[mova] the pronunciation of Kyiv

[Wayles Browne]

Вибачте, я буду писати по ан„лiйському, тому що моя тема дотичить 
власне ан„лiйської вимови.
I am afraid that the difficulty for Anglophones is not merely 
understandable--it is unavoidable, even incurable.
I say this because of some facts about English vowels and syllables:
There are two kinds of syllables: one has a vowel at the end, like 
English "go, see, too" etc., and the other kind has a vowel followed 
by a consonant, like English "it, goat, book" etc.
For some languages, this doesn't make much difference. Indeed, it is 
not important for present-day Ukrainian (though for older Ukrainian 
it did make a difference). But for English it is important, because 
different English vowels behave differently. The English long vowels 
can be at the end of a syllable, or they can have a consonant after 
them, so we can say "go" and "goat", "see" and "seem", "too" and 
"tool". However, the English short vowels can't be at the end of a 
syllable. They must have a consonant after them. So we can say "get" 
but we can't say "ge..." in English, we can say "fat" but we can't 
say "fa...", we can say "fun" but we can't say "fu...", and, now I'm 
coming to my main point, we can say Lynch but we can't say "Ly...". 
That also means that we can't say "Ky..." as a separate syllable, 
whereas we can say "Ki..." as a separate syllable (as in the word 
"key", for instance--that is a long vowel in English).
З пошаною
Wayles Browne

>Greetings!
>
>It is understandable that many anglophones will have difficulty pronouncing
>Kyiv.  But now that the State Department has adopted this spelling, we
>can patiently tell our anglophone friends that:
>
>1) The noun has two syllables:  *ky -- *iv*
>2) The *y* in the first syllable  is like the vowel *y* in Lynch.
>3) The second syllable is pronounced like the second syllable in
>the adjective (and noun) *na -- ive.*
>
>With consistent use (and a respectful attitude) on the part of
>Ukrainians, anglophones will switch from *Kiev* to *Kyiv,* the way
>they switched from *Peking* to *Beijing.*
>
>Best,
>NP
>
>|||||||||||||||||
>Dr. Natalia Pylypiuk
>University of Alberta

-- 

Wayles Browne, Assoc. Prof. of Linguistics
Department of Linguistics
Morrill Hall 220, Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853, U.S.A.

tel. 607-255-0712 (o), 607-273-3009 (h)
fax 607-255-2044 (write FOR W. BROWNE)
e-mail ewb2 at cornell.edu
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