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Kyiv or Kiev? De-Russianization in Ukraine

Mar 13, 2022

I don't know Ukrainian or Russian (I want to learn it but it's super difficult XD), but I have been exposed to Cyrillic letters in high school. Most of this article is a small discovery I got by referring to the Wiki. If there are any mistakes, please help to correct or add !

When I was a child, I remembered that the English name of Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, was Kiev, but in recent years, when I watched football or Western media, they all wrote Kyiv. I checked it out of curiosity, and I found out that Kiev is Russian Киев, and Kyiv is Ukrainian Київ straight turn.

After 1995, Kyiv became the official English translation of Ukrainian foreigners. Since then, it has promoted the name rectification movement. In 2018, the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs also launched the #KyivNotKiev online name rectification movement, but it took two or three years for Kyiv to be fully adopted. It is widely used in the world, and the aviation industry has only switched to Kyiv in recent years.

The de-Russianization of the English names corresponding to Ukrainian-related words, also affected the city names of Odessa ("Odessa" was changed to "Odesa"), Kharkiv ("Kharkov" was changed to "Kharkiv"), Li Wolf ("Lvov" was changed to "Lviv"), Nikolaev ("Nikolaev" was changed to "Mykolaiv"), Rovno ("Rovno" was changed to "Rivne")... etc., observe the recent The Taiwanese media reported that the English name is de-Russianized, but the Chinese translation is both old and new, such as "Zaporojie", Ukrainian is Запоріжжя (Zaporizhzhya), Russian is Запоро́жье (Zaporozh'ye), The Chinese translation of the name is more like a direct transliteration of the Russian place name.

I asked, why Kharkiv is Midales in Chinese? ? ? Kharkiv has a team called Kharkiv Metalworkers Football Club (Футбо́льний Клуб Металі́ст Ха́рків), referred to as Kharkiv Metalworkers (Ukrainian: ФК «Металіст» Харків), Midales should be a transliteration of Металі́ст, but Металі́ст It's obviously a Metalist, ah, google map hello? ? ?

Ukraine has started to implement some reforms to de-Russianization since its independence, but some people in their country think that it is a populist operation. Now that the war has broken out, the rectification of vocabulary has once again received great attention, and Ukrainians will also use Ukrainian to identify the enemy. I, hope that one day our lives will not be all about tomatoes, avocados and potatoes.

Another interesting (ironic?) thing, Zelensky's name Володи́мир (Volodymyr) is actually a variant derived from the same root as Putin and Lenin's name Vladimir (Влади́мир).