CORRECTIONS In Ukrainian Дніпро [dn⁽ʲ⁾iˈprɔ] has the stress accent on the FINAL syllable, not the first. If we follow the same principle I applied to Sevastopol, Kherson, and Bakhmut, where we maintain the same accented syllable as in Ukrainian we should say "nee-PRO" in English.
I say the D. /dni.ˈpɹʌw/. A lot of other English speakers probably want to add a schwa but for me its not that hard cause you just nasalize the /d/ midway before you release.
Absolutely nailing it! Very good pronuciation even in difficult cases, like Запоріжжя (with double "ж" and release to "я"), Львів (with "ь" between consonants) and Миколаїв. Also Київ is pretty close, but "-їв" part should be closer to how you pronounced Миколаїв. And huge thanks for the video!
Zaporizhzhia means "Land/Place/Island Beyond Rapids" - in reference to rapids on the Dnipro River. It was the capital of the Ukrainian Cossacks Host - thus they were called "Zaporizhzhian Cossacks".
Now I finally know why Milan is "Mediolan" in Polish, should have figured we took those names from Latin. Although Venice we call "Wenecja", which is closer to "Venezia" in Italian I reckon. And Florence became "Florencja".
I'm from Ukraine and haven't yet learned all the names of the cities of my own country in English) So, I'm very grateful! 🔥 And by the way, your pronunciation is awesome 👍🏻 maybe even better than ours sometimes 😂
Interesting video! I noticed that the media and people in general started saying "Kyiv" instead of "Kiev" when the Ukraine War broke out in 2022 (growing up in the 90s, the Ukrainian capital was always "Kiev" to me). I don't recall any explanation for this shift being explicitly provided. I assumed it was an sign of solidarity and support for Ukraine.
@@servantofaeie1569 I say /'ki:ev/ in English, but I think /'ki:f/ is taking over, because people are trying to pronounce "Kyiv". I say [ˈkɪjiu̯] in Ukrainian. That last sound is much closer to a "w" in English than a "v" or an "f".
I grew up with “Kiev” too, I think the best way to say its true Ukrainian name in my accent would be /kjiːv/, not sure if removing the second s in Odes(s)a is going to catch on so easily though
your pronunciations are incredibly good... of all kinds of languages! I'm really jealous of how well you pronounce words in both english as well as other languages! it's super impressive!
As a proud Zaporižžian, I thank you, polýMathy, for your excellent work and hope it’ll help many stop mispronouncing my city & region’s names 😅 Slava Ukrajini 💙💛 vse bude dobre
Героям слава! 🔱 Yes, haha, I got really tired of hearing people pronounce it zapper-neetsa. 😆 As English speakers we’re normally quite confused by something like zhzh in writing, but it’s not that hard to deal with once you get past the orthography. Дякую!
@@polyMATHY_Luke Нема за що, це Вам подяка! Was incredibly pleasant to hear you speaking this Ukrainianly! As for the zh and other such digraphs (sometimes tetragraphs, like shch), hope it would be slightly easier if some new official “desovietised” romanisation was introduced, with diacritics instead of letter combinations
OMG. I am Ukrainian, and I think this guide is perfect. Speaking about the 'historic' vs. 'modern' city names, I always try to learn the way the locals call them: this both shows respect and makes it easier to read departure boards in the airports or at the stations. That is why I was happy to visit Köln (while some may say it is Cologne), Antwerpen (I did not know it is Antwerp) and İzmir (not Smyrna). Thank you for the video!
In polish Köln is Kolonia which is funny because in Poland Kolonia is a popular name of village "suburbs", near the border of a village, so called middle of nowhere. If a village is named Wólka then it's sort of a "center", but Wólka-Kolonia is a victim of jokes.
I didn't quite get why English speakers say "k" for "х". I may be butchering, Russian/Ukrainian but I just say it as I'd pronounce "ch/h" in Polish and it seems far from "k". That combined with "zh" transliteration makes my head explode when I see transliterated Ukrainian/Russian cities or names haha
Thanks a lot for my native city Cernihiv - one of the oldest cities of ancient Rus and modern Ukraine (we will celebrate 1320 y.o. in 2024). Only Kyiv is older (celebrated 1541 y.o. this year) if not to mention the former Greek polices in the south). We pronounce the name of city in Ukrainian more like: Cher'nihif. And even in Russian we say Chyer'nihaf, because Ukrainians do not say hard "g" like Russians (as well as southern Russians also say "h" instead of "g"). Also Chernihiv is near Belarus border so here you can hear some mix of Ukrainian and Belarusian language, which is close to Polessian dialects of Ukrainian and Belarusian languages. That is why Chernihiv is also often pronounced as Cher'nihaw ("w" is pronounced close to English "w"), especially in northern parts of the oblast (close to Belarusian pronunciation "Tshar'nihau"). Belaruses pronounce "Ch" as hard sound like CZ in Polish, while in standard Ukrainian "Ch" is much more milder, and in Russian "ch" is always mild (like ć in Polish).
Fun fact, most western Ukrainian oblast capitals have their separate names in German and/or Polish/Hungarian/Romainan. For example Lviv is also Lemberg and Lwów, while Chernivtsi is also Czernowitz or Cernăuți. And those toponyms are often used within those countries instead of universally accepted versions.
@@polyMATHY_Luke Actually there are even more names in yiddish slovakian latin and in almost every language in Europe. The yiddish is לעמבעריק (Lèmberik), slovakian Ľvov and latin Leopolis.
It used to be Lemberg in Swedish too. Swedes used to use the same names for cities and regions in central and eastern Europe as the Germans did, at least until the end of WWI. In some cases we still use those names. The region where Lviv/Lwow/Lemberg is situated is still Galizien in Swedish. Moldova is Moldavien (Moldawien in German). Bratislava used to be Pressburg. Warsaw Warschau. Poznan Posen. Etc etc etc.
A nice and interesting video,it is going to be helpful to English speaking people! And by the way my place of birth is Lugans’k, I lived there until 2014.
love to see you do a video on this, i've spent a bit now trying to learn how to say places and words in Ukrainian since it's what my not-too-distant ancestors spoke, also so i can say their names correctly. Ideally i can actually speak it when i visit one day. one thing that ends up being a convenience for me is that due to me becoming aware of the outer world in the 2010s is that i didn't have to learn any new names/switch any
All Greek-like names in Southern Ukraine, including Mariupol, Sevastopol, Simferopol, Odesa, Kherson, Melitopol and also cities in Russia such as Stavropol, it was a policy of Russian Empire that had many goals, main ones being 1. Trying to eradicate names that already existed here, especially Crimean names, for example Kefe was renamed to Feodosia and Kezlev was renamed to Jevpatoria 2. Establishing connection to Ancient Greece to cement Russian claims to Constantinople and title of the "Third Rome" I didn't quite understand some of those transcriptions, espessialy that prenasalized palatal /ɟⁿʲi 'prɔ/. It supposed to be /dʲnʲi 'prɔ/, but i guess that was a graphic mistake. As for Rivne, "e" vowel is quite higher than /ɛ/ for absolute majority of speakers, aproaching cardinal /e/ quality as it's unstressed. All vowels in Ukrainian tend to have their quality moving a bit to the centre while not losing distinct quality. Although here's the fun thing - there's ongoing merger of unstressed /e/ and /ɪ/ in unstessed syllables so менé (genative of я "І" unless before a preposition due to stress shift) and минé (third person singular future of минути "to pass, to pass by") are complete homophones /meˈnɛ/. Ukrainians being mad at Kyiv and Odesa has more to do with existing threat from Russia and it's colonization policies then and today to. As oposed to names like Milan and Rome for Milano and Roma there were no active effort from France to destroy Roman and Milanese identities and shut their voices, while here enormous Russification project was happening from 1627 at least, when for the first time Ukrainian books were burn and first print bans were imposed. As to end this here are some Ukrainian place names just to break English speakers minds and tongues in form of fun exersize trying to actually pronounce them: Неветленфолу, Петропавлівська Борщагівка, Зноб-Новгородське, Щекавиця, Ржищів, Монастирище, Фертешолмаш, Тячів
Privit, Anton, thanks very much. Indeed, I'm aware of that tragic history with the "Greek" names - I didn't want to get too much into the politics in this video, as you see. As for, [ɟⁿʲi 'prɔ], I copied and pasted that IPA (and all of the IPA transcriptions of toponyms in this video) directly from Wikipedia or Wiktionary so as not to make a mistake. I can see that since publishing this video someone has changed it to [dʲnʲiˈprɔ] on both: en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Дніпро#Ukrainian en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dnipro I assume someone saw this video, and corrected the Wiki pages. Was it you? Good job if so. Although, the audio sample does sound like [ɟⁿʲi 'prɔ], so maybe it was an attempt at a narrow transcription of that man's way of saying it. Really great point about unstressed e and the mergers there, which I had read about and noticed in speech. Do you think /ei̯/ is an acceptable way to render this in English? As for Kyiv and Odesa, the current political situation is what informs my recommendation to my Anglophone audience to embrace the transliterations from Ukrainian. But I don't make this recommendation from an abstract linguistic point of view, which is the purpose of the discussion in the video. Those are beautiful Ukrainian names. Thanks for the comment.
Ok, but being that butthurt over FOREIGN (not Russian) people using traditional exonyms in their own languages without any undertones and with no intention to make a political statement is rather exaggerated. For example I support Ukraine and I still use the names that I'm used to in English because they're natural to me and most native speakers still use them without any intention of offending anyone.
@@polyMATHY_Luke I think that [ɟⁿʲ] is a possible interpretation too. Nasalisation of stops before nasals actually occurs in a lot of languages allophonically, we just usually don't mark it except in very detailed phonetic transcriptions. In fast speech, the nasal may be entirely absorbed by the stop and realised as nasalisation of the former, i.e. they two are pronounced as single units (the same happens in fast speech in Polish, btw., and it also applies to stops followed by /l/ (but not in Ukrainian since it has a dark "l" while Polish has a clear one which has less auditory "power"), e.g. the stop+sonorant clusters in "dno" and "dla" may be pronounced as single units in fast speech, and in slower speech, the stops are still technically nasalised or lateralised but the sonorants are clearly pronounced). And I think it's entirely possible for the phoneme /dʲ/ to be realised as [ɟ] in many contexts as they're very similar sounds, and you only have to slightly move your tongue when making the latter. But still, it's just transcription, arguing over it is silly xd Btw., Luke, you're the first native English speaker I've ever heard who's able to correctly imitate the phonological systems of foreign languages :O I'm very impressed. I guess it's due to your ability to read IPA, right? I think we should teach IPA to kids because it really helps with learning pronunctiation. I've noticed that native speakers of English very often diphthongise monophthongal /o/ and /e/ in foreign languages because English only allows diphthongs in coda positions for these vowels. So maybe that's how you could pronounce Ukrainian names that end in these vowels to still sound natural in English?
