Literally the whole media switched spelling around this time.
iRaq and iRan are silly but the “Kyiv” stuff is different.
I still call it Kiev because all the TV people switching words on a dime freaked me out. It’s real
shit when the entire media class just decides for geopolitical reasons the geographic name for a place everyone was used to using isn’t usable anymore.
unprovoked full scale invasionthey can do this one instantly, but scores of media outlets either took forever or haven’t even got Turkiye down yet
I still think a funny bit is just pretending to not accept the Cyrillic alphabet and calling it “Knib”
“Turkiye” would be fine, but that is not the official English name, it’s “Türkiye” which makes absolutely no sense. Maybe we should start referring to Japan as 日本 in English instead too /s
Nippon
No seriously it seems insane to officially change the English name and make a big stink about it but use a letter that isn’t in the English alphabet? Just skip the umlaut wtf are you doing
Not to mention it’s nationalist BS driven by Erdogan as a popularity stunt
You can write Türkiye as Tuerkiye if you want to stick to ‘pure’ English. I mean, Latin.
Calling Japan 日本 in English but pronouncing it Rìběn
Tbh turkiye kinda weirds me out. I have never heard anyone complaon about it before.
The grocery stores in my country all made a big thing about renaming their “Chicken Kievs” to “Chicken Kyevs” it was so funny.
freedom fries energy
When the media says or implies that Russian culture doesn’t belong in Ukraine, don’t take it as a statement of fact, take it as a statement of intent. They’re priming people to accept ethnic cleansing.
But I thought Russia was committing genocide. CNN told me so and they never lie.
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It’s like the whole “Ukraine” vs “the Ukraine” in English that the media did the same thing for. Russian and Ukrainian don’t have definite articles. There is no such thing as “the” in either language. The thing they argue over between Russian and Ukrainian is what preposition to use when talking about something in the territory of Ukraine saying ‘на украине’ (~“na ookrayeenye”) versus ‘в украине’ (~“v ookrayeenye”) meaning essentially “on Ukraine” vs “in Ukraine.”
Presumed to be a legacy of an assumed origin of the name Ukraine coming from
- ‘у’ particle/prefix in certain contexts meaning kind of by/at/of/near
- and край (~“krai” similar to English “cry”) in contexts meaning ‘ridge/edge/side,’ with its adjective form крайний (~krainee) meaning ‘outermost’
so Украина (“Ookrayeenah”) under this assumed origin meaning something akin to ‘of the outer-edge (of the Russian empire)’ kind of like “borderland.” It is common place especially with older generations to use на украине instead of в украине, though it also often both get used interchangeably.
That’s its own whole mess of history, but US English doesn’t have, at all, the historical quirk of “on Ukraine” so it would’ve always been normal and proper to just say “in Ukraine;” and by making a thing about “Ukraine” vs “the Ukraine” they invented a new problem to then argue about that has no corollary in Russian or Ukrainian to start with.
Probably “the Ukraine” started in English because some anglo dipshit heard the preposition “na” as similar enough to “the” (and la/le for other romance languages if they even knew that) to just assume it was a definite article, and now they won’t shut up about it. It’s like the origin I heard from a Korean friend that yanks originally made the g*** slur for Koreans because anglos are so unworldly and pig-ignorant they heard “miguk” from Koreans, which literally means “USA/American,” and thought it was the Koreans calling themselves the slur, because they assumed “mi” part is like English “me” because, and I can not stress this enough, they are dumb as hell.
There was the same debacle in Poland between something happening “on Ukraine” vs “in Ukraine”. It have no real difference, the former is archaic grammar irregularity for some currently or previously bordering countries, for example: Ukraine, Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia, Belarus, Slovakia.
But there was suddenly entire shitstorm in media about it, that it refuse the status of country, it is playing into Putin propaganda etc. etc. it was a mirror thing of the Kiev vs Kyiv debacle in English which we didn’t have because pronouncing “Kyiv” is pretty hard for Poles so everyone is still using traditional name in Polish “Kijów”. Also of course nobody changed it for the rest of abovementioned countries.
it’s ironic too because nobody who’s complaining about that grammatical quirk with Kiev/Kyiv or “on Ukraine” vs “in Ukraine” seems to have an issue that the west-aligned countries calls Pridnestrovie the entirely different name “Transnistria” which actually does that thing of ‘refusing the status of the country’ because it just means “[the Moldovan territory] past the Dneister (river)”
and also its doubly so because Pridnestrovians don’t want to be called that because it’s literally the name the Romanian and German Nazis used for their occupation government when they did the Holocaust there (Transnistria Governorate)
I legit never knew they didn’t like that name. That is all really valid
Well, the west doesn’t recognize it as a country in the first place, so it’s consistent.
