I mentioned the other day (my blog entry for March 29) that I've been interested for years in the many ways language and culture and politics (among other things) intersect.
I'm posting this for the two-and-a-half friends who might conceivably find this interesting. I realize I'm writing for myself here for the most part. But what can I say? I really do find it interesting how the world works and how just when you think you know what it's all about, it has more to teach you.
Putin thought he was riding a great white horse and bringing those pesky Ukrainians back into the fold. Instead he now has to watch his army get butchered because he so badly underestimated the morale of the Ukrainians to defend their homeland - not just the soldiers, but the babushkas with their Molotov cocktails, as well. He called it really really wrong.
Countless folk who had no interest at all in the Ukrainian language are now learning bits and pieces that never would have crossed their radar a month ago. They're learning that there's more to the story than the claim that Slavic languages are so close to each other as to be almost mutually intelligible. It's not so much that Ukrainian and Russian are so very close linguistically as it is that Russian was once the lingua franca of the Soviet world. And that meant that while few Russians learned Ukrainian, something like 98% of Ukrainians learned Russian and to this day many Ukrainians can and do use Russian on a daily basis, especially those who live East of the Dnieper River, which divides the country and runs through the capital, Kiev.
A certain number of these people of Eastern Ukraine are Russian people and would love to see their region become Russia. But Putin overestimated their number. A great many more folk, even Russian speakers, developed an attachment to Ukraine as their homeland and wanted to get out from under Russian influence, their native language notwithstanding. One of the ways this shift in political attitudes is being manifested, including into an ever-growing Ukrainian nationalism, is that people are saying they no longer want to be assumed to be speakers of Russian (even when they are!). Evidence is showing up in ways the Ukrainian language is being brought front and center, both formally, and sociolinguistically.
One of the first things I noticed is that the media were pronouncing the name of the capital differently. I had always heard it pronounced Kee-yev. Turns out that's the Russian version of the city. They write it КИ - ЕВ ( К + I + YE + V). The Ukrainians write it quite differently. They write it К + И + Ї + В.
The Ukrainian sound represented by И is similar to the Russian letter Ы, not the Russian letter И. Russian Ы and Ukrainian И are pronounced like the short English i in "stick" except that it's more in the center of the mouth, not the front - halfway between short i and the u in "duh!" Best to hear a native speaker pronounce it.
The next Ukrainian letter is Ї. That's an I with two dots on top of it. It's pronounced like the word "ye" in Hear ye, hear ye!
Finally, the last letter in Kiev is В. It's more like the Spanish b in that is sounds to English ears like a cross between a v and a w when it comes after a vowel. And in Ukrainian, it actually devolves into a w sound too, depending on the speaker and the dialect.
So here's a summary. If you want to pronounce the Russian name for the city of KИЕВ (Еnglish spelling: Kiev), you say "Kee-yev." But if you want to pronounce the Ukrainian name for the city of КИЇВ (English spelling: Kiyiv or Kiyiw) you say...
Now here's where it gets weird. Instead of teaching English speakers to use the Ukrainian pronunciation of the name: K plus YU as in YUCK (kind of) plus YEE plus something between v and w, the powers that be have decided to simplify it and simply tell media people to pronounced it "KEEV."
Fine with me. I enjoy simplifying complexity. KEEV it is.
Turns out we in "the West" (speakers of languages like French, German, English, Spanish, Frisian, Corsican, Sardinian, etc.) are not the only ones learning a whole new political reality in solidarity with our new heroes, the Ukrainians. The Japanese have joined the pack. They are now explaining to the good people of Mikado-land that they should stop using the traditional Russian names for the cities in Ukraine and start using more-or-less Ukrainian pronunciations.
To wit, this screenshot from Terebi (as in "terebizhon) Asahi: "changes to the pronunciation according to the Ukrainian language"
2 comments:
Nice summary, Alan, but I'm curious where the syllable stresses occur (including the Japanese transliteration). Maybe they do not mark them.... But being a Slavic language like Russian, it's considered a stress-timed language (as opposed to syllable-timed like French and others).
Stamatios: Yes, Ukrainian is stress-timed, but stress is unmarked in the written language and has to be learned by rote. And Japanese has pitch accent, so there's no way to mark stress when writing Ukrainian, either. When Japanese transcribe foreign languages into katakana, they necessarily convert the sounds into Japanese phonemes, often distorting the original sounds considerably. And there's no way to mark stress. While Russian and Ukrainian have a great deal of lexical and syntactic similarity, there is a pretty wide gap in phonology. Wikipedia has a pretty good rundown of Ukrainian phonology, if you want to check it out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_phonology. But please note that my goal in writing this blog was not to do a linguistic analysis of Ukrainian, but merely to make the observation that the world was suddenly giving anything and everything to do with Ukraine a lot of attention, and becoming aware of Ukrainian geography, history, and the nature of the Ukrainian language, maybe for the first time. Putin's goal was to convince the world that Ukraine is indistinct from Russia. He has failed miserably. In fact, he has ended up accomplishing the exact opposite. Thanks for tuning in!
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