I’m an old fart who learned in primary school that The Ukraine, along with several other countries like The Netherlands, The Philippines or The Congo, was spelled with “the” for some reason. The geography teacher never told us why. It was just the way it was.
And yes, now I’m older, I realize there are several Philippine islands and several nether lands, and The Congo is an outdated - possibly colonial - short for Democratic Republic of the Congo, and that DR Congo is more acceptable today.
And yes, I know it’s Ukraine now, since Ukraine gained its independence. But I always thought the switch from The Ukraine to Ukraine-sans-the was a cutesy to mark the event.
So, childhood habits being what they are, I regularly kept calling it The Ukraine, and I thought it didn’t matter all that much.
But today, I found this article, and it really brought the point home of why it’s a lot more important than it seems!
I figured I’d share, for other English-speaking old farts who were never taught why the Ukraine SSR was spelled out with “the” and why it shouldn’t be anymore.
So basically when translated directly from Russian, “the” means that the place is no a sovereign place (eg, a hill). This is done deliberately to lull people into the idea that Ukraine is not an independent state. Ukraine has asked Russia to refrain from this, which it doesn’t. But we don’t have to collude. Fair enough.
The United States
That term isn’t translated to represent Russian grammar and politics, hence not relevant to this topic.
Yep, those states ain’t sovereign
This is the reason I always write “the Russia”, never just “Russia”. It’s an artificial construct and if you read its history, it’s unclear where it really begins or ends. A very weird thing that it even has some thing such as a capital!
That’s Dr. Congo to you pal
The na construction is, however, still widely used in Russia.
From what I know, it wasn’t until the 2014 invasion, making the change as political as the Russian media being instructed to refer to the Ukrainian government strictly as “the Kyiv regime” (though they’d probably spell it as Kiev).
though they’d probably spell it as Kiev
Oh yeah, that’s another one I still do out of habit.
And Bombay
And Rangoon
And Calcutta
And Gorky
…Funny how you learn a lot of stuff in school that becomes increasingly irrelevant and incorrect 🙂
Every so often I still call it Constantinople! It’s tough to dislodge some things we learn as children!
All of those places aside from Gorky are the colonizer’s version of the name. It’s hard to unlearn but important to keep in mind the general rule: call a place by what the locals want you to call it, not by what the empire labeled it on a map.
I get it though, sometimes it’s really hard. Squamish is a lot easier to type out than Sḵwx̱wú7mesh.
They’d probably spell it Киев
2008 revolution, not 2014 invasion.
The Orange Revolution is apparently what prompted Putin to start preparations for this war, because that’s when the official grammatical rule was changed in the Russian language.According to this paper,
It is notable, that such respect and Ukraine’s recognition as a sovereign state in the form of correct preposition usage was withdrawn a few months before the start of Euromaidan in November 2013. Former economic policy advisor to Vladimir Putin, Andrey Illarionov believes it signalled the start of the information component of the Russian operation on annexation of Crimea (Illarionov, 2015). The change in prepositions, hence in attitude, occurred within one day – 27 July 2013, when Putin visited Kyiv to commemorate the 1025th anniversary of events that brought Christianity to Kyivan Rus (predecessor of Ukraine and Russia). In the official documents and speeches till that date, Putin used the correct grammatical form “v Ukraine” (“in Ukraine”).
