"Kiv" or Kiev?

wymondham only has one h in it

Edited By bernard towers on 31/03/2022 21:56:27

Reading 'Reading' in Reading on a signpost I got rather lost.

One of the ones that has annoyed me for a long time is pronouncing the children's book hero Don Quixote as Keeotay rather misses the educational connection with the word quixotic.

But wouldn't deliberately saying it wrong to fit our narrative be worse? Especially as the original is three or four hundred years old and predates any childrens variant of it by a few centuries.

Trottiscliffe (Trosley)

Some that bug me on this side of the pond :

- Pronouncing "Israel" as "Isreal" (CBC never fails)

- Pronouncing "genealogy" as "geneology"

- Pronouncing "medi-eval" as "med-ieval" (do they know what it means?)

Not to mention "Richard the Lionhearted" (mostly American).

I think Ukrainians now spell their city Kyiv, not Kiev?

Therefore the sound of the word has changed from Ki - ev to K - yiv. The latter sounds like Kiv, if spoken quickly or indistinctly.

I blame my6 disexik keybored.

Actually, the Ukrainians now spell it Ки́їв . They use their own Cyrillic alphabet. There are various systems for transliterating Ukrainian Cyrillic into English. Kyiv is one of them.

The Russians spell it using Russian Cyrillic script as Киев which is tranliterated into English by one of various systems as Kiev.

It's all kind of an arbitrary approximation like Munich vs Munchen, Paris vs Paris pronounced Paree, and somewhat of a grey area.

But Ukraine government decided to go with Kyiv to make the point they are not a colony of Russia. Media has chosen to side with Ukraine and use their preferred pronunciation.

And the problem of Nuclear as opposed to Newcular. spose if you press the button, correct pronunciation is irrelevant.

Regards Ian.

Amazing, the number of cunning linguists on here !

This mispronunciation is common, my aunt persistantly called Guildford Guild-Ford.

Whilst we are on the subject of mis pronunciation, where exactly is Park Heston? Whilst it sounds like a services on the M4, it is actually the country that split off from India when the country was partitioned. Come on BBC , it's a hard A like 'bath' in the North of England....

Edited By stevetee on 03/04/2022 20:12:27

What's wrong with Richard the Lion hearted?

See link

Probably your question has been answered in one way or another Phil, but to put in a nutshell it's because different linguistic signifiers (ie differing spellings and pronunciations of words with the same meaning) are important in establishing tribal, and by extension, national identity. For example, from the King James Bible (Judges 12:5-6)

Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand."

It's been going on for some time! The reason that the BBC has adopted the Ukrainian pronunciation is simply an expression of support for Ukraine's desire to resist Russian aggression and develop a distinct national identity, reflecting Western views I think. No doubt similar support would be given to (some) other countries if their national identities were threatened.

On Cunning Linguists, a little known (but interesting!) nugget is that the late and great Robert Smithies who set crosswords for the Guardian until his demise in 2006 proposed 'Cunning Linguist' as his nom de plume when he was engaged, but the editor rejected it (too near the knuckle) so he chose 'Bunthorne'. One of his best:

Amundsen's forwarding address (4)

That's madly off topic I know, but trying to lighten the tone.!

Robin

Edited By Robin Graham on 04/04/2022 02:47:15

Edited By Robin Graham on 04/04/2022 02:57:03

Since you are all being pedantic - could I possibly point out you're only thinking of the Wymondham in Norfolk.

I think the one in Leicestershire is pronounced properly (wyemundum)

Yes, the Angela Rippemoff version of guerillas was indeed stupidity.

We all know we should pronounce H properly in a word e.g. "a horse" not "an oss" when we speak.

How many are pronouncing the letter H, a letter, properly As "aitch" and not pronouncing it incorrectly as "haitch"

Mishearing is the mirror image of mispronunciation and it gets worse as my ageing ears lose the high-notes.

I do it a lot with song lyrics. Despite knowing the hit is called Chiquitita, I hear ABBA sing 'take your teeth out'.

Now I'm worrying about ears, either the word should be spelt 'hears', or 'hearing' should be spelt 'earing'. Gaffes galore in aitches.

Dave

Scotch Whisky

I've never quite understood why people get uptight about pronouncing placenames the way the people who live there do.

Possibly because I'm Welsh and I hear placenames butchered all the time.

There's currently a campaign to promote the use of Eryri for Snowdonia, something I wholeheartedly support

Neil