Why "Kyiv" and not "Kiev"?

[Copernicus]

In my self-appointed capacity as IIDB's linguistic policy advisor, I feel duty-bound to explain the mangled attempts of US journalists to pronounce the new politically correct spelling and pronunciation for Ukraine's capital city. The old spelling "Kiev" and pronunciation--"kee-yev"--was based on the transliteration of Russian Cyrillic Киев. The new spelling "Kyiv", based on Ukrainian Cyrillic Київ, is sometimes butchered as "keev". It turns out that the Ukrainian government started a KyivNotKiev campaign in 2018, but just for English, not necessarily other languages. They also want other city names changed, so you might see "Odesa" instead of "Odessa" in the future. Needless to say, the change in English usage is not favored by Russia, but language usage can be an intensely political subject.

But how should one pronounce "Kyiv"? The advice I've seen is to say something like "keev" or "kee-yiv". See the following brief video for an explanation:



She was pronouncing "Kyiv" accurately for Ukrainian, but her advice for how to pronounce the city in English is just flat out wrong. If you pronounce it like "keeve" (rhymes with "peeve"), then the /k/ will come out wrong to Ukrainians and right to Russians. You might just as well keep the old "Kiev" pronunciation. The reason is that both Ukrainian and Russian make a distinction between "hard" and "soft" consonants. That is, they have two different phonemes--soft (palatalized) /k^y/ and hard (velarized) /k/. English speakers don't hear a significant difference, because hard and soft consonants are fully automatic in English. Before an "ee" (/i/) sound, /k/ tends to be automatically softened. Before an "oo" (/u/) sound, it tends to be hard. The Russian pronunciation of "Kiev" starts with a soft /k^y/ phoneme. The Ukrainian pronunciation of "Kyiv" starts with a hard /k/. So it sounds very different to both Russian and Ukrainian ears.

Sorry if this is too pedantic, but I still want to say something about the "y" vowel transliteration from Cyrillic English does not have this vowel, but Russian and Ukrainian do. It's just that they use different Cyrillic letters to represent it. Russian uses ы and Ukrainian uses и. (To make matters worse, Russian use и for the "ee" vowel sound. I will spare you the technical names.) For obscure historical reasons, standard Russian does not ever allow ы after "k" or "g". It used to, so the Ukrainian pronunciation of their city is actually closer to the historical pronunciation that Russians used before the 19th century. So English does not have the Slavic "y" sound. To pronounce it, you can pronounce the English "oo" /u/ vowel while simultaneously spreading your lips into a smile. That is, suppress the lip rounding for that /u/ sound, if you can. It is a difficult sound for English speakers to make, so you might need to drink a few beers before trying it.

OK, here's the punchline. How should you, as an English speaker, pronounce "Kyiv"? I recommend that you use two syllables--"kuh-yiv"--not one syllable "keeve". That isn't technically accurate for Ukrainian, but it will preserve the hard /k/, which is more significant in Ukrainian.

Or you could just continue to use the Russian pronunciation and spelling: "Kiev". If Russia invades and occupies the country, they'll try to go back to that anyway. Because language is political.

 

[Politesse]

Thank you, I've been wondering about that!

 

[steve_bank]

You say po-TAH-to I say po-TAY-to.

From the song lets call the whole thing off. Louie Armstrong and Ek]lla Fiztgerald.

song yiu say potato - Google Search

You like potato and I like potahto
You like tomato and I like tomahto
Potato, potahto, tomato, tomahto.
Let's call the whole thing off

You say laughter and I say larfter
You say after and I say arfter
Laughter, larfter after arfter
Let's call the whole thing off,


You like vanilla and I like vanella
You saspiralla, and I saspirella
Vanilla vanella chocolate strawberry
Let's call the whole thing off....

 

[Politesse]

Um, I'm pretty sure the entire free world would like to call the Russia/Ukraine spat off. Excepting the involved parties, alas.

 

[steve_bank]

A political issue for those who get upset over trivial issues.

I like Peking Duck.

Qaddafi vs Kadafi
Koran vs Quran

Somebody on the forum once gave me grief for saying The Ukaaine insted of just Ukraine.

It is possible by design or accident NATO and Russia will be shooting at each other. At that point linguistic debate over Ukraine will be irrelevant, it will be a wasteland.

Linguistic purity is an uphill battle.

 

[Copernicus]

A political issue for those who get upset over trivial issues.

I like Peking Duck.

Qaddafi vs Kadafi
Koran vs Quran

Somebody on the forum once gave me grief for saying The Ukaaine insted of just Ukraine.

It is possible by design or accident NATO and Russia will be shooting at each other. At that point linguistic debate over Ukraine will be irrelevant, it will be a wasteland.

Linguistic purity is an uphill battle.

To the Ukrainians, it is not really just about linguistic purity, but national identity. I'm not personally in favor of laws that attempt to suppress the Russian language in Ukraine, since there are a large number of speakers dominant in the Russian language, not the least of which is President Zelensky himself. (Although he always tries to speak Ukrainian in public now.) Whether that is a good or bad thing--or even constitutionally legal--in Ukraine is controversial and properly a subject for political debate elsewhere. But the whole point of the  KyivNotKiev initiative is to establish a preferred spelling and pronunciation in English, and it seems fair that official names for Ukrainian cities and places ought to be based on Ukrainian in English, not Russian, since Ukrainian is the only official state language now. (See  Russian Language in Ukraine) The reason is that English is the most widely used language standard for international communications, so the government is pursuing a policy of trying to promote its indigenous language in official naming policy. Not being Ukrainian, I don't really have a standing in debates over what its language policy ought to be. That is a matter for Ukrainians to determine.

