{"id":1228,"date":"2022-02-24T19:29:14","date_gmt":"2022-02-24T19:29:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/?p=1228"},"modified":"2022-02-24T21:39:04","modified_gmt":"2022-02-24T21:39:04","slug":"country-deadnaming","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/country-deadnaming\/","title":{"rendered":"Country (dead)naming"},"content":{"rendered":"

Current events reminded me of an ongoing Discourse about how we ought to refer to the country Ukraine in English. William Taylor, US ambassador to the country under George W. Bush, is quoted on the subject in this Time magazine piece<\/a> (“Ukraine, Not the Ukraine: The Significance of Three Little Letters”, March 5th, 2014; emphasis mine), which is circulating again today:<\/p>\n

The Ukraine<\/em> is the way the Russians referred to that part of the country during Soviet times \u2026 Now that it is a country, a nation, and a recognized state, it is just Ukraine<\/em>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Apparently they don’t fact-check claims like this, because this is utter nonsense. Russian doesn’t have definite articles, i.e., words like the<\/em>. There is simply no straightforward way to express the contrast between the Ukraine<\/em> and\u00a0Ukraine<\/em> in Russian (or in Ukrainian for that matter).<\/p>\n

Now, it’s true that\u00a0the<\/em> before Ukraine<\/em> has long been proscribed in English, but this seems to be more a matter of style\u2014the the<\/em> variant sounds archaic to my ear\u2014than ideology. And, in Russian, there is variation between \u0432 \u0423\u043a\u0440\u0430\u0438\u043d\u0435 and \u043d\u0430 \u0423\u043a\u0440\u0430\u0438\u043d\u0435, both of which I would translate as ‘in Ukraine’. My understanding is that both have been attested for centuries, but one (\u043d\u0430) was more widely used during the Soviet era and thus the other (\u0432) is thought to emphasize the country’s sovereignty in the modern era. As I understand it, that one preposition is indexical of Ukrainian nationalist sentiment and another is indexical of Russian revanchist-nationalist sentiment is more or less linguistically arbitrary in the Saussurean sense. Or, more weakly, the connotative differences between the two prepositions are subtle and don’t map cleanly onto the relevant ideologies. But I am not a native (or even competent) speaker of Russian so you should not take my word for it.<\/p>\n

Taylor, in the\u00a0Time<\/em> article, continues to argue that US media should use the Ukrainian-style transliteration Kyiv<\/em> instead of the Russian-style transliteration\u00a0Kiev<\/em>. This is a more interesting prescription, at least in that the linguistic claim\u2014that Kyiv<\/em> is the standard Ukrainian transliteration and Kiev<\/em> is the standard Russian transliteration\u2014is certainly true. However, it probably should be noted that dozens of other cities and countries in non-Anglophone Europe are known by their English exonyms<\/a>, and no one seems to be demanding that Americans start referring to Wien\u00a0<\/em>[vi\u02d0n] ‘Vienna’ or Moskva <\/em>‘Moscow’. In other words Taylor’s prescription is a political exercise rather than a matter of grammatical correctness. (One can’t help but notice that Taylor is a retired neoconservative diplomat <\/em>pleading for “political correctness”.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Current events reminded me of an ongoing Discourse about how we ought to refer to the country Ukraine in English. William Taylor, US ambassador to the country under George W. Bush, is quoted on the subject in this Time magazine piece (“Ukraine, Not the Ukraine: The Significance of Three Little Letters”, March 5th, 2014; emphasis … Continue reading “Country (dead)naming”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4,22,7,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1228","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language","category-politics","category-presentation-of-self","category-sociolinguistics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1228","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1228"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1228\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1240,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1228\/revisions\/1240"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}