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”.
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.