If there are 5 people saying “the Ukraine”, I am one of them. If there is 1 person saying “the Ukraine”, that person is me. If there is no one saying " the Ukraine", I am no longer alive. If the entire world says “the Ukraine”, I will support the entire world. 'Till my last breath, I will say “the Ukraine”.
It’s weird how quickly that changed, if you asked me five years ago I would’ve said that it’s called ”the Ukraine” in English and it’s just one of those quirks like how Switzerland is die Schweiz in German, but no, apparently it’s an evil Russian plot and we must stop saying it immediately.
It’s so absurd because Russian doesn’t even fucking have the direct article. You can’t say “the Ukraine” in Russian because the language just does not have the necessary part of speech to do so.
Like this is literally some weird totemic thing libs just made up from whole cloth and turned into a shibboleth to differentiate between people faithfully cleaving to official western-approved propaganda lines (good, smart, free thinking) and anyone who doesn’t reorient their entire mode of speech to conform to whatever whimsical bullshit the corporate talking heads have started popularizing today (bad, unfree, probably a perfidious foreign agent doing a heckin wrongthink) and instead is just continuing to use the longstanding and better scanning “the Ukraine” that’s 100% the default for English speakers because it’s pronounced like “the UK” but with an “r” and an “n” mixed in without changing the syllables or vowels.
Same thing with ‘Keev’ suddenly becoming the only acceptable pronunciation of Kiev/Kyiv. The ‘authentic’ way to pronounce it uses vowel sounds that are close to Polish and are very difficult for most English speakers to get right. The distinction between the Ukrainian and Russian pronunciations was artificially reconstructed within the bounds of English speakers’ familiarity as “keev” vs “key-ev” in a way mostly unrecognizable to the actual speakers. But now there was an easy indicator of whether someone was sufficiently loyal and willing to snap to the good righteous Ukrainian way, or if they were an agent of Putin who said it the Russian way.
I pronounce it so it rhymes with “give” or “shiv” but with a “ky” sound in front like in “cube”.
As a linguistic pedant, the Kiev shit drives me nuts! Like yeah lemme just refer to every city name in the world by its official language
It’s Kyyyyiv!!!
It’s 成都 not Chengdu!!!
Linguistic prescriptivists can catch these hands
Technically, China DID rename Beijing from “Peking”, and Chengdu from Chengtu. But it wasn’t a political decision, but a linguistic one (updated latinisation of Chinese)
it’s wild to me how there are institutions in Beijing that still use the Peking spelling because they never changed their English name
Sure they weren’t trying to move up the Peking order?
lol yeah that was weird.
“the ukraine” was never the default for me (east coast yankkkee in my 30s). it feels kind of old timey to me. i agree that the media has made up the whole “the ukraine is the ruzzian way to pronounce it!” bit, but before that “the ukraine” was old person coded
if “the ukraine” is the default for some english speakers, the reason is absolutely not “because it’s pronounced like “the UK” but with an “r” and an “n” mixed in without changing the syllables or vowels”. toponyms dont really work like that
I’ve called it Ukraine for decades (I’m not even an east coast yank!), because I wasn’t born in 1975 and place names change sometimes.
Czechoslovakia is another one that dates people’s geography knowledge imo.
Notice how Wikipedia changed all Ukrainian cities’ names to Ukrainian ones, EXCEPT FOR CHERNOBYL. (It should be “Chornobyl”)