I hate Cyrillic transcription using English alphabet. I guess using any European language alphabet other then English would be better. I think we should use something similar to transcription which is used in Serbia.
There's also a thing that used to happen in (some) South Slavic languages. In historical sources you can find -pol replaced with -polje (in many cases but not all). Polje literally means a field if translated to English. So you can find Galipolje (Gelibolu, Gallipoli, a city in Turkey today), Sebastopolje (Sevastopol), Melitopolje (Melitopol), Nikopolje (Nikopol, a town in Bulgaria, also a town in Ukraine) and so on. Not sure if it happened purely out of similarity between -pol and -polje or why it did at all, but ye, it happened. In recent times and in modern speech i haven't heard anyone using -polje versions (apart from Galipolje but rarely). Great video as allways, Cheers! P.s. Constantinople (Konstantinopol, Istanbul) was weirdly enough never called Konstantinopolje but there is another (South) Slavic name for it, Carigrad (Car/Tzar - Emperor, Grad - City).
Luke, I… lack for words. That's just incredible, your pronunciation is extremely good, and I'm super grateful for your effort! It's always great to know that a person whose videos I appreciate so much is a true human with a big heart. Thank you so much, hugs to you and greetings to your dearest ones, be blessed and happy! Дуже дякую за це відео!
For Ukrainian speakers it sounds very strange, when the [x] sound is pronounced as [k]. In Ukrainian it's a different phoneme. I think, if your language doesn't have the [x] sound, the [h] sound is the closest one to represent it. Also, it won't lead to any confusion, because there is no [h] sound in Ukrainian. If you say [kɐ'hɔvkɐ] instead of [kɐ'xɔvkɐ], every Ukrainian will understand you immediately, but it you say [kɐ'kɔvkɐ], it depends on the context, if people will understand you. The problem is that in Ukrainian the letters "x" and "к" are different phonemes, but by using the [k] sound for "х" in the second case, you make them the same. Also, in this particular name, Ukrainians will probably find it funny, because it sounds a little bit vulgar, since кака means poop in Ukrainian.🙂
In my native language (Greek for anyone wondering) we use the names derived from Russian, via other European languages. (Κίεβο for Kyiv, Δνείπερος for Dnipro). We never really changed it to support Ukraine, it’s just that the names have been used for a long time that we never really decided to change it, I guess.
"Crimea" in Norwegian is just "Krimhalvøya". "Krim" is the name, "halv" means half, "øy" means "island" and the "a" at the end means "the", so "The Krim halfisland" "Halvøya" (half-island) is our word for "peninsula". The word "krim" is also a word we use for crime, as in doing something illegal, although I've honestly only seen it in the context of police investigations and crime stories etc. 11:18 English speakers insistence on treating the "e" at the end of words as silent really is a pet peeve of mine...
A British person would never say kɜːʼsəʊn... or hɪˈɹəʊʃɪmə for Hiroshima. That's a very American way to say foreign O's and we Brits would never even think of pronouncing it that way
As a ukrainian, i have to say, when our "x" is transcribed as "kh", pronouncing it as "k" sounds really weird. Like when you called Bakhmut "Bakmut". It just doesn't feel right lol
I learned the pronunciations from the news analysts, _The Duran_ , who are Greek, although as sons of diplomats they grew up outside of Greece and speak English with the accent of England and the US respectively. That's also where I learned that the president of Ukraine doesn't speak Ukrainian. He speaks Russian and English, so I've heard. As for showing respect, I certainly don't wish to insult anyone on either side of the conflict. But sometimes you have to choose. For instance, 97% of Crimean voters chose to separate from Ukraine, as did a large majority of the voters in Donbas, and in response, Ukraine has been shelling them since 2014. Methinks the prestige Ukraine has gained since last year is a delusion. I don't blame the citizens. I blame my stinking corrupt US government and Joey Biden, who has banked millions from raping Ukraine of her resources. If you only became aware of Ukraine in February of 2022, and only listened to Megacorporate Media, it'll seem simple to decide that Russia, of rather Putin is evil. But if you care to look further to find out what's going on, you'll find that it's not that simple. Putin isn't an irrational mad man, and Elensky isn't an angel. (The first letter of his name is illegal in some places due to Russia marking their tanks with that letter, which should be a clue as to the Insanity driving this continued conflict). I just don't appreciate my own government vowing to keep it going until the last Ukrainian is dead. Obama ordered the coup to overthrow the legitimately elected president that the Ukrainian voters chose. If it happened in Canada, or Mexico, I'm pretty sure my US government would do what Putin is doing. The Military Industrial Complex is making bank on this, and that's the only reason they want to keep it going instead of allowing both Ukrainians and Russians to live in peace. And by the way, the reason Donbas and Crimea wanted out of Ukraine is because of Obama's illegal coup and puppet government.
I like your explanation of exonyms such as Odessa, Kiev or Milan. For that matter English Paris is in the same category as it's not the same as French Paris...nor should it be. Use of exonyms grounds us in historicity and helps guard against linguistic/geography chaos, which is caused by constant attempts at name changing. Use of exonyms has nothing to do with political leanings (it certainly shouldn't), and is the way to go for all languages. I'd expect Ukrainians to use their own names for London, New York or Rome.
Автор канала винит нас в "кремлёвской пропаганде", а хотя сам пишет "героям сала". Двойные стандарты, они такие. Очень печально, что автор очень однобоко оценивает ситуацию. Он даже не удосужился посмотреть капнуть в историю Украины и убедиться в том, что большинство городов на юге и Востоке страны были основаны при Российской империи. Всё это выглядит, как заказ, отработка методички. Всё это непохоже на него, ибо он очень подробно и глубоко копает в рассказах про древний Рим и древнюю Грецию.
Thanks for the video. I just want to point out one thing: in Ukrainian е and и get heavily reduced in unstressed positions and, because of that, the better (just in my opinion) way to pronounce Суми is to end it with a schwa sound (or with a closed e if English phonotactics allow it). You can at least consider it to be a plausible alternative to your suggestion. We just don't distinguish between е and и in unstressed positions and children constantly mix them up in writing
Odessa is from Greek Odessos with double 's'. Catherine the Great gave quite a few new-founded cities Greek names through her 'Greek project' on the newly conquered land from the Turks.
One thing about being a Celt, I do not have a problem with the Cyrillic letter ‘х’, either in hearing or speaking. One interesting thing though, in the orthography of the Ewe language of West Africa, the letters h and x correspond to the same symbols in IPA. However, at least one second generation descendant brought up in the USA has grown up with “Anglo Ears” and wonders why her parents’ languages has to use the two different letters.
Italians are indifferent about the usage of French names for their cities in English, as France doesn't have a war with Italy and Italians don't feel oppressed by French language, there is a certain sense of equality between France and Italy, while using Russian names for Ukrainian cities is a sign of colonial dominance of Russian language and state over Ukraine.
(sorry for double comment but I just noticed something) Wikipedia may be a good source for pronunciation of names of cities or rivers but I think it's absolutely terrible for personal names (like members of the government or military commanders) Which makes it *extremely* confusing how to correctly pronounce the names of Ukranian people. for example: it somehow lists 3 different spellings for Zelensky's name: Zelensky, Zelenskiy and Zelenskyy (with double Y at the end!) in addition to that we also have the military commander-in-chief spelled as Valerii Zaluzhnyi (first name spelled with double "i" at the end and last name spelled with 'yi') It's obvious that the transcription of personal names with the roman alphabet is a total mess! In just two examples above Wikipedia manages to exhaust ALL mathematically possible combinations of the letters "i" and "y" and the end of names!! We have "ii", "yy", "iy" and "yi" in the names of just two people!! This has to be some kind of a record, lmao 🤣🤣
Haha thanks for the comment, double or otherwise! That’s hilarious. Also an important note. Since Wikipedia can be corrected, if you’re confident about the change, you should suggest it.
Not Ukrainian, but I just wanted to point out that "Kiev" is not really a historical English toponym like Milan and Naples but rather a direct Russian loanword. There is, in fact, a historical English name for Kyiv which is Kyow (borrowed through Polish and German) but, of course, no one has used that one for over a century and there's nothing to be gained by reinstating it. Lviv (often referred to by its Russian name Lvov in the past) also had a couple of interesting historical toponyms that are no longer in use including the German-based Lemberg (which was probably the name an English-speaker would have used in the 19th century) and, more interestingly enough, the Latin-based name Leopolis. While neither of those names are in use (in English at least), people from Lviv are still known as "Leapolitans" in English, much in the same way English keeps the more conservative and Latinate adjectival forms for Venetians and Neapolitans.
This gets even more confusing for other cyrillic users. In Bulgarian, historically we've taken mostly the russian names and for most of them, their spelling in russian as well, because our alphabet fits closer to the russian version of cyrillic. Pronounciation is balkanized a lot, as we lack many of the vowels and palatalizations they both have. We don't have i and ї for example and ь is extremly rare. We are writing Киев, but pronouncing it is closer to what an english speaker would say as Kiev. If i get the orthography correct - we say it as Кiев in urkainian/Киэв in russian. But same as in english, we are lately aiming at adopting more ukraninan names so we have things like Харкив, Днипро, Чернихив comming through which don't look either ukranian nor russian, but that's just our best approximation of spelling to pronounce it more as ukranian rather then russian.
I think it often boils down to this: spelling vs pronunciation. Either you keep the ‘proper’ spelling (the endonym) and absolutely butcher the pronunciation (because your own language operates on a different phonological rulebook) or you butcher the spelling in order to most closely approximate the ‘proper’ pronunciation. Some languages are more phonetically analogous and thus require less tweaking, some require great compromise by disregarding either spelling or pronunciation (or by giving up on both and savouring creative ignorance) And then, as you’ve shown, there’s etymology. Very often, foreign versions of a name retain some older spelling feature that was present in the original spelling but was lost in the language of the home country. ‘Florence’ retains the and of Latin ‘Florentia‘ that Italian has lost, ‘Odessa’ keeps the of the Greek root. It’s not all too different for Kiev/Kyiv and its old Ruthenian ancestor. I, for one, admit to having somewhat of a soft spot for maintaining an older and etymologically more faithful orthography whenever possible. But, of course, language adapts to new realities and it serves the people speaking it, not vice versa. In the end, it’s all merely a balancing act between written language, spoken language, history, culture, politics and - most important of all - the great duality of fervour and laziness present in every single one of us.