The g-slur goes back to the Spanish-American War and then the Filipino-American War. Americans in the Philippines thought Filipino languages sounded like “guk guk buk buk” the same way they think Mandarin is “King Kong ling long.” It got shortened down to come up with the slur, which became more widespread when the Philippines tried to gain independence.
And because Americans are so racist, they used the same slur against Koreans and Vietnamese as though Asians are all interchangeable. Doesn’t surprise me they thought “miguk” was Koreans using the slur in a “Well of course they call themselves that! They recognize the superior white man,” kind of way.
also its funny cuz nobody gets mad at the germans for saying “die Ukraine”. In fact theres a bunch of country names in german that get used with a definite article, like die Slowakei, die Turkei, die Schweiz.
Isn’t that just how the language works though? Like, it sounds unnatural to say certain nouns without adding “the” to the front. Spanish does that too, it’s why Das Kapital is called El Capital in Spanish but just Capital in English.
Isn’t that just how the language works though? Like, it sounds unnatural to say certain nouns without adding “the” to the front
Well the “naturalness” argument feels a bit iffy to me, but in the context of a specific language community, over time, things stick I guess. Like why do germans (I rly should say germanophones since austrians and the swiss do exist) say “der Iran”, or “der Jemen”? Who came up with that? Now it probably feels natural to them, but it was never preordained.
Spanish does that too, it’s why Das Kapital is called El Capital in Spanish but just Capital in English.
Im sure someone more linguistically minded can give the real explanation but in regards to your Capital example, its a peculiar feature of English in relation to the other western european languages where certain abstract nouns are not used with their articles. Like for example in English you can say “Love wins”, but in German you cant say “Liebe gewinnt”, you say “Die Liebe gewinnt”.
Yeah, by “natural” I didn’t mean innate or absolute. All languages are made up and for some reason these languages made up the rule that you have to put The before certain words. People can get pretty worked up about language quirks like that. Iirc there was a thread on hexbear about exactly this some time ago (translating das Kapital into Capital in English)
die Schweiz
That’s a correct sentiment
It always annoys me how bent out of shape people get over pronunciation of city and place names in other languages. Some languages have different sounds and thus things are said differently.
The Chinese word for Australia is “Audaliya” and even the frothist of frothers don’t go complaining about it (I hope)
Chinese names for countries are cool. They try to be nice about it when there’s more than one set of characters for something that sounds right (America is from the characters for “beautiful country” instead of “mildew country”), but when that’s not possible you get really silly like Portugal being named “grape tooth.” (There are also countries with literal translations.)
I don’t know why Greece (Hope Wax) is labelled Hope December
the La (腊) in Xi La (Greece or Hellas) can mean wax but it also refers to method of food preservation in China called Waxing where meat is dried and cured to have a waxy exterior, this is commonly done in the winter and hence the 12th month in the Chinese Lunar calender (actually usually in January rather than December) is sometimes colloquially called the wax month
很有意思，谢谢
kosovo
I hope that’s real because it’s fucking hilarious 🤣
It is.
Kosovo is 科索沃
I mean they probably tried to be nice, how else they would have to call it, nato-puppet-ethnically-cleansed-mafia-land or what?
B I L L Y T I M E
germany
moral landwhat the fuck
These are literal translations of names mostly chosen for sounding at least a little like the country’s name in its own language
Deutschland
Deutsch
De
德 (meaning moral or virtuous)
德国
I assume it’s because it’s like “de” or something i.e. Deutschland
They should really fucking change it for Germany. Also Sweden, didn’t they heard about Poltava? And France after what happened after last election. And UK ffs.
Bulgaria is spot on though, their insurance companies are fucked up.
Russia
White Russia
Tbf that’s a literal translation of Belarus. It means ‘white Russia’.
We call it that in Norwegian as well
Red Wheat sounds like the title of a kickass video game, a fantastic western novel, a decent 80’s action movie and an absolutely horrendous metaphor for menstruation.
name for sweden sounds like they’re still kinda mad about a very odd war that happened at some point
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It’s historical name and the meaning is that old Slavs colour coded geographical directions, white was north.
ITS DEUTSCHLAND NOT GERMANY YOU POOTIN BOT
DDR
I forgot about the Germans capability for froth somehow
Good point.
I will now start saying, ‘yidali’, ‘jianada’, ‘yingguo’, and ‘bumeiguo’.
