Київ
How to use spelling as a Kafka trap. Because the virtue signaling, and the propaganda, never ends.
Setting the trap
In 2021 Merriam-Webster changed their minds on how to spell the name of a Ukrainian city. Clearly this means we must have an argument about the English spelling of a Ukrainian city’s name. Common belief seems to be if you’re rooting for the Russians you spell it Kiev, and if you’re rooting for the Ukrainians you spell it Kyiv (not true, but it’s the dichotomy that’s been created). And this had led to endless, and useless, arguments over the “correct” spelling.
Merriam-Webster’ s English spelling, up until some time in 2021, was Kiev - as shown by the dictionary entry from 16 February 2021.
But by 19 August 2021 the English spelling had somehow become Kyiv.
Kiev, Kyiv, Kiyev, Kyyiv?
The Ukrainian language uses a variation of the Cyrillic alphabet - the correct Ukrainian spelling is Київ. The name can’t be spelled “correctly” using the Roman (or Latin) alphabet because it doesn’t contain the correct letters. It can only be approximated in the Roman alphabet, a process called romanization.
But there’s a difference between romanizing a name for something, and it having a different name in another language. Germany is called Deutschland in German - the word Germany isn’t a romanization of the German name, it’s the name of the country in English. The city of Cologne is Köln in German, Austria is Österreich and Vienna is actually Wien. The German language uses a version of the Roman alphabet, but we still use English names for these places.
And by the way, Москва is romanized to Moskva, but we still call the city Moscow. So is Kiev a romanization, or just the English name for the city? Let’s see what Britannica has to say on the subject.
How many ways can we spell the name of the same city?
Kidding aside, this entry is actually very helpful. The romanized Russian for the name is Kiyev, not Kiev. Just like in the example of Cologne/Köln cited earlier, Kiev isn’t a romanization of the “Russian” spelling, it’s the English name for the city. Both Britannica and Merriam-Webster are changing the English spelling.
Did everyone agree to this change in spelling?
Well, no. Other resources are still listing the original English spelling for the city:
There’s a big, long river too
Let’s look at another interesting thing in the definition of Kiev given us by the good people at Merriam-Webster. They also tell us it’s a city on the Dnieper River. Is Dnieper a romanization? Let’s use Google Translate for this one.
The spelling in Ukrainian (in the Cyrillic alphabet) is Дніпро, and Google tells us to romanize this as Dnipro. But the Dnieper River starts in Russia, so what’s the Russian name?
In Russian it’s Днепр, which is romanized to Dnepr. The river also goes through Belarus, and Britannica gives us that romanization as well.
Now we have three options in the Roman alphabet:
Dnieper - the English name for the river
Dnipro - romanization of the Ukrainian name
Dnepr - romanization of the Russian name
Dynapro - romanization of the Belarusian name
But clearly we don’t need to use the romanization of the name when writing in English, since we have an English name: Dnieper. Why all the names? So we can translate texts from other languages using an alphabet readers can understand - without them needing to learn the original language.
In the example of the Dnieper River, when translating from Russian one would use Dnepr, from Ukrainian Dnipro, from Belarusian Dynapro, and if the original work was in English it would already be spelled Dnieper.
Merriam-Webster changed from using the English name for the city (Kiev) to using the romanized Ukrainian (Kyiv), but still use the English name for the River (Dnieper) in the description of the city.
The Dnieper River actually starts deep in Russia but Google decided to use the romanization of the Ukrainian for the river even in Russia (which is most of the river). Here’s the river in Kiev, Ukraine -where romanizing it to Dnipro makes sense:
Here it is in Smolensk, Russia - but still romanized from the Ukrainian, not the Russian spelling:
According to Google Translate, when romanized from Ukrainian this city is Smolensʹk. Google makes distinctions between the spellings, and have deliberately chosen to use the Ukrainian romanization for the entire river - despite the fact there’s a correct English name for the same river as well as a romanized Russian spelling.
Google appears to have chosen sides.
Manipulation everywhere
Soon after Russia invaded Ukraine, the newest virtue signal was to put a Ukrainian flag on your social media and change from spelling the city Kiev to spelling it Kyiv. But Kiev wasn’t a romanization of the Russian name, so there was nothing nefarious (or even objectionable) about spelling the name Kiev in English in the first place.
That was just the correct spelling, and there was nothing wrong with using it when writing in English. Of course one could also choose to romanize the Ukrainian, and use Kyiv. Neither answer is wrong.
The Kafka trap
But someone latched onto this difference in spellings and began using it to demonstrate a political preference, pretending Kiev was the “Russian” spelling, and this put everyone who uses the original English name in the other camp by default.
No reasonable person wanted to argue over this, but those reasonable people were put in an awkward position - they never wanted to signal anything, but not changing the spelling was taken as a signal anyway.
It’s another version of the Kafka trap1, wherein simply denying there’s an issue with the spelling is taken as evidence of a (not politically correct) position. And since almost no one cares about the details the Kafka trap works - it helps shut down reasonable debate on the whole subject.
This, and the maps from Google, are examples of the small bits of manipulation and propaganda that seem to permeate everything on the internet today.
One last detail
The Russian invasion of Ukraine started on 24 February 2022, after which the online debate over spelling began.
But Merriam-Webster had already changed the spelling at least six months earlier. It seems they knew in advance that this would be a point of contention, and after years of the accepted English spelling being Kiev it suddenly needed changing.
Did they know something we didn’t?
Update 05 February 2024
It’s been a long time since making this post, but something interesting came to my attention. What we’ve been discussing is something called an exonym, which is a term linguists use to describe a word for a place in one language that is different from the name in the native language.
This is as opposed to romanization, which is basically just re-spelling the name using another alphabet (we see this all the time with people’s names). People writing about Ukraine today aren’t romanizing the Russian name, they’re using the correct exonym.
I don’t normally quote Wikipedia but they have a page about exonyms and this part about Kiev is just too interesting to pass up.
Even the government of Ukraine admits that Kiev is the traditional English exonym for the city. Of course when the name was derived, the nation of Ukraine didn’t exist and this is why the exonym was derived from the Russian.
But the bullet point from Wikipedia just reinforces the point that Kiev is, and always has been, the correct English spelling for the name of the city. Use another spelling if you like, but don’t insist that others are spelling it wrong. There can be more than one acceptable answer.
Kafka trapping:
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=2122
Archived copy:
https://web.archive.org/web/20220328002237/http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=2122