Kozak/Cossack

[William Ryan]

Of course it is a political matter - your politics, not mine. You have 
failed to answer my question as to why Ukrainian nationalists have 
decided not only to claim ownership of all Cossacks but also to dictate 
how their name should be spelled in latin alphabets, regardless of 
language (the combinations ko- and -ak in English and French for example 
are uncommon and ugly, c, ck, and qu- are much more common). And what 
about the Russian-speaking Don Cossacks who expanded Muscovy eastwards 
and manned the forts of Siberia, and fought for or rebelled against the 
Moscow tsar - most of them were never within a thousand miles of the 
Ukraine. Are we supposed to re-write history and literature as well? Do 
we have to describe Ermak, Pugachev and Stenka Razin as kozaki, 
Ukrainian cowboys? Do we have to rewrite Tennyson's  'Charge of the 
Light Brigade'? (I note, however, that Byron in Don Juan also uses the 
form Kozack, as well as Cossacque).
By all means be proud of your cultural heritage, by all means try to 
re-balance the Great Russian view of history - I applaud all that, but 
stop trying to bully others into alien linguistic norms for spurious 
reasons. Your introduction of the notion of purity ('Ukrainian and thus 
pure') into the argument is really quite alarming. This precisely why 
'political correctness' has got a bad name.
Will Ryan


nataliek at UALBERTA.CA wrote:
> 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.
>

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