between Russian and Ukrainian. What is of a more serious
> concern is that even the Slavic Review which uses the LC transliteration
> consistently for Russian, continues to apply the Russian transliteration
> to citations from Ukrainian.
>      I view the U.S. Board of Geographical names (and the Ukrainian
> Legal Terminology Commission's)  form Kyyiv as unwieldy
> and unpractical. In general, an LC based transliteration, with minor
> modifications, such as is used by Krytyka appears to be the most
> applicable for private use and to those publications that do not use LC.
>
>
>
> On Mon, 16 Oct 2006, Mykola Ponomarenko wrote:
>
> > Hi Irena,
> > Fluent Ukrainian speaker, as I am, will say Ky-jiv in all situations. I
> > think you had experience NOT with people who speak Ukrainian naturally,
> but
> > with those who speak Russian naturally and know Ukrainian. They present
> > themselves to you as Ukrainians but in reality they are Russian speakers
> > from Ukraine. For them it is subconscious to say Ki-ev, especially when
> they
> > say it "in English" :))
> >
> > Fershtain? ;)
> > -- Mykola
> >
> >
> > On 10/16/06, Peter Voitsekhovsky <pvoitsekhovsky at gvpt.umd.edu> wrote:
> >>
> >> I would like to take this questiion further.
> >>
> >> Why is it that speakers of Ukrainian who know perfectly well that the
> >> US capital's name is  [wOshington] in English, still say [va-shing-TON]
> >> in Ukrainian (same as in Russian)?
> >>
> >> Petro
> >>
> >> >>> K&I Bell <kib at magma.ca> 10/16/06 3:07 PM >>>
> >> Dear Mova -
> >>        I wonder why even those who are well-informed and use Kyiv
> >> instead
> >> of Kiev in writing,
> >>        still, in speaking, pronounce it in Ukrainian and English, as
> >> Ki-yev
> >> instead of Ky-yiv ?
> >>        Why ? I don't get it .....
> >>                                                Irena
> >>
> >>
> >
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.brama.com/pipermail/mova/attachments/20061017/aad35187/attachment.html