Current events reminded me of an ongoing Discourse about how we ought to refer to the country Ukraine in English. William Taylor, US ambassador to the country under George W. Bush, is quoted on the subject in this Time magazine piece (“Ukraine, Not the Ukraine: The Significance of Three Little Letters”, March 5th, 2014; emphasis mine), which is circulating again today:
The Ukraine is the way the Russians referred to that part of the country during Soviet times … Now that it is a country, a nation, and a recognized state, it is just Ukraine.
Apparently they don’t fact-check claims like this, because this is utter nonsense. Russian doesn’t have definite articles, i.e., words like the. There is simply no straightforward way to express the contrast between the Ukraine and Ukraine in Russian (or in Ukrainian for that matter).
Now, it’s true that the before Ukraine has long been proscribed in English, but this seems to be more a matter of style—the the variant sounds archaic to my ear—than ideology. And, in Russian, there is variation between в Украине and на Украине, both of which I would translate as ‘in Ukraine’. My understanding is that both have been attested for centuries, but one (на) was more widely used during the Soviet era and thus the other (в) is thought to emphasize the country’s sovereignty in the modern era. As I understand it, that one preposition is indexical of Ukrainian nationalist sentiment and another is indexical of Russian revanchist-nationalist sentiment is more or less linguistically arbitrary in the Saussurean sense. Or, more weakly, the connotative differences between the two prepositions are subtle and don’t map cleanly onto the relevant ideologies. But I am not a native (or even competent) speaker of Russian so you should not take my word for it.
Taylor, in the Time article, continues to argue that US media should use the Ukrainian-style transliteration Kyiv instead of the Russian-style transliteration Kiev. This is a more interesting prescription, at least in that the linguistic claim—that Kyiv is the standard Ukrainian transliteration and Kiev is the standard Russian transliteration—is certainly true. However, it probably should be noted that dozens of other cities and countries in non-Anglophone Europe are known by their English exonyms, and no one seems to be demanding that Americans start referring to Wien [viːn] ‘Vienna’ or Moskva ‘Moscow’. In other words Taylor’s prescription is a political exercise rather than a matter of grammatical correctness. (One can’t help but notice that Taylor is a retired neoconservative diplomat pleading for “political correctness”.)
I believe he meant the Soviets referred to it as such in English, a language they definitely used at times.
Re the other part, where do you stand on Bombay->Mumbai and Peking->Beijing? Surely there’s a fine line somewhere between these and Vienna?
Taylor maybe meant that, but I’m not sure I buy it: Russian 2nd-language speakers are really not known for their use of the English definite article. And if they did, it wouldn’t have been very marked for the time, because so did Churchill. (p. 11 of The Grand Alliance, for instance.)
My personal preference is anti-exonym so I like those changes, but it doesn’t connect to any particular political ideology. It would be fun to quantify just how exonymic an exonym is.