What I will say about the PoTAHto/PoTAYto issue is that you are talking about variation in a single language, sometimes across dialects. Ukrainian is very much a distinct language from Russian. It has its own alphabet, spelling conventions, vocabulary, grammar, and punctuation. It overlaps a lot with Russian, but so do Italian and Spanish. Like those two languages, Russian and Ukrainian are not always mutually intelligible, but speakers of both languages can often communicate somewhat with each other. Most Ukrainians are familiar with Russian, but not vice versa.

 

[steve_bank]

Simple pronounces can express ethnic and cultural divisions.

Back in the 90s I think France officially pugged Americanisms from the official language.

If Ukraine is moving to ban Russian speech then yet again we comnemn Russia for oppression and support a country that is oppressive.

 

[Bomb#20]

If a bunch of foreigners admire American cooking so much they want to name their city after one of our delicious chicken dishes, hey, more power to 'em, and thanks for the compliment! But why they'd imagine this entitles them to tell Americans we're pronouncing our own language wrong is a mystery.

 

[Copernicus]

Simple pronounces can express ethnic and cultural divisions.

Back in the 90s I think France officially pugged Americanisms from the official language.

If Ukraine is moving to ban Russian speech then yet again we comnemn Russia for oppression and support a country that is oppressive.

Again, this isn't just about the pronunciation of a language. It is about using an entirely different language as a basis for naming places in Ukraine, which, as a member of the Soviet Union, had to use Russian names internationally for those places. Now that Ukraine is independent from Russian control, it is free to use names for places that existed before Russian domination. Ukraine is not actually moving to ban Russian speech any more than the Soviet Union moved to ban Ukrainian, Estonian, Belarussian, Latvian, Lithuanian, etc., in the countries that it dominated. Now that those countries are independent of the Soviet Union, they are free to revert to language preferences that they deem to represent their national identity. And they want English speakers to use names for those places that are based on their official language policy for naming them. There is nothing out of the ordinary here. Countries all over the world do this kind of thing. That's why we now say "Beijing" instead of "Peking", "Saint Petersburg" instead of "Leningrad", "Belarus" instead of "Byelorussia" or "White Russia", "Gdansk" instead of "Danzig", "Kaliningrad" instead of "Konigsberg", "Istanbul" instead of "Constantinople", "Mumbai" instead of "Bombay", "Chennai" instead of "Madras", "Malagasy Republic" instead of "Madagascar", "Myanmar" instead of "Burma", "Bangla Desh" instead of "East Pakistan", "Zimbabwe" instead of "Rhodesia", and so on. Or do you think that no country should ever revise its naming conventions? Why make an exception for Ukraine?

If a bunch of foreigners admire American cooking so much they want to name their city after one of our delicious chicken dishes, hey, more power to 'em, and thanks for the compliment! But why they'd imagine this entitles them to tell Americans we're pronouncing our own language wrong is a mystery.

Americans speak English, but they don't actually have a copyright on language usage. English is an international language standard, and the US is just one of the countries that uses it for official purposes. The Ukrainian effort is really aimed at the international standard, not the US in particular. Ukraine should be fully entitled to use naming conventions based on the Ukrainian language. If you feel offended by that, you really ought to take greater offense at China for making us call their capital city "Beijing" instead of "Peking". They've got a lot of nerve, don't they? Anyway, I'm sure that you'll still be able to talk about "Chicken Kiev" and "Peking Duck" in our restaurants instead of "Chicken Kyiv" and "Beijing Duck". Unless of course, the Language Nazis start arming themselves and patrolling for deviant restaurant menus.

 

[Bomb#20]

Did I need to put a "[/joke]" in there?

 

[steve_bank]

To be clear, so what?

Language and communications always evolve. The Oxford English Dictionary periodically updates with new words.

Here in the USA in particular what we call American English is extremely fluid with numerous influences from immigrant language. Unless you get out in the world and mix it up with the 'peasants' you will not see it.

Words are invented on the fly in conversation. Strict grammar in common usage is not always used or required.

To me Australian and British English can sound like a foreign language at times.

How is Kiev written and phonetically pronounced in Cyrillic?

 

[TV and credit cards]

This sounds and looks like what you describe with the spread lip smile.

 

[Bronzeage]

Even old New York was once New Amsterdam
Why they changed it, we can't say
Maybe folks just like it better that way.

 

[Copernicus]

How is Kiev written and phonetically pronounced in Cyrillic?

TV&CC's video gives the correct pronunciation much more clearly than my video in the OP. However, the vowel in the first syllable is not exactly like "i" in the first syllable of "living", but closer than the first vowel in "leaving". It is a  high back unrounded vowel that would be represented with the phonetic symbol ɯ. So the first syllable is really pronounced as if you were trying to say "coo" but spread your lips rather than rounding them. The point from the perspective of Russian or Ukrainian hearing is not so much the vowel as the initial "k" pronunciation. If you use the "i" in "living", that will still tend to soften the "k", so I recommend trying to say "kuh-yiv", which is perfectly pronounceable for English speakers. The most important sound to get right is the initial consonant, not the following vowel. It should be a hard "k", not a soft "k", which English speakers produce before front* vowels. English speakers don't consciously recognize the distinction between hard and soft consonants, because that distinction cannot be used to distinguish words in English. It does in Slavic languages.

* The term "front" here refers to the bulk of the tongue mass being forward during pronunciation. Phoneticians classify vowel sounds according to tongue positions, because the tongue is the organ that most affects sound quality in vowels. Lip rounding is a secondary factor. All front vowels in English are unrounded. All back vowels are rounded. Russian and Ukrainian have this unrounded ɯ back vowel, which is unpronounceable for English speakers.