Kozak/Cossack

[nataliek at UALBERTA.CA]

Ah, but it is not just a matter of spelling. Or a matter of English  
usage. It is a political matter. As Will Ryan correctly pointed out,  
at one point the Ukrainians waged a successful campaign to get rid of  
the "the" before Ukraine. When the campaign began, "the Ukraine" was  
indeed standard English usage. It no longer is. And Kyiv is written as  
I just have, not as Kiev, though Kiev was standard English usage for a  
long time, like Peking and Bombay.

The current campaign is to replace Cossack with kozak. Why? Well  
kozaks/Cossacks are to Ukrainians what cowboys are to Americans, to  
paraphrase Subtelny. And Cossacks/kozaks, like cowboys, or any other  
group for that matter, did not always behave well. Shedding the term  
Cossack and replacing it with kozak allows the retention of the  
positive aspects of this group while negative aspects are jettisoned.  
The term kozak is seen as more Ukrainian and thus pure, free of  
negative traits.  By implication, the negative traits were attributed  
to Cossacks by non-Ukrainians.

Quoting "Edward M Dumanis" <dumanis at BUFFALO.EDU>:

> Just to add my two cents.
> We can change our spelling but on a par with the Russian and  
> Ukrainian speakers change their habits:
> I insist then that they refer to us as AMERIKANZ, and to the English  
> as INGLISHMEN. :)
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Edward Dumanis <dumanis at buffalo.edu>
>
> On Sun, 7 Dec 2008, William Ryan wrote:
>
>> It would be churlish not to oblige you! This is really not a  
>> Ukrainian (or Russian in the case of Russian Cossacks) issue at  
>> all, but a matter of English usage. There are many words, and in  
>> particular ethnonyms and place names in English (and probably all  
>> other European languages), which are poor phonetic representations  
>> of the original word but which have been around for so long that  
>> they are fully established lexical items. There is no reason  
>> normally to change them unless they are offensive or inaccurate in  
>> some other way. 'Cossack' is attested in English since the 16th  
>> century, 'cosaque' in French probably from the same period, and in  
>> both languages the word has acquired secondary meanings - to try  
>> change it now would do violence to English and French literature.  
>> And if we did change it, would it be to Ukrainian 'kozak' or to  
>> Russian 'kazak'? In the latter case we would risk partial or  
>> complete confusion with kazakhs (as I suspect the Oxford English  
>> Dictionary does when, even in the current online edition, it  
>> describes Cossacks as 'warlike Turkish people now subject to  
>> Russia, occupying the parts north of the Black Sea'.) In my various  
>> editorial roles I would certainly not allow 'kozak' in any but a  
>> narrowly specialist article or footnote - most ordinary readers  
>> would not know what it meant, and those with only a smattering of  
>> Slavonic languages might think it means a male goat. Why do your  
>> Ukrainian groups worry about this at all? The inhabitants of the  
>> Netherlands don't get excited because we normally but inaccurately  
>> call their country Holland, and refer to them as Dutch, and the  
>> Germans, as we call them, don't riot when Ukrainians call them  
>> nimtsy.
>> Will Ryan
>>
>>
Natalie Kononenko
Kule Chair of Ukrainian Ethnography
University of Alberta
Modern Languages and Cultural Studies
200 Arts Building
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada T6G 2E6
Phone: 780-492-6810
Web: http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/uvp/

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