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

[Peter Voitsekhovsky]

I cannot help responding to this string again because the discussion
seems to suffer from some confusion, regarding facts as well as
concepts. 

1) To the best of my knowledge,  Mr. Ponomarenko is wrong claiming that
virtually nobody in Ukraine cares how Ukrainian proper names are spelled
in English. As far as I remember, a U. govt entity (was it the Rada?)
issued a decree in early 1990s which officially authorized the English
spelling KYIV.  

2) Quite a few Ukrainians are unhappy about the way their government
decides to spell their own names in English in the passorts - without
asking them. 

3) Ukraine government's attempt to decree a foreign language spelling
of its toponyms is not successful, apparently.  KIEV remains the norm in
English. A search on Google yielded approx. 44 million results for KIEV
and only 0.4 million for KYIV.  

4) I think the previous point gives a short answer to the original
question from Irena. In my view, it is a sign of proper language culture
to stck to the NORM.  

5) Linguistic norms are seldom decreed for a nation's own language and
virtually never for a foreign language. 

6) Note, in contrast, that there was never a decree ordering to stop
saying "the Ukraine" - but today the English norm is obviously to drop
the article there.

To conclude, I agree that to make an issue about the alternatives
KYIV/KIEV is like fighting about saying "pyvo" vs "pivo" insread of
thinking about its taste. 

With best regards,

Petro Voitsekhovsky
Retired Liinguist







>>> "Mykola Ponomarenko" <mykola at mykola.com> 10/17/06 9:00 PM >>>
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
> >>
> >>
> >
>