National identity is itself symbolic, but it starts to feel a lot less symbolic when it is also the basis of a war, writes Nicholas Clairmont. 'The people who live in and rule a sovereign nation should make the decision, and we should acquiesce.'
Transliteration is a difficult issue. Everyone accepts that there are different words for the same things in one language than in another, including the original or host language. Nobody thinks saying “Spain” instead of Espana is intended as a slight against the legitimacy of the Spanish people or government — though I haven’t asked a Catalonian. One of the wonderful things about English is how readily we English speakers take on terms from other languages: think cul-de-sac, aloha, and tsunami.
The matter has become hotter than usual given the unprovoked attack on Ukraine, whose foreign ministry has operated a campaign to get foreign countries and citizens to recognize, per the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs PR project’s name, that it’s “KyivNotKiev.” Pronounce these, respectively, keev and key-evv.
Kyiv is the name of the capital city since it derives from the Ukrainian Київ and not the Russian Киев. In fact, the way the Russian “Kiev” is pronounced in English involves a letter that does not exist in Ukrainian locution, which means using the old Soviet term tells Ukraine that it cannot speak the name of its own hometown and Russians can. This cuts deep, even if language is merely symbolic.
We can quarrel about Calcutta vs. Kolkata or Istanbul vs. Constantinople . But generally, the people who live in and rule a sovereign nation should make the decision, and we should acquiesce. A vaguely memetic tweet from a few years ago notes that, in another Ukraine-related language issue, Ukraine has something in common with Batman: Its enemies call it “the Ukraine,” and its friends call it just “Ukraine.
“It’s this feeling that you’re part of another country, that you are a territory of somebody else,” the president of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America told Time in 2014. Just uttering a word sometimes expresses and affirms a proposition, even if you don’t mean it. Nobody should be held to account for saying anything they didn’t mean, and the correction should be gentle. But it’s worth correcting on this one.
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