As a Ukrainian and a former linguist, I suppose I should say there are some minor mistakes in this video, but I appreciate your interest, so I don't want to be picky. I guess the biggest one is at 3:43 where you mention the fact that Г is used for the /h/ sound. You're not wrong here but, given the context, since you were talking about KH instead of H, I found it misleading, so I think you should've mentioned that we use Г for the H equivalent in English, and Х for KH, respectively. Your pronunciation of Zaporizhzhia is very good, almost perfect for someone speaking English, in my opinion, although I would recommend attempting to pronounce the ending just a tiny bit more as "ya" rather than just "a", after the long "zh". Also, it would be nice to mention Chornobyl since many remembered it as Chernobyl in the old days of the USSR. Other than that, pretty good work, thanks for making this video, I appreciate it.
Unfortunately, it looks like the youtube deleted (or something, because I don't see it) my comment where I recommended a website that could help with the pronunciation. Anyways, thank you very much, Luke, for the great, as always, video! Your accent is really cute in some words :) (For some reason your "Kyiv/Київ" pronunciation sounds like "Киив" to me). I wanted to add, that "v/в", when pronounced at the end of a syllable, is often realised as "f", which is, I think, especially the case with many Ukrainians who grew up speaking Russian at home (However, I, as someone who never spoke Russian in my life, still often say "Kharkif", as well as "Kharkiv"). There are many more details about the Ukrainian (as about any other language's) phonology that could be said, but I don't think that's relevant to the video. Take care, Luke and everyone reading this!
Hi Max! Yes, RUclips usually deletes links and such, but if you describe the URL or space it out it might appear. I'm glad if my rendition of the Ukrainian is acceptable. You're right about how I said Київ.
@@polyMATHY_Luke Even without the URL the youtube deletes my comment :( My third try: choose the Ukrainian language on you glish, it's really helpful for many languages as it shows how native speakers pronounce words in context.
your Дякую has common mistake. In your pronounce it sounds more "дЪякую"....instead of "дЯкую". Passage from Д to Я must be way softer, almost unnoticable. While many not native speakers for some reason tend to harden the end of Д sound....so it looks like in between Д and Я there is something hard "дЪякую"
As a linguistics student, enthusiast of phonetics and native speaker of Slovak, I'm very happy to see this profound and awesome phonetic adaptation of the names. This video just soothes my heart 😂 Thank you! 😁
It's always best to use endonyms over exonyms, so I'll try to learn the Ukrainian names, but I haven't seen the same courtesy being applied to toponyms of countries being genocided by the US or its allies.
Perfect pronunciation! Bravissimo! As a translator in Ukraine, I always struggle with how to render our Ukrainian place names in English. Especially small localities, villages etc. I also hate the official Ukrainian latinization bringing us the monstrous Zaprorizhzhia or Chernivtsi, which look intimidating, so I usually write Zaporizhia, although I don't like rendering Ж as ZH altogether. Latinization of Ukrainian is another hot topic in Ukrainian, and I personally favor the Central European approach, that is Zaporižžia, Čerkasy and Černiwci.
Very kind of you to say so! Indeed, I hope there will be some sort of reform to these spellings as well. I don’t favor the Ukrainians switching to the Latin alphabet, as the Ukrainian Cyrillic alphabet is very efficient and clear, in my opinion. But I heard some Ukrainians mention this idea in order to become more Westernized. What do you think?
@@polyMATHY_Luke I þanke þe for þyne answere, my lefe freend! The Cyrillic alphabet definitely should be preserved for the Ukrainian language. Truth be told, all those discussions about Ukrainians switching to the Latin alphabet don't hold water. Moreover, most Ukrainian will never agree to that. However, the transliteration of Ukrainian for the outside world should be improved bc things like ZH, SHCH, DZH or YY (for Ж, Щ, ДЖ, ИЙ) are too clumsy. In fact, they are just remnants of the awkward Soviet quick fix.
This cities in South of Ukraine have Greek got names after russian empire destroyed Crimean Khanat. This cities had Crimean Tatars names. But russian empire wanted to complitely destroy memory about history of Crimea. That's why they renamed all cities and pretended they where Greek but not Crimean Khanat
We in Ukraine often get confused whether Bakhmut should be stressed on the first or on the second syllable in Ukrainian. Actually, it is a historical name of the city which was renamed back not so long ago. Previously, it was called Artyomovsk after soviet tradition. Nice to see our cities in modern Ukrainianized spelling in English.
I tend to prefer to use an h like sound for X, instead of a k like sound. Probably from growing up with relatives from Ukraine who use the original local pronunciations. Note: that place name pronunciations can vary regionally in Ukraine and official spellings are based on pronunciation in Kyiv.
It is always so confusing for me to hear "X" sound as "Kh". I mean I get it but it takes me a moment to understand which city foreigner is referring to
That’s an interesting point. Since an /h/ sound already exists as г, should we nevertheless make both г and х /h/ in English? My feeling is that was the more confusing, but I’m eager to hear from Ukrainians on this issue.
@@polyMATHY_Luke for me as a speaker of Ukrainian (not native), the Ukrainian г sounds closer to the modern Greek gamma, but not so hard. I mean, like a voiced English h, if my explanation makes any sense.
@@stsglntin Polish it used to be “Ch” and “H” which were voiced and unvoiced versions of this sound (or the other way around). Today they have exactly the same sound. It’s confusing when spelling because you have to remember which one to use. That’s why Polish name for Kherson is Chersoń.
As a Croatian i know that English pronounce most Slavic language names wrong, not just city names but also last names. On the other hand i don't think in opossite situatiom that is always the case.
Great video, you explained everything very well. As a Ukrainian, I appreciate your work. I am happy that the world finally started seeing us as a separate nation and not a part of russia
Imho the "kh" is bs. The "h" in "Harkiv" sounds too me (I am from Harkiv) exactly like the "h" from "house". The same applies to Hmelnytskyi and KaHovka. It's just an "h". By the way I study slavic philology... The distinction between "kh" and "h" just confuses foreigners so that they don't say correctly KaHovka but instead KaKovka which sounds like some excrement...
It isn’t the same, though, as [x] is a velar fricative, and [h] is a glottal fricative. The latter isn’t even articulated in the mouth, but the throat, while [x] is far forward of it. While they sound acoustically similar to people who don’t have both in their language, they sound quite different to those who have both. Thus the problem for English speakers is that either х and г will both be merged with /h/, or к and г will both be merged with /k/. We can’t make the three-way distinction in English, so we have to choose one of these mergers. As I said in the video, the traditional way is the latter. But if Ukrainians overwhelmingly prefer the former merger, we can oblige. Слава Україні. 🔱
As a Slavic speaker I give You permission to use H in both places but You will have to explain this everytime to others, some people want consistency... We were taught at school that in ancient times there was distinction in h sounds but now it is merged. Different spelling helps with grammatical issues and indicates origin of words, adds meaning.
As a native Ukrainian speaker (well Rusyn but whatever) I just want to bring up the vice versa that bothers me. For some reason we transliterate English names that have letter “h” into Ukrainian “x”. So for example “Manhattan” becomes “Манхетен”. This bothers me so much! We already have the “h” sound in Ukrainian with “г” so why change it? I assume its due to Russian influence since they dont have that sound but still not quiet sure about this. Its something I am always correcting my cousins on when they speak English.
It’s also kind of weird that you transliterate the first “a” as “а” but the second and the last one as “е”. I’d expect either “Мангатан” (based on the original spelling), “Менгетен” or “Мангатен” (based on the pronunciation /mænˈhæt.ən/) or “Менгатен” or “Мангетан” (based on the pronunciation /mənˈhæt.ən/). ;-)
@@mertonnephake Good point, there are different ways to pronounce it. Since I emigrated to NYC, here we say something close to “Менгетен” in English. But for some reason I subconsciously switch to "Мангeтeн" when speaking with other Ukrainians or Russians.
Thanks, Alexey! I’m not familiar with many Ukrainian folk songs, but I was hopeful that they would sound familiar and appropriate to my Ukrainian audience, while simultaneously acquainting non-Ukrainians with your musical tradition.
Never did understand all this "Kh..." thing in Kherson and other. Actual sound does not have any "K" in it, and you have words that sounds the same. Like "heresy", "heritage", heraldry. Sound is much closer to "H" than "Kh". Just listen to those sounds for city names in Ukrainian even in google translate. I'm not a linguist so I might miss the reason behind it, but the sound is wrong. I'm Ukrainian.
Thanks for the comment. As English does not have [x], we have to look for a sound that is closest; [x] and [k] are articulated in the exact same part of the mouth, whereas [h] is not articulated in the mouth at all. Obviously there is some acoustic similarity between [h] and [x] as they are fricatives, but they’re not closer in their physical articulation. See my IPA videos for more on this. Whatever English sound we use for [x], it will be wrong since it doesn’t exist in our language. But if Ukrainians prefer the wrongness of [h] instead of [k] I’m open to the idea.
@@polyMATHY_Luke I'm not Ukrainian but Polish and I have to say that I have a very hard time hearing any difference between [x] and [h] (or [ɦ]), however [x] sounds to me nothing like [k]. 😅
[x] of course is used in some English dialects, the classic examplar word being "loch", but also in some circumstances in say, Scouse accents. If people are somewhat familiar with that sound I think they should use it in these Ukrainian places instead of the k-sound you suggest. I do think thats what most/many people from the UK do with the example "Bach" you gave, i definitely wouldn't pronounce it the same as the word "back"
As a fluent Ukrainian and English speaker, I really don't understand the need to write "kh" instead of "h" for Harkiv and so on. The English sound in "house", "hat", "home" and so on is far closer to the Ukrainian in Херсон and Харків than the "k" sound given by "kh".
Героям слава! It looks Ukraine now become famous with its ruined cities ... just like Italy and Greece. I would say English speakers have no need to twist their tongues pronouncing "oblast" (область), far more practical just to say Khreson region, rather than "Kherson oblast". Here are my arguments: 1) oblast is very ugly and unnatural for English. 2) English already has good words for oblast. 3) Ukrainians themselves rarely use word oblast other than official occasions. We have a beautiful and succinct suffix "-щина" that converts a city to a region. so we don't say Херсонська область, we say Херсонщина (Khersonshchyna) which means region of/near Kherson. The suffix can be applied to smaller cities and towns which are not centers of oblast, or even to foreign names. Regarding pronunciation: sound х is lighter in Ukrainian, letter в roughly has two pronunciations: v and short u. I would say there is no need to scare people with 5 different sounds: Ukrainian is enough complicated. вугільний (coal adjective) has stressed on the first syllable. Your Ukrainian pronunciation is very good, and the anglicization proposed seems to be reasonable. In fact if Vikings had just a little bit more influence on English, Kyiv could have been spelled like Canugard in English :) Thank you for promoting underpromoted Ukrainian language and culture!
