With the Russian invasion of Ukraine (not “the Ukraine”) dominating the news, many of us have noticed for the first time that most reports now call its capital Kyiv rather than Kiev. I wondered when this shift happened and why, and exactly how the name should be pronounced.

Kiev comes from the Russian name for the city, Kyiv from its Ukrainian name. Both Russian and Ukrainian use the Cyrillic alphabet, so any version of the name in the Roman alphabet is a transliteration. With the current situation, using “Kyiv” is especially satisfying, since it rejects Russia’s claim to the nation. (So far, thankfully, I haven’t seen any claims that criticizing Russia is “red scare racist.”) We can safely say it’s the new standard spelling. For similar reasons, we now talk about “Ukraine” rather than “the Ukraine.” The latter suggests a region rather than a nation. A few other countries have a definite article in front of their names, but they’re ones where the name is a phrase (e.g., “the Netherlands,” “the United States”).

I sometimes slip from many years of calling it “the Ukraine.” In my college days I played Risk a lot, and an annoying kibitzer kept urging us to go after “the rich, rich Ukraine,” to the point that it became a catchphrase among us. I’m afraid we did some things to him which I don’t approve of today.

Pronouncing the name Kyiv is harder than spelling it. The authentic Ukrainian pronunciation involves a phoneme which we don’t have in English, and which I haven’t been able to get after repeated listening. English is under no obligation to duplicate native pronunciations of place names. We don’t say “Paree” with a glottal “r.” We say “Berlin” with a short “i” rather than “bare-LEAN” with a nearly silent “r.” The best we can do with Kyiv is something like “KEY-iv.”

Some English-language place names have been serious manglings of the originals. Livorno in Italy was once commonly called “Leghorn” in English. We refer to Germany by an Anglicized version of its Latin name. There’s been a gradual trend to get closer to the original names, which I approve of, but we’ll never get the pronunciations exactly right.

To add to the confusion, some places in America have names spelled like places in other countries but not pronounced the same. Athens, Kentucky is pronounced “AY-thens.” Several American towns named Berlin put the accent on the first syllable; many of these shifts occurred during the World Wars to dissociate the towns from the German capital. Cairo, Illinois is reportedly “KEH-row” rather than “KYE-row.” Lima, Ohio is pronounced like the bean, not the Peruvian city. Lebanon, New Hampshire has a two-syllable name.

Curiously, the German news media still use “die Ukraine” and “Kiew” (pronounced almost exactly the same as Kiev).

Old versions of names tend to hang on when they’re in common phrases. You’re more likely to find Peking duck than Beijing duck in a Chinese restaurant in the United States. To me, the final section of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition will always be “The Great Gate of Kiev.”