Don’t forget xibanya!
There’s the other nickname that’s shorter and translates to backwards/rustic Australia
Ooh. What’s that one?
Thanks!
even the frothist of frothers don’t go complaining about it (I hope)
Even if they did, they should stay mad. None of the Anglo settler-colonial names are legitimate after all.
They largely don’t know
But Iran, Iran so far away
Iran, I couldn’t get away
why was 'e chasing you
If you suspect someone of being ukronazi, spell it in Polish “Kijów” (pronounced something like Keyoov), that would really piss them.
or look at their tattoos and emblems — I just cycled through the Reuters article linked in the OP body and picture 2/6 is of an azovite National Corps and picture 3/6 are UNA-UNSO nazis, whose members fought in every post-collapse struggle where they could shoot Russians and even fought alongside Salafi-jihadist and Al-Qaeda groups in Chechnya, and whose founding and most prominent members were real pieces of work
none of this is of course mentioned in the captions.
Hey Wikipedia, how’s it going?
Occupation: political activist
Chechen War veteran on the side of the Mujahideen
I always spell it as Kijów XD
kachow
For some reason I thought of Kraków, and foreigners pronouncing it as Crack Cow.
It’s correct pronounciation though, or at least should be considering what’s happening there.
Yeah it makes sense
The most idiotic thing about this is that English pronunciation of both Kiev and Kyiv is equally far from both Russian and Ukrainian pronunciation.
Kiyev
I support Ukraine so I say Kiyiv instead of kiyev
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We’re not going to succeed in making English the dumbest lingua franca by making the sounds match the letters.
20 vowel sounds for five vowel letters is language perfection
If elected president, I will do nothing but push for a phonetic alphabet.
love going on anglo wickypedia and looking up a country, city, or non-anglo person from history
pronunciation guides are first in some anglo gibberish fo-NEY-ticks with big SHOU-ty letters and nonsensical spelling, for some weird anglo pronunciation, and then IPA for the [weird] anglo pronunciation, and then the pronunciation in local language
por ejemplo
Hexbear (US: HAYKZ-buhr [IPA: 'hejks,bə:r]) (UK: HEKS-beh[IPA: 'heksbɶ:] ) (Marxist Standard: Hexbear [IPA: häx’bɑˑɾ̼])
𐑞 𐑮𐑰𐑟𐑩𐑯 𐑞𐑨𐑑 𐑖𐑱𐑝𐑾𐑯 𐑦𐑟 𐑯𐑪𐑑 𐑿𐑟𐑛 𐑦𐑟 𐑚𐑦𐑒𐑪𐑟 𐑦𐑑𐑕 𐑡𐑳𐑕𐑑 𐑦𐑥𐑐𐑪𐑕𐑩𐑚𐑩𐑤 𐑑𐑵 𐑒𐑩𐑯𐑝𐑦𐑯𐑕 𐑩 𐑚𐑦𐑤𐑘𐑩𐑯 𐑐𐑰𐑐𐑩𐑤 𐑑𐑵 𐑤𐑻𐑯 𐑣𐑶 𐑑𐑵 𐑮𐑰𐑛 𐑩𐑜𐑱𐑯
Your pronunciation examples confuse me greatly. “ah” from “alternative”? “eh” from “bad”? Certainly not in my accent.
Could be a Kiwi.
Have you heard them say “not bad”?
Bitter then e sith ifriken
Are you sure that bad isn’t baed and elephant isn’t something else?
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In the liberal mind, “Kiev vs Kyiv” is equal to “Beijing vs Peking” or “Myanmar vs Burma” or “Uluru vs Ayer’s Rock”
Iran should return to the good old times before the revolution when the country was still called Aynrand and literally every woman was wearing bikinis all day so I can oogle at them. It was objectively better back then.
Holy fuck it took me way too long to realize this was a bit
Iran away from my wife
And from UK media it is the same people who will call you a baby for calling it Derry. Even though in that case blood has legit been spilt over it and it stems from colonialism.
Honestly, in half the country (the east) Russian is if anything more indigenous than Ukrainian is.
I pronounce Kyiv so that it rhymes with “shiv”.
Rare British win.
Also though, a lot of people seem unreasonably upset about English speakers pronouncing words differently to how they are in their native languages when that’s just how accents work.
If english speakers weren’t specially insufferable about pronunciation then maybe they wouldn’t care.
And just a few weeks before the very same people were still calling the country the Ukraine. It was hysterical to see the very same people be very serious and very respectful about
theUkraines culture and language