Absolutely astonishing! You've aced the pronunciation of most cities so that it's hard to discern whether Ukrainian is your first language or not. That's the power of linguistics, I guess. One thing I would point out, as a native Ukrainian speaker, is that somehow "proper English" pronunciation of Kyiv in the video sounded more natural than "your" variant (13:38). I would assess that it sounded more like "Кив" than "Київ". In fact, simply saying "Kiiv" would be perceived better by an Ukrainian eye. No offense meant by that, it's just an observation.
About "Ukraine" and "The Ukraine" - Polish had a similar situation with "w Ukrainie" (in Ukraine) and "na Ukrainie" (on Ukraine) - with the second one now dropped.
There's no evidence of second one dropped with exceptions of some sources using preposition "w". In addition to that the same applies to Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, Hungary and Slovakia. Yet none of those seem to be bothered. Czech and Slovak languages also use preposition "na". "Na" is used with respect to Slovakia as well, but Slovaks don't mind at all. In addition to that they do not cook sh**storms about Slovenes "stealing" their name. Yeah, Slovakia is called "Slovensko" in Slovak.
According to professor Miodek it's still correct to say "na Ukrainie" like "na Łotwie", "na Litwie", "na Białorusi", "na Słowacji" and "na Węgrzech". According to professor Bralczyk it's "politically correct to say «w Ukrainie»". Therefore I will always use "na Ukrainie" (not "w Ukrainie") and "na Ukrainę" (and not "do Ukrainy") as a Pole.
a little correction about the -pole cities. even though the south of Ukraine had had Greek colonies, these cities got their names from a russian queen trying to "legitimize" russia's connection to the antient word of Byzantium/Rome. Before the russian annexation of 18c Sevastopol was called Akmescit (white mosque) and was populated mostly by Muslim Crimean Tatars. The city of Nikolpol was originally known as the settlement of Mykyta's Cape. Under the pretence of "protecting the Christians" russia deported all Crimean Christians (mostly Greeks from LATER waves of immigration UNrelated to the colonies) to the mainland, where they called their new settlement the city of Mary - Mariupol. btw I love the background music (started singing the lyrics even before I recognized the name)
@@erkinalp Αρτεμίσιο (artemisio) 😉 if you wanna go to the original root. Means: dedicated to the Greek goddess Artemis. (goddess of the moon and hunting. Diana, in later Roman mythology.
Good video, Luke, as always! There are some things that came to my mind as to a Ukrainian speaker. 1. I didn't really catch on what you meant by mentioning a pitch component to stress accent when you explained about Bakhmut. I could be wrong, but I've been quite sure there were no such thing in Ukrainian, and honestly the variants you pronounced sound kind of the same to me or like just some regular "syntactic" intonation. Maybe while researching you have payed much attention to a thing that is so subtle that I'm not sure it's really there. It might be the samples you've listened to, which often have some over-emphasised pronounciation, not in a very natural way, so to say. Although indeed the primary version and more correct stress here would be on the second syllable, an initial-stressed pronunciation is also common. I think that is due to the fact that the current "new-old" name of the city was reintroduced just seven years ago, being Artemivsk for almost a century prior to that, and the correct pronunciation was not so obvious for everyone for a while. It also might be due to resemblance to the last name Pákhmutov(a), which was on hearing and is initial-stressed, and may also even share the etymology. 2. Speaking of double purpose of the letter Y in transcribing into Roman alphabet, notice how inconsistently it is usually applied. Although there is an offical transliteration system which is used by government for names in passports (and it's in not nearly perfect), the overall usage of romanization is a mess honestly. Look how ZaporizhzhIA and BerdYAnsk are transcribed differently for literally no reason (ironically being in the same region). The usage of Y for palatalization and [j] is similar to what happens in a system for Russian language. For me, the issue here is that in Ukrainian Y=И is far more frequent than Y=Ы is in Russian, and if we apply the same rule in Ukrainian, it would be overloaded with those Ys, and in addition leaving some ambiguity (like in "Pryazovya"). Therefore I prefer the "Polish style" for after palatalized consonants, which are used offically, but these are also ambivalently used for /ja, jo, ju, je/ which leads to such ridiculous (as for me) spellings like Iuliia. Ideally, I would introduce the J for that purpose, which is completely absent from any system for some reason and unfortunately it's not in common practice using it. So it would be Pryazovja, Berdiansk, Zaporizhzhia, Julija and so on, much better I think. :)
I agree with your recommendation of the j! That would be a much better convention. As for the pitch component of stress accent, I didn’t mean something phonemic like phonemic pitch. What was trying to say you actually wrote more elegantly here: pitch variations are a normal part of speech. In stressed syllables in Ukrainian, the pitch tends to be lower when the word is in isolation or in other situations, whereas we don’t often do that in English, so we get super confused haha, also because Ukrainian is syllable-timed while English and Russian are stress-timed; when the syllables are roughly the same duration, this causes us confusion because we except unstressed syllables to be shorter. Something like this happens in Italian too: in isolation words like amare importante often have a higher pitch on the syllable before the stressed one. Thanks for the comment!
Thanks for your work, great video with very detailed explanations! I am sorry, but I can't agree with your example regarding the spelling of Odesa, Kyiv and the rest of the toponyms listed in that block. You gave the example of Italian cities, which English took from a language older than modern Italian. If you compare it with the Ukrainian context, it is as if someone borrowed the name "Kyiv" from the spelling of the tenth century and kept it for 1000 years, adapting it to update their own language. How, for example, the Spanish kept "Ucrania" from ancient maps instead of transliterating the modern name as "Ucraina" And in this case, when "Kiev" appears, it is either ignorance of the nuances, or deliberate disrespect. By using "Kiev", "Odessa", "Kharkov", "Lvov" or "Dnepr" you call our cities by the names that the colonizers - the russians - told you about them. It's like saying "Ceylon" instead of "Sri Lanka". Our colonizer's language is more like ours than English is Sinhala, but we still live through post-colonialism as we see fit.
Being Ukrainian, I never really understood the "the Ukraine" issue. On the other hand, there is an issue of saying "на Украине" (on Ukraine) which many Ukrainians had a problem with because saying "на" (on) instead of "в" (in) implies that Ukraine is not a name of a country, but of some territory. Many Ukrainians saw this as Russians implying that Ukraine is just a territory of Russia.
A point about the names. The existance of different names in different languages shows that that place has existed in the minds and mouths of people who speak that language. For example, most large FInnish cities have a Finnish and a Swedish name. The Swedish names are testament to the closeness of the two cultures and the presence of these cities in the mind of Swedish-speakers (and it goes both ways, many cities in Sweden have a different name in Finnish). Finland and Sweden were united in the past. Similarly, Ukrainian cities have their own names in FInnish, Kiev is Kiova, Kharkov is Harkova. Finland and Ukraine both belonged to the Russian empire at the same time.
At that some names in Ukraine are really ancient. For example, a small town in Kharkiv region bears name Meréfa, which is Scythian for "Dead Snake"; also name of a village in Cherkasy region - Irklíyiv comes from Scythian "Curvy Stream". The name of my native city Chilia in Odesa region comes from the Greek name Achillea. That's right, this is the native land of the Troyan War hero Achilles, and the remains of his tomb and sanctuary still are at the Snakes Island in the Black Sea nearby the city, where fierce fights against Russian occupants were fought last spring, and we won! 🇺🇦
@@igorvoloshin3406 I'm just curious what goes through the mind of someone like you. You do use the word "occupiers" with a pejorative connotation, right? And you are obviously cheering as an expression of the nationalistic/patriotic feelings you have. But it seems like you glorify or at least are proud of the fact that your place of birth was also a Greek colony. Were they occupiers too, and were they "good" occupiers in that case? And since we are at that, how did that part of the country become Ukraine in the first place and since when? What's the history behind it exactly? All these questions might be hard and even triggering I realize that.
@@jabrilbalakrishna err... it seems you're not very much acquainted in ancient history of Ukraine. In fact, the lands of Southern Ukraine were part of the cradle of the Greek nation, including those vast territories which are under waves now - Ghilea, the green and plentiful land to the south of Odesa and Meothia Swamps which are now at the bottom of Azov sea. It was in Ghilea where hunter Acteon angered goddes Arthemida, and was turned by her into deer to be hunted by his own dogs. And in the middle of Meothian Swamps there was the cave entrance to the realm of Aid, where poet Orpheus descended trying to bring his beloved Euridica back to the realm of alive. Greeks were not colonists here, they were local natives, and our land is the land where legendary heroes walked and myths were born. The Greeks lived here in Southern Ukraine for millenia... and were oppressed by Russian Empire / Soviet Russia just the same as Ukrainians and other nations of these lands. So may it seem, Greeks lived in Ukraine long before Ukrainians or any other Slavic tribes even formed? Not so simple. As recent paleogenetic studies prove, modern Ukrainians still bear the genes of the ancient local peoples beginning from the very first Indo-Europeans of the Yamna culture, which inhabited South-East of Ukraine as long ago as in 4th millenium BC. So we Ukrainians also have the firm right to live at our ancient lands. But current invaders are definitely out of any right to raid our lands. They'we unlawfully broken treaties and borders signed and approved by them. How can you or anyone even try to excuse them?
The spelling "Odessa" is ingrained into our consciousness, and since the pronunciation is identical in English anyway, I don't think it makes a difference to spell it with one S or two. Likewise with Chernobyl, for rather infamously unfortunate reasons. It would take a monumental effort to get people to spell it as Chornobyl. But Kyiv will stay Kyiv, despite our derived terms "Kievan Rus’" and "Chicken Kiev". Not only is it the preferred term by Ukrainians and the media, the other spelling is used deliberately by ruZZian imperialists and their apologists in order to demean Ukraine and show support for the terrorist invasion. So Kyiv it is, just like Luhansk, Kharkiv, and Mykolayiv.
