Ukraine (the country formerly known as definite)

[keg at violet.berkeley.edu]

Well, maybe this thread has not (as I feared) become the thread from
hell...but it's definitely (couldn't help that) got the potential.  So I
thought I would take this time to summarize what people wrote, and clarify
my intent, while the thread is still in the neighborhood of purgatory.

I will not bother to summarize the postings that were made to the list
(which were, alas, the majority).

Kristen M Harkness <kmhst16+ at pitt.edu> wrote that she was corrected by both
Russians and Ukrainians when she would try to say *v Ukrainu* or *v
Ukraine*, while she was living in Moscow in 1994-5.  She cautions that the
Ukrainians there had been living in Russia for 20+ years, however.

John Dingley <JDINGLEY at YorkU.CA> forwarded a posting he made to LINGUIST
back in 1992 regarding the use/lack of articles along the lines that have
been discussed here.  I will not copy it here, but will be happy to forward
it (assuming it's OK with John).

Genevra Gerhart <ggerhart at wolfenet.com> was kind enough to offer to send
hard copy of a discussion that took place on SEELANGS last year on *v/na*
and (the) Ukraine.  It should be interesting to compare last year's
comments with this year's...

Wouter Meijer <wouterm at xs4all.nl> wrote the following, regarding the
situation in Dutch:
>In Dutch, too, we switched to skipping the definite article ("de" for M
>and F, "het" for N) some years ago.  <...>
>The 'Stylebook' of one of the leading daily newspapers, 'de Volkskrant',
>prescribes: 'We write "Oekra~ine", and not "de Oekra~ine". "Oekra~ine"is
>the name of the indepedent state, whereas "de Oekra~ine" is the name of
>the region.' (my translation)
He went on to note that the use of prepositions remains unchanged, and that
Dutch still generally uses Russian transliterations of Ukrainian place
names (i.e., rather than the Ukrainian forms).

Michael Betsch <michael.betsch at uni-tuebingen.d> wrote the following,
regarding usage in German:
>In German, IMHO, there is only "die Ukraine" (with article). (In German
>this is linked to the grammatical gender of a country name: country names
>that are masculine or feminine or plural always take a definite article.
>Most country names, however, are neutral gender singular and these are
>used without an article. But Ukraine is feminine singular).
(Several other people noted this or similar language-specific facts as
well.)  He then adds:
>I somehow wonder about the idea that Ukrainians might think the use of
>v/na in Russian should affect the perception of Ukraine as an independent
>state. I remember lines of Shevchenko's poetry where it is "na Vkraine"

Alina Israeli <aisrael at auvm.american.edu> wrote that she feels that there
is a certain amount of arbitrariness in the way Russian assigns
prepositions, specifically to geographic sites -- and gave some examples.
If you want them, you can write me and I'll forward them.  She later added
that she uses *na* with Ukraine herself, but:
>The only person I've heard say "v Ukraine" is the Ostankino reporter from
>the Ukraine, anchors don't.

Finally, someone wrote this today:
> Tell me you really started this to gather data for an article on Slavic
>Internet flaming conventions

Nope.  My real and true interest was something that was touched upon by a
couple people, but was kind of left in the dust by the discussion of the
article and such.  For the past couple summers, I have worked on an exhange
program where we had a large staff from the NIS -- mainly from Russia and
Ukraine.  What interested me was that I heard the Ukrainians stumble not
only with the choice of preposition, but if they chose *v*, then what their
choice would be for the 'motion to' instance.  Robert De Lossa
<rdelossa at fas.harvard.edu> hit this on the head when he wrote (to the
list):
>3. Ukrainian provided a dilemma with the shift to v + loc. for
>Ukrajina, because the motion counterpart then should have been *do Ukrajiny,
>which no one seems to produce, using instead v Ukrajinu... theoretically a
>Russism! I have queried a large number of native speakers on this, they almost
>all are flustered to realize the contradiction, but feel that *do
>Ukraijiny is unnaceptable.

This confirmed my suspicions -- but since I do not know Ukrainian, I was
not entirely sure of the state of things...although the Ukrainians I
observed hesitating could not come up with a good reason *why* a
construction like *do Vkrajiny* would be unacceptable, the general
consensus was that it just was, and that *v Ukrajinu* was best.  (I should
note that these native speakers were, obviously, bilingual in Russian, and
were from two different generations:  mainly in the 15-20 year-old range,
and the 35-45 year-old range.  Females outnumbered the males, but the males
had the same general intuitions as the females.)

Part of the reason for asking people to respond to me (other than the
concern over archival storage allocation...) was that I was hoping to get
some native speakers to make a choice in preposition, and then I could
innocently ask them, "But how would you say '(in)to Ukraine'?"  And wait,
wide-eyed and breathless, by my modem.  Alas, Robert was the only one who
mentioned this, and no native speakers really took the bait.

So, that said, I would ask some native speakers (or even near-native, if
you have good intuitions on this) to reply on this issue.  Again, I would
prefer it if you would *sigh* respond to me, so as to avoid influencing
others' feelings on the matter, and I will gladly summarize to the list.

Many thanks to those who replied to the original query -- no need to send
any more messages to me regarding articles, politics, or nationalistic
plots.

Keith

Keith Goeringer
UC Berkeley
Slavic Languages & Literatures
keg at violet.berkeley.edu