Ukraine/The Ukraine

[Martin Votruba]

> if they can tell us how to speak English, can we tell them how to speak Ukrainian?

If "we" could be broadened to "Germanic cultures," then something similar did happen. West Germany (the Federal Republic of Germany) pushed in the 1970s until it got Poland and Czechoslovakia (the USSR/Russian was involved, too) to switch from translating the name of the country as (Slovak examples) Nemecká spolková republika (NSR) to Spolková republika Nemecko (SRN). The linguists (prompted by the totalitarian regimes) brought up arguments similar to those of the English-speaking opponents of Ukraine without the definite article, but once the regimes got the deals from Bonn they wanted, the linguists shut up, although the Communist Party-controlled press was (probably told to be) rather slow to adopt the altered name and mostly opted for "West Germany".

An ironic moment was that while the two countries' linguists insisted how alien Spolková republika Nemecko was to Czech, Polish, and Slovak, the countries had routinely used (Slovak example) Socialistická federatívna republika Juhoslávia since the name came to be used in Yugoslavia, i.e., exactly the same structure that they proclaimed so "against the nature" of the languages at issue when Bonn "told them to how to speak" Czech, Polish, and Slovak while giving the country's formal name (for Russian, see the "political history" of the use of Германская Федеративная Республика/Федеративная Республика Германии/Федеративная Республика Германия).

A parallel moment in English is that while Ukraine/the Ukraine has been argued for about two decades now, the shift from, e.g., the Lebanon to [no article] Lebanon has taken place with hardly any attention.


Martin

votruba "at" pitt "dot" edu

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