English has many flavours but locally to me the word coat is not a good example in the North of England as it has a hint of two vowel sounds eg co-at, with two syllables and the road is pronounced ro-ad quite similar to OP Shakespeare. The accents of the Midlands and the North is sometimes like archaeology (Brit here)with hints of Old English, Norse,Cumbric and Gaelic.
i am not familiar with phonetic script. but i would pronounce don-etsk more like a sloppily pronounced english "done"etsk or the german "dann"etsk. like simulating to say an "o" but keeping the mouth open as if saying an "a" and also keeping it short. ... an example came to mind: like dunn in ryan dunn.
About the "growing prestige" of Ukrainian, I'd rather call it "growing acknowledgment that it isn't a regional dialect of Russian as assumed through ignorance, but a linguistic national standard on its own, close but distinct from Russian, with a proper literature and mass use aside and sometimes code-mixing with Russian due to the, ahem, 'interesting' story of Ukraine in the last three centuries under Moscow's boot". But I assume that was a bit too long. 😜
Haha well said. Naturally I did my best to avoid overt political commentary in this video. Indeed, I’d say last year was the realization of what you said. This year we’re seeing a deep admiration for Ukraine’s abilities, successes, and resolve under great duress. This is what I’d add to your very apt description.
I just found an interesting thing. Romanians overall don't like Hungarians, just as Slovaks. Romania has been historically friendly to Czechoslovakia. At the same time, Romanians seem to not mind that both Czechs and Slovaks use Hungarian name adaptation Temešvár for one of their cities and do not require them to write Timišoára instead. Same goes for Serbs. Maybe because Romanians as a nation are more mature.
Thank you so much for covering this topic ✨ It is extremely important for us to teach the world to recognise our Ukrainian ways to pronounce those names. Your pronunciation is amazingly accurate, which is not a surprise for me since I hear how flawlessly you pronounce Latin words (always a pleasure for any ear). Just a little correction: your [l] sound is a little bit off in Ukrainian. Through some experimentation I can draw a conclusion that you articulate it a bit too far from the teeth. In Ukrainian, as in other Slavic languages, it's a bit closer to the upper teeth, both the regular and the palatalised one. Hope it helps :) Thank you again for the video!
CORRECTIONS
In Ukrainian Дніпро [dn⁽ʲ⁾iˈprɔ] has the stress accent on the FINAL syllable, not the first. If we follow the same principle I applied to Sevastopol, Kherson, and Bakhmut, where we maintain the same accented syllable as in Ukrainian we should say "nee-PRO" in English.
I say the D. /dni.ˈpɹʌw/. A lot of other English speakers probably want to add a schwa but for me its not that hard cause you just nasalize the /d/ midway before you release.
fun stuff!
Absolutely nailing it! Very good pronuciation even in difficult cases, like Запоріжжя (with double "ж" and release to "я"), Львів (with "ь" between consonants) and Миколаїв.
Also Київ is pretty close, but "-їв" part should be closer to how you pronounced Миколаїв.
And huge thanks for the video!
Also you pronounced Рівне as Ривне, and didn't palatalize the zhzh in Zaporizhzhia.
Besides that, the pronunciations where perfect. Great job!
Yup. Dnee-Pro, like Mac Pro
Amazing pronunciation in ukrainian, even sometimes sounds as native
That’s very nice of you to say. I have a lot to learn, but hopefully I’ll keep improving.
Unlike certain other ”polyglot, pronunciation teacher”, who should have remained as a wine expert 😅.
Being Ukrainian myself, I tip the hat for the correctness and pronunciation 🎩
And yes, please, Kyiv and Odesa! 🫶🏻 We’ll greatly appreciate 🤝🏻
Zaporizhzhia means "Land/Place/Island Beyond Rapids" - in reference to rapids on the Dnipro River. It was the capital of the Ukrainian Cossacks Host - thus they were called "Zaporizhzhian Cossacks".
I thought Cossacks are exclusively Russian?
Now I finally know why Milan is "Mediolan" in Polish, should have figured we took those names from Latin. Although Venice we call "Wenecja", which is closer to "Venezia" in Italian I reckon. And Florence became "Florencja".
Both of those are also from the Mediaeval Latin.
Medieval Latin pronounced -tia essentially as Italian -zia and Polish -cja so Wenecja could just as well come directly from Latin Venetia
As for me, Włochy is more interesting word to define Italy)))
Włochy comes from the same root as "Wales"...Germanic name for Romance or Celtic areas.
@@erichamilton3373 This is the source of "Wallachia" and "Vlach" as well, right?
I'm from Ukraine and haven't yet learned all the names of the cities of my own country in English) So, I'm very grateful! 🔥
And by the way, your pronunciation is awesome 👍🏻 maybe even better than ours sometimes 😂
Very kind of you to say, Alex!
Interesting video! I noticed that the media and people in general started saying "Kyiv" instead of "Kiev" when the Ukraine War broke out in 2022 (growing up in the 90s, the Ukrainian capital was always "Kiev" to me). I don't recall any explanation for this shift being explicitly provided. I assumed it was an sign of solidarity and support for Ukraine.
Thanks! You have it right; that’s exactly what it is. Like I said in the video, it’s an optional change that I happen to support.
@@polyMATHY_Luke The problem is that when English speakers see "Kyiv" they often say something more like "Keef"
@@servantofaeie1569 I say /'ki:ev/ in English, but I think /'ki:f/ is taking over, because people are trying to pronounce "Kyiv".
I say [ˈkɪjiu̯] in Ukrainian. That last sound is much closer to a "w" in English than a "v" or an "f".
They were priming the pump for war and trying to get people to buy in. This propaganda machine pushing the war is next level.
I grew up with “Kiev” too, I think the best way to say its true Ukrainian name in my accent would be /kjiːv/, not sure if removing the second s in Odes(s)a is going to catch on so easily though
There is another city with a "polis" part Nikopol. Enki Bilal named his comic book character after him. Thank you for your work.
your pronunciations are incredibly good... of all kinds of languages!
I'm really jealous of how well you pronounce words in both english as well as other languages!
it's super impressive!
Very kind! I have lots to improve upon.
Yea and on top of that he sounds so nicely, especially in Latin.
As a Ukrainian, I didn’t knew even a half of this information 😅 thanks for amazing video! Watching your videos starting from speaking Latin in Rome
Thanks for watching! Duzhe dyakuyu.
As a proud Zaporižžian, I thank you, polýMathy, for your excellent work and hope it’ll help many stop mispronouncing my city & region’s names 😅
Slava Ukrajini 💙💛 vse bude dobre
Героям слава! 🔱
Yes, haha, I got really tired of hearing people pronounce it zapper-neetsa. 😆 As English speakers we’re normally quite confused by something like zhzh in writing, but it’s not that hard to deal with once you get past the orthography. Дякую!
@@polyMATHY_Luke Нема за що, це Вам подяка! Was incredibly pleasant to hear you speaking this Ukrainianly!
As for the zh and other such digraphs (sometimes tetragraphs, like shch), hope it would be slightly easier if some new official “desovietised” romanisation was introduced, with diacritics instead of letter combinations
@Работаем, брат! source: trust me bro
this bot graduated from the finest shawarma stand in all of St Petersburg
@Работаем, брат! You have no saying in the matter while your country is killing our people. Crawl back to your swamp.
What is the nickname of the car the Soviets made there?
OMG. I am Ukrainian, and I think this guide is perfect. Speaking about the 'historic' vs. 'modern' city names, I always try to learn the way the locals call them: this both shows respect and makes it easier to read departure boards in the airports or at the stations. That is why I was happy to visit Köln (while some may say it is Cologne), Antwerpen (I did not know it is Antwerp) and İzmir (not Smyrna). Thank you for the video!
In polish Köln is Kolonia which is funny because in Poland Kolonia is a popular name of village "suburbs", near the border of a village, so called middle of nowhere. If a village is named Wólka then it's sort of a "center", but Wólka-Kolonia is a victim of jokes.
Your pronunciation of Zaporizhzhia is amazing for a foreign speaker. This is one of the hardest Ukrainian names. 🙂
The largest Ukrainian port city has a Greek name: Οδησσός. It is Odessos in Ancient Greek and Odissos in Modern.
I didn't quite get why English speakers say "k" for "х". I may be butchering, Russian/Ukrainian but I just say it as I'd pronounce "ch/h" in Polish and it seems far from "k". That combined with "zh" transliteration makes my head explode when I see transliterated Ukrainian/Russian cities or names haha
Thanks a lot for my native city Cernihiv - one of the oldest cities of ancient Rus and modern Ukraine (we will celebrate 1320 y.o. in 2024). Only Kyiv is older (celebrated 1541 y.o. this year) if not to mention the former Greek polices in the south). We pronounce the name of city in Ukrainian more like: Cher'nihif. And even in Russian we say Chyer'nihaf, because Ukrainians do not say hard "g" like Russians (as well as southern Russians also say "h" instead of "g"). Also Chernihiv is near Belarus border so here you can hear some mix of Ukrainian and Belarusian language, which is close to Polessian dialects of Ukrainian and Belarusian languages. That is why Chernihiv is also often pronounced as Cher'nihaw ("w" is pronounced close to English "w"), especially in northern parts of the oblast (close to Belarusian pronunciation "Tshar'nihau"). Belaruses pronounce "Ch" as hard sound like CZ in Polish, while in standard Ukrainian "Ch" is much more milder, and in Russian "ch" is always mild (like ć in Polish).
Ghernihiv is not only one of the oldest cities but also one of the most beautiful🥰
@@liudmylab2328 1320%😉
Fun fact, most western Ukrainian oblast capitals have their separate names in German and/or Polish/Hungarian/Romainan. For example Lviv is also Lemberg and Lwów, while Chernivtsi is also Czernowitz or Cernăuți. And those toponyms are often used within those countries instead of universally accepted versions.
Very cool
@@polyMATHY_Luke Actually there are even more names in yiddish slovakian latin and in almost every language in Europe. The yiddish is לעמבעריק (Lèmberik), slovakian Ľvov and latin Leopolis.
I'm a bit disappointed that German has stopped using many of them.
Exonyms.
It used to be Lemberg in Swedish too. Swedes used to use the same names for cities and regions in central and eastern Europe as the Germans did, at least until the end of WWI. In some cases we still use those names. The region where Lviv/Lwow/Lemberg is situated is still Galizien in Swedish. Moldova is Moldavien (Moldawien in German). Bratislava used to be Pressburg. Warsaw Warschau. Poznan Posen. Etc etc etc.
A nice and interesting video,it is going to be helpful to English speaking people! And by the way my place of birth is Lugans’k, I lived there until 2014.
9:58 I'm surprised that you didn't mention that Lyman also comes from Greek.
λιμένας - port, dock, harbor.
From Greek through Turkic languages. In Turkish "havalimanı" is an airport.
love to see you do a video on this, i've spent a bit now trying to learn how to say places and words in Ukrainian since it's what my not-too-distant ancestors spoke, also so i can say their names correctly. Ideally i can actually speak it when i visit one day. one thing that ends up being a convenience for me is that due to me becoming aware of the outer world in the 2010s is that i didn't have to learn any new names/switch any
It's simple!
Bilhorod-Dnistrovskyi, Kamianets-Podilskyi, Yuzhnoukrayinsk and Novhorod-Siverskyi:
You forgot Khmelnytskiy!
and Kryvyi Rih😅
@@БогданНовоградов-ш3т лишнехросомньıй тебя никто не спрашивал...
All Greek-like names in Southern Ukraine, including Mariupol, Sevastopol, Simferopol, Odesa, Kherson, Melitopol and also cities in Russia such as Stavropol, it was a policy of Russian Empire that had many goals, main ones being
1. Trying to eradicate names that already existed here, especially Crimean names, for example Kefe was renamed to Feodosia and Kezlev was renamed to Jevpatoria
2. Establishing connection to Ancient Greece to cement Russian claims to Constantinople and title of the "Third Rome"
I didn't quite understand some of those transcriptions, espessialy that prenasalized palatal /ɟⁿʲi 'prɔ/. It supposed to be /dʲnʲi 'prɔ/, but i guess that was a graphic mistake.
As for Rivne, "e" vowel is quite higher than /ɛ/ for absolute majority of speakers, aproaching cardinal /e/ quality as it's unstressed. All vowels in Ukrainian tend to have their quality moving a bit to the centre while not losing distinct quality. Although here's the fun thing - there's ongoing merger of unstressed /e/ and /ɪ/ in unstessed syllables so менé (genative of я "І" unless before a preposition due to stress shift) and минé (third person singular future of минути "to pass, to pass by") are complete homophones /meˈnɛ/.
Ukrainians being mad at Kyiv and Odesa has more to do with existing threat from Russia and it's colonization policies then and today to. As oposed to names like Milan and Rome for Milano and Roma there were no active effort from France to destroy Roman and Milanese identities and shut their voices, while here enormous Russification project was happening from 1627 at least, when for the first time Ukrainian books were burn and first print bans were imposed.
As to end this here are some Ukrainian place names just to break English speakers minds and tongues in form of fun exersize trying to actually pronounce them: Неветленфолу, Петропавлівська Борщагівка, Зноб-Новгородське, Щекавиця, Ржищів, Монастирище, Фертешолмаш, Тячів
Privit, Anton, thanks very much. Indeed, I'm aware of that tragic history with the "Greek" names - I didn't want to get too much into the politics in this video, as you see.
As for, [ɟⁿʲi 'prɔ], I copied and pasted that IPA (and all of the IPA transcriptions of toponyms in this video) directly from Wikipedia or Wiktionary so as not to make a mistake. I can see that since publishing this video someone has changed it to [dʲnʲiˈprɔ] on both:
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Дніпро#Ukrainian
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dnipro
I assume someone saw this video, and corrected the Wiki pages. Was it you? Good job if so. Although, the audio sample does sound like [ɟⁿʲi 'prɔ], so maybe it was an attempt at a narrow transcription of that man's way of saying it.
Really great point about unstressed e and the mergers there, which I had read about and noticed in speech. Do you think /ei̯/ is an acceptable way to render this in English?
As for Kyiv and Odesa, the current political situation is what informs my recommendation to my Anglophone audience to embrace the transliterations from Ukrainian. But I don't make this recommendation from an abstract linguistic point of view, which is the purpose of the discussion in the video.
Those are beautiful Ukrainian names.
Thanks for the comment.
Would recommend Vlad Vexler's video on Crimea for anyone who wants to know more about the Greek connection!
Ok, but being that butthurt over FOREIGN (not Russian) people using traditional exonyms in their own languages without any undertones and with no intention to make a political statement is rather exaggerated. For example I support Ukraine and I still use the names that I'm used to in English because they're natural to me and most native speakers still use them without any intention of offending anyone.
@@bartoszwojciechowski2270 Guess where those “English” exonyms come from? That’s right, Russian.
@@polyMATHY_Luke I think that [ɟⁿʲ] is a possible interpretation too. Nasalisation of stops before nasals actually occurs in a lot of languages allophonically, we just usually don't mark it except in very detailed phonetic transcriptions. In fast speech, the nasal may be entirely absorbed by the stop and realised as nasalisation of the former, i.e. they two are pronounced as single units (the same happens in fast speech in Polish, btw., and it also applies to stops followed by /l/ (but not in Ukrainian since it has a dark "l" while Polish has a clear one which has less auditory "power"), e.g. the stop+sonorant clusters in "dno" and "dla" may be pronounced as single units in fast speech, and in slower speech, the stops are still technically nasalised or lateralised but the sonorants are clearly pronounced). And I think it's entirely possible for the phoneme /dʲ/ to be realised as [ɟ] in many contexts as they're very similar sounds, and you only have to slightly move your tongue when making the latter. But still, it's just transcription, arguing over it is silly xd
Btw., Luke, you're the first native English speaker I've ever heard who's able to correctly imitate the phonological systems of foreign languages :O I'm very impressed. I guess it's due to your ability to read IPA, right? I think we should teach IPA to kids because it really helps with learning pronunctiation. I've noticed that native speakers of English very often diphthongise monophthongal /o/ and /e/ in foreign languages because English only allows diphthongs in coda positions for these vowels. So maybe that's how you could pronounce Ukrainian names that end in these vowels to still sound natural in English?
I hate Cyrillic transcription using English alphabet. I guess using any European language alphabet other then English would be better. I think we should use something similar to transcription which is used in Serbia.
Indeed.
czech latin would be pretty good for this language.
just need one more letter for щ which probably be ś just like in polish
As an English speaker, I agree. I hate seeing Ys for /j/s, CHs for /tʃ/s and SHs for /ʃ/s everywhere.
Duzhe dyakuyu for video. Nineteen minutes of the pleasure.
The latter half of "Singapore" also happens to be related to the "-pol" suffix!
Oh, wow, indeed. Sanskrit पुर् "pur", Greek "polis", through Indo-European. This blew my mind. Thanks!
This is really cool
And Lithuanian "pilis", Latvian "pils".
Isn't it "Lion City" thus the namesake of Lviv?
@@The0Stroyexactly!
There's also a thing that used to happen in (some) South Slavic languages. In historical sources you can find -pol replaced with -polje (in many cases but not all). Polje literally means a field if translated to English. So you can find Galipolje (Gelibolu, Gallipoli, a city in Turkey today), Sebastopolje (Sevastopol), Melitopolje (Melitopol), Nikopolje (Nikopol, a town in Bulgaria, also a town in Ukraine) and so on. Not sure if it happened purely out of similarity between -pol and -polje or why it did at all, but ye, it happened. In recent times and in modern speech i haven't heard anyone using -polje versions (apart from Galipolje but rarely).
Great video as allways,
Cheers!
P.s. Constantinople (Konstantinopol, Istanbul) was weirdly enough never called Konstantinopolje but there is another (South) Slavic name for it, Carigrad (Car/Tzar - Emperor, Grad - City).
Very cool!
Luke, I… lack for words. That's just incredible, your pronunciation is extremely good, and I'm super grateful for your effort! It's always great to know that a person whose videos I appreciate so much is a true human with a big heart. Thank you so much, hugs to you and greetings to your dearest ones, be blessed and happy! Дуже дякую за це відео!
For Ukrainian speakers it sounds very strange, when the [x] sound is pronounced as [k]. In Ukrainian it's a different phoneme. I think, if your language doesn't have the [x] sound, the [h] sound is the closest one to represent it. Also, it won't lead to any confusion, because there is no [h] sound in Ukrainian. If you say [kɐ'hɔvkɐ] instead of [kɐ'xɔvkɐ], every Ukrainian will understand you immediately, but it you say [kɐ'kɔvkɐ], it depends on the context, if people will understand you. The problem is that in Ukrainian the letters "x" and "к" are different phonemes, but by using the [k] sound for "х" in the second case, you make them the same. Also, in this particular name, Ukrainians will probably find it funny, because it sounds a little bit vulgar, since кака means poop in Ukrainian.🙂
In my native language (Greek for anyone wondering) we use the names derived from Russian, via other European languages. (Κίεβο for Kyiv, Δνείπερος for Dnipro). We never really changed it to support Ukraine, it’s just that the names have been used for a long time that we never really decided to change it, I guess.
In Croatia there is a region Kninska Krajina where a village Kijevo is located.
It's sad, bc 1000 years ago, here were: Kyiv Chernihiv, Dnipro, and Pereiaslav. Old "Russian" is a rightfully old version of Ukrainian.
As far as I know Americans cannot pronounce a soft L but you did
"Crimea" in Norwegian is just "Krimhalvøya".
"Krim" is the name, "halv" means half, "øy" means "island" and the "a" at the end means "the", so "The Krim halfisland"
"Halvøya" (half-island) is our word for "peninsula".
The word "krim" is also a word we use for crime, as in doing something illegal, although I've honestly only seen it in the context of police investigations and crime stories etc.
11:18
English speakers insistence on treating the "e" at the end of words as silent really is a pet peeve of mine...
Ukrainian and Russian also say "half-island"
pivostriv (piv - half, ostriv - island) and poluostrov (polu - half, ostrov - island) respectively
I hate the English insisting of silent "e" at the end of words too, especially if they do it on foreign words!!
@@Kitulous Thank you for telling me that.
@@Delibro May I ask what your native language is?
@@Luredreier My native language is German.
The American pronunciation of "Porsche" ...
A British person would never say kɜːʼsəʊn... or hɪˈɹəʊʃɪmə for Hiroshima. That's a very American way to say foreign O's and we Brits would never even think of pronouncing it that way
It’s whatever vowel you use in “stone.” It’s different depending on the Brit’s accent.
Actually the Ukrainian v should be pronounced as w after the constants so Kakhovka would be Kakhowka as well
As a ukrainian, i have to say, when our "x" is transcribed as "kh", pronouncing it as "k" sounds really weird. Like when you called Bakhmut "Bakmut". It just doesn't feel right lol
Great video!
Well explained about Kiev/Kyiv!
The one sound that people can't seem to get right is 'zh', despite it being an English sound (treaSure).
I learned the pronunciations from the news analysts, _The Duran_ , who are Greek, although as sons of diplomats they grew up outside of Greece and speak English with the accent of England and the US respectively. That's also where I learned that the president of Ukraine doesn't speak Ukrainian. He speaks Russian and English, so I've heard.
As for showing respect, I certainly don't wish to insult anyone on either side of the conflict. But sometimes you have to choose. For instance, 97% of Crimean voters chose to separate from Ukraine, as did a large majority of the voters in Donbas, and in response, Ukraine has been shelling them since 2014. Methinks the prestige Ukraine has gained since last year is a delusion. I don't blame the citizens. I blame my stinking corrupt US government and Joey Biden, who has banked millions from raping Ukraine of her resources. If you only became aware of Ukraine in February of 2022, and only listened to Megacorporate Media, it'll seem simple to decide that Russia, of rather Putin is evil. But if you care to look further to find out what's going on, you'll find that it's not that simple. Putin isn't an irrational mad man, and Elensky isn't an angel. (The first letter of his name is illegal in some places due to Russia marking their tanks with that letter, which should be a clue as to the Insanity driving this continued conflict).
I just don't appreciate my own government vowing to keep it going until the last Ukrainian is dead. Obama ordered the coup to overthrow the legitimately elected president that the Ukrainian voters chose. If it happened in Canada, or Mexico, I'm pretty sure my US government would do what Putin is doing. The Military Industrial Complex is making bank on this, and that's the only reason they want to keep it going instead of allowing both Ukrainians and Russians to live in peace. And by the way, the reason Donbas and Crimea wanted out of Ukraine is because of Obama's illegal coup and puppet government.
I like your explanation of exonyms such as Odessa, Kiev or Milan. For that matter English Paris is in the same category as it's not the same as French Paris...nor should it be. Use of exonyms grounds us in historicity and helps guard against linguistic/geography chaos, which is caused by constant attempts at name changing. Use of exonyms has nothing to do with political leanings (it certainly shouldn't), and is the way to go for all languages. I'd expect Ukrainians to use their own names for London, New York or Rome.
Берут русские города основанные при Екатерине второй и каверкают их
Автор канала винит нас в "кремлёвской пропаганде", а хотя сам пишет "героям сала". Двойные стандарты, они такие. Очень печально, что автор очень однобоко оценивает ситуацию. Он даже не удосужился посмотреть капнуть в историю Украины и убедиться в том, что большинство городов на юге и Востоке страны были основаны при Российской империи.
Всё это выглядит, как заказ, отработка методички. Всё это непохоже на него, ибо он очень подробно и глубоко копает в рассказах про древний Рим и древнюю Грецию.
Thanks for the video. I just want to point out one thing: in Ukrainian е and и get heavily reduced in unstressed positions and, because of that, the better (just in my opinion) way to pronounce Суми is to end it with a schwa sound (or with a closed e if English phonotactics allow it). You can at least consider it to be a plausible alternative to your suggestion. We just don't distinguish between е and и in unstressed positions and children constantly mix them up in writing
Odessa is from Greek Odessos with double 's'. Catherine the Great gave quite a few new-founded cities Greek names through her 'Greek project' on the newly conquered land from the Turks.
One thing about being a Celt, I do not have a problem with the Cyrillic letter ‘х’, either in hearing or speaking.
One interesting thing though, in the orthography of the Ewe language of West Africa, the letters h and x correspond to the same symbols in IPA. However, at least one second generation descendant brought up in the USA has grown up with “Anglo Ears” and wonders why her parents’ languages has to use the two different letters.
Italians are indifferent about the usage of French names for their cities in English, as France doesn't have a war with Italy and Italians don't feel oppressed by French language, there is a certain sense of equality between France and Italy, while using Russian names for Ukrainian cities is a sign of colonial dominance of Russian language and state over Ukraine.
(sorry for double comment but I just noticed something)
Wikipedia may be a good source for pronunciation of names of cities or rivers but I think it's absolutely terrible for personal names (like members of the government or military commanders)
Which makes it *extremely* confusing how to correctly pronounce the names of Ukranian people.
for example: it somehow lists 3 different spellings for Zelensky's name: Zelensky, Zelenskiy and Zelenskyy (with double Y at the end!)
in addition to that we also have the military commander-in-chief spelled as Valerii Zaluzhnyi (first name spelled with double "i" at the end and last name spelled with 'yi')
It's obvious that the transcription of personal names with the roman alphabet is a total mess!
In just two examples above Wikipedia manages to exhaust ALL mathematically possible combinations of the letters "i" and "y" and the end of names!!
We have "ii", "yy", "iy" and "yi" in the names of just two people!!
This has to be some kind of a record, lmao 🤣🤣
Haha thanks for the comment, double or otherwise! That’s hilarious. Also an important note. Since Wikipedia can be corrected, if you’re confident about the change, you should suggest it.
Thx Luke, all your pronunciation is perfect! with the only minor error in Berdyansk, Y in this case makes previous D softer like Dʲ.
Thanks, Bogdan! Hopefully I’ll learn Ukrainian fluently one day.
Not Ukrainian, but I just wanted to point out that "Kiev" is not really a historical English toponym like Milan and Naples but rather a direct Russian loanword. There is, in fact, a historical English name for Kyiv which is Kyow (borrowed through Polish and German) but, of course, no one has used that one for over a century and there's nothing to be gained by reinstating it.
Lviv (often referred to by its Russian name Lvov in the past) also had a couple of interesting historical toponyms that are no longer in use including the German-based Lemberg (which was probably the name an English-speaker would have used in the 19th century) and, more interestingly enough, the Latin-based name Leopolis. While neither of those names are in use (in English at least), people from Lviv are still known as "Leapolitans" in English, much in the same way English keeps the more conservative and Latinate adjectival forms for Venetians and Neapolitans.
This gets even more confusing for other cyrillic users. In Bulgarian, historically we've taken mostly the russian names and for most of them, their spelling in russian as well, because our alphabet fits closer to the russian version of cyrillic. Pronounciation is balkanized a lot, as we lack many of the vowels and palatalizations they both have. We don't have i and ї for example and ь is extremly rare. We are writing Киев, but pronouncing it is closer to what an english speaker would say as Kiev. If i get the orthography correct - we say it as Кiев in urkainian/Киэв in russian. But same as in english, we are lately aiming at adopting more ukraninan names so we have things like Харкив, Днипро, Чернихив comming through which don't look either ukranian nor russian, but that's just our best approximation of spelling to pronounce it more as ukranian rather then russian.
I think it often boils down to this: spelling vs pronunciation. Either you keep the ‘proper’ spelling (the endonym) and absolutely butcher the pronunciation (because your own language operates on a different phonological rulebook) or you butcher the spelling in order to most closely approximate the ‘proper’ pronunciation. Some languages are more phonetically analogous and thus require less tweaking, some require great compromise by disregarding either spelling or pronunciation (or by giving up on both and savouring creative ignorance)
And then, as you’ve shown, there’s etymology. Very often, foreign versions of a name retain some older spelling feature that was present in the original spelling but was lost in the language of the home country. ‘Florence’ retains the and of Latin ‘Florentia‘ that Italian has lost, ‘Odessa’ keeps the of the Greek root. It’s not all too different for Kiev/Kyiv and its old Ruthenian ancestor.
I, for one, admit to having somewhat of a soft spot for maintaining an older and etymologically more faithful orthography whenever possible. But, of course, language adapts to new realities and it serves the people speaking it, not vice versa. In the end, it’s all merely a balancing act between written language, spoken language, history, culture, politics and - most important of all - the great duality of fervour and laziness present in every single one of us.
Thanks for the comment. Those are important points to consider.
Дуже цікаве та актуальне відео, дякую!
As a Ukrainian and a former linguist, I suppose I should say there are some minor mistakes in this video, but I appreciate your interest, so I don't want to be picky.
I guess the biggest one is at 3:43 where you mention the fact that Г is used for the /h/ sound. You're not wrong here but, given the context, since you were talking about KH instead of H, I found it misleading, so I think you should've mentioned that we use Г for the H equivalent in English, and Х for KH, respectively.
Your pronunciation of Zaporizhzhia is very good, almost perfect for someone speaking English, in my opinion, although I would recommend attempting to pronounce the ending just a tiny bit more as "ya" rather than just "a", after the long "zh".
Also, it would be nice to mention Chornobyl since many remembered it as Chernobyl in the old days of the USSR.
Other than that, pretty good work, thanks for making this video, I appreciate it.
Thanks! Good points.
Duzhe tobi dyakuyu druzhe. Thanks you so much. Video is made well
Unfortunately, it looks like the youtube deleted (or something, because I don't see it) my comment where I recommended a website that could help with the pronunciation. Anyways, thank you very much, Luke, for the great, as always, video! Your accent is really cute in some words :) (For some reason your "Kyiv/Київ" pronunciation sounds like "Киив" to me). I wanted to add, that "v/в", when pronounced at the end of a syllable, is often realised as "f", which is, I think, especially the case with many Ukrainians who grew up speaking Russian at home (However, I, as someone who never spoke Russian in my life, still often say "Kharkif", as well as "Kharkiv"). There are many more details about the Ukrainian (as about any other language's) phonology that could be said, but I don't think that's relevant to the video. Take care, Luke and everyone reading this!
Hi Max! Yes, RUclips usually deletes links and such, but if you describe the URL or space it out it might appear. I'm glad if my rendition of the Ukrainian is acceptable. You're right about how I said Київ.
@@polyMATHY_Luke Even without the URL the youtube deletes my comment :( My third try: choose the Ukrainian language on you glish, it's really helpful for many languages as it shows how native speakers pronounce words in context.
That’s a shame! What’s the name of the site?
@@polyMATHY_Luke It's you glish. Just google it, unfortunately the youtube hates me whenever I try to give more details.
your Дякую has common mistake. In your pronounce it sounds more "дЪякую"....instead of "дЯкую". Passage from Д to Я must be way softer, almost unnoticable. While many not native speakers for some reason tend to harden the end of Д sound....so it looks like in between Д and Я there is something hard "дЪякую"
Yes, something I’ve never mastered in any Slavic language. I’ll keep working at it.
@@polyMATHY_Luke Neither the less, quite remarkable pronunciation of ukrainian. Though Didnt expect less from a polyglot like you!!!
Very kind! I’ll keep at it.
Wow, a huge and amazing work was done in this video. And your Ukrainian prononciation is wonderful. Thank you!
Слава Україні 🔱
As a linguistics student, enthusiast of phonetics and native speaker of Slovak, I'm very happy to see this profound and awesome phonetic adaptation of the names. This video just soothes my heart 😂 Thank you! 😁
It's always best to use endonyms over exonyms, so I'll try to learn the Ukrainian names, but I haven't seen the same courtesy being applied to toponyms of countries being genocided by the US or its allies.
Perfect pronunciation! Bravissimo! As a translator in Ukraine, I always struggle with how to render our Ukrainian place names in English. Especially small localities, villages etc. I also hate the official Ukrainian latinization bringing us the monstrous Zaprorizhzhia or Chernivtsi, which look intimidating, so I usually write Zaporizhia, although I don't like rendering Ж as ZH altogether. Latinization of Ukrainian is another hot topic in Ukrainian, and I personally favor the Central European approach, that is Zaporižžia, Čerkasy and Černiwci.
Very kind of you to say so! Indeed, I hope there will be some sort of reform to these spellings as well.
I don’t favor the Ukrainians switching to the Latin alphabet, as the Ukrainian Cyrillic alphabet is very efficient and clear, in my opinion. But I heard some Ukrainians mention this idea in order to become more Westernized. What do you think?
@@polyMATHY_Luke I þanke þe for þyne answere, my lefe freend! The Cyrillic alphabet definitely should be preserved for the Ukrainian language. Truth be told, all those discussions about Ukrainians switching to the Latin alphabet don't hold water. Moreover, most Ukrainian will never agree to that. However, the transliteration of Ukrainian for the outside world should be improved bc things like ZH, SHCH, DZH or YY (for Ж, Щ, ДЖ, ИЙ) are too clumsy. In fact, they are just remnants of the awkward Soviet quick fix.
This cities in South of Ukraine have Greek got names after russian empire destroyed Crimean Khanat. This cities had Crimean Tatars names. But russian empire wanted to complitely destroy memory about history of Crimea. That's why they renamed all cities and pretended they where Greek but not Crimean Khanat
Greek colonies was there also, but not in places of most of that cities
We in Ukraine often get confused whether Bakhmut should be stressed on the first or on the second syllable in Ukrainian. Actually, it is a historical name of the city which was renamed back not so long ago. Previously, it was called Artyomovsk after soviet tradition. Nice to see our cities in modern Ukrainianized spelling in English.
Id rather say a famous city there was bakhmut
I tend to prefer to use an h like sound for X, instead of a k like sound. Probably from growing up with relatives from Ukraine who use the original local pronunciations. Note: that place name pronunciations can vary regionally in Ukraine and official spellings are based on pronunciation in Kyiv.
Thank you for the video
It is always so confusing for me to hear "X" sound as "Kh". I mean I get it but it takes me a moment to understand which city foreigner is referring to
That’s an interesting point. Since an /h/ sound already exists as г, should we nevertheless make both г and х /h/ in English? My feeling is that was the more confusing, but I’m eager to hear from Ukrainians on this issue.
@@polyMATHY_Luke for me as a speaker of Ukrainian (not native), the Ukrainian г sounds closer to the modern Greek gamma, but not so hard. I mean, like a voiced English h, if my explanation makes any sense.
@@polyMATHY_Luke If it were up to me I'd keep /h/ sound for both г and х. But yeah I can see possible confusion here
I'd say that in 'Aha' /h/ sounds almost like (if not identical) Ukrainian г
@@stsglntin Polish it used to be “Ch” and “H” which were voiced and unvoiced versions of this sound (or the other way around). Today they have exactly the same sound. It’s confusing when spelling because you have to remember which one to use. That’s why Polish name for Kherson is Chersoń.
There's a nice town of Rzhyshchiv in Kyiv oblast which is good for pronunciation training.
Beautiful!
As a Croatian i know that English pronounce most Slavic language names wrong, not just city names but also last names.
On the other hand i don't think in opossite situatiom that is always the case.
As a Ukrainian speaker, I would pronounce Sumy the same as summa con laude, with an unstressed schwa at the end
Thanks for the suggestion! What about for Rivne etc?
@@polyMATHY_Luke reeve-nay since we want to distinguish final -y and final -e
Nice pronunciation
What did you said at the outro?
Great video, you explained everything very well.
As a Ukrainian, I appreciate your work.
I am happy that the world finally started seeing us as a separate nation and not a part of russia
Very glad to see Ukraine as a thriving nation
Imho the "kh" is bs. The "h" in "Harkiv" sounds too me (I am from Harkiv) exactly like the "h" from "house". The same applies to Hmelnytskyi and KaHovka. It's just an "h". By the way I study slavic philology... The distinction between "kh" and "h" just confuses foreigners so that they don't say correctly KaHovka but instead KaKovka which sounds like some excrement...
It isn’t the same, though, as [x] is a velar fricative, and [h] is a glottal fricative. The latter isn’t even articulated in the mouth, but the throat, while [x] is far forward of it. While they sound acoustically similar to people who don’t have both in their language, they sound quite different to those who have both.
Thus the problem for English speakers is that either х and г will both be merged with /h/, or к and г will both be merged with /k/. We can’t make the three-way distinction in English, so we have to choose one of these mergers. As I said in the video, the traditional way is the latter. But if Ukrainians overwhelmingly prefer the former merger, we can oblige.
Слава Україні. 🔱
@@polyMATHY_Luke I know but as I said KaKovka just sounds wrong 😅
As a Slavic speaker I give You permission to use H in both places but You will have to explain this everytime to others, some people want consistency... We were taught at school that in ancient times there was distinction in h sounds but now it is merged. Different spelling helps with grammatical issues and indicates origin of words, adds meaning.
As a native Ukrainian speaker (well Rusyn but whatever) I just want to bring up the vice versa that bothers me. For some reason we transliterate English names that have letter “h” into Ukrainian “x”. So for example “Manhattan” becomes “Манхетен”. This bothers me so much! We already have the “h” sound in Ukrainian with “г” so why change it? I assume its due to Russian influence since they dont have that sound but still not quiet sure about this. Its something I am always correcting my cousins on when they speak English.
Indeed! Must be an old fashioned spelling convention.
It’s also kind of weird that you transliterate the first “a” as “а” but the second and the last one as “е”. I’d expect either “Мангатан” (based on the original spelling), “Менгетен” or “Мангатен” (based on the pronunciation /mænˈhæt.ən/) or “Менгатен” or “Мангетан” (based on the pronunciation /mənˈhæt.ən/). ;-)
@@mertonnephake Good point, there are different ways to pronounce it. Since I emigrated to NYC, here we say something close to “Менгетен” in English. But for some reason I subconsciously switch to
"Мангeтeн" when speaking with other Ukrainians or Russians.
I have Ukrainian heritage and I still call it Kiev in English even though I know it is Kiiv in actual Ukrainian. Both are technically correct.
Thank you for the great video Luke! And I really appreciate your choice for the soundtrack!
Thanks, Alexey! I’m not familiar with many Ukrainian folk songs, but I was hopeful that they would sound familiar and appropriate to my Ukrainian audience, while simultaneously acquainting non-Ukrainians with your musical tradition.
Never did understand all this "Kh..." thing in Kherson and other. Actual sound does not have any "K" in it, and you have words that sounds the same. Like "heresy", "heritage", heraldry.
Sound is much closer to "H" than "Kh". Just listen to those sounds for city names in Ukrainian even in google translate. I'm not a linguist so I might miss the reason behind it, but the sound is wrong. I'm Ukrainian.
Thanks for the comment. As English does not have [x], we have to look for a sound that is closest; [x] and [k] are articulated in the exact same part of the mouth, whereas [h] is not articulated in the mouth at all. Obviously there is some acoustic similarity between [h] and [x] as they are fricatives, but they’re not closer in their physical articulation. See my IPA videos for more on this.
Whatever English sound we use for [x], it will be wrong since it doesn’t exist in our language. But if Ukrainians prefer the wrongness of [h] instead of [k] I’m open to the idea.
@@polyMATHY_Luke Oh, I see. So it's technically correct, bot does not sound right :)
@@polyMATHY_Luke I'm not Ukrainian but Polish and I have to say that I have a very hard time hearing any difference between [x] and [h] (or [ɦ]), however [x] sounds to me nothing like [k]. 😅
[x] of course is used in some English dialects, the classic examplar word being "loch", but also in some circumstances in say, Scouse accents. If people are somewhat familiar with that sound I think they should use it in these Ukrainian places instead of the k-sound you suggest.
I do think thats what most/many people from the UK do with the example "Bach" you gave, i definitely wouldn't pronounce it the same as the word "back"
Very interesting, thanks.
Extremely useful for a Ukrainian learner. Thanks!
I'd also add that you can often see + shchyna as a name of region instead of oblast
Kherson = Croissant
Most news I hear is in Swedish, so it sounds so unusual when /x/ is pronounced /k/. When romanising Cyrilic, we typicaly write /x/ as .
Sounds good to me, if that works in Swedish
As a fluent Ukrainian and English speaker, I really don't understand the need to write "kh" instead of "h" for Harkiv and so on. The English sound in "house", "hat", "home" and so on is far closer to the Ukrainian in Херсон and Харків than the "k" sound given by "kh".
Героям слава! It looks Ukraine now become famous with its ruined cities ... just like Italy and Greece.
I would say English speakers have no need to twist their tongues pronouncing "oblast" (область), far more practical just to say Khreson region, rather than "Kherson oblast". Here are my arguments:
1) oblast is very ugly and unnatural for English.
2) English already has good words for oblast.
3) Ukrainians themselves rarely use word oblast other than official occasions. We have a beautiful and succinct suffix "-щина" that converts a city to a region. so we don't say Херсонська область, we say Херсонщина (Khersonshchyna) which means region of/near Kherson. The suffix can be applied to smaller cities and towns which are not centers of oblast, or even to foreign names.
Regarding pronunciation:
sound х is lighter in Ukrainian,
letter в roughly has two pronunciations: v and short u. I would say there is no need to scare people with 5 different sounds: Ukrainian is enough complicated.
вугільний (coal adjective) has stressed on the first syllable.
Your Ukrainian pronunciation is very good, and the anglicization proposed seems to be reasonable. In fact if Vikings had just a little bit more influence on English, Kyiv could have been spelled like Canugard in English :)
Thank you for promoting underpromoted Ukrainian language and culture!
Absolutely astonishing! You've aced the pronunciation of most cities so that it's hard to discern whether Ukrainian is your first language or not. That's the power of linguistics, I guess.
One thing I would point out, as a native Ukrainian speaker, is that somehow "proper English" pronunciation of Kyiv in the video sounded more natural than "your" variant (13:38). I would assess that it sounded more like "Кив" than "Київ". In fact, simply saying "Kiiv" would be perceived better by an Ukrainian eye. No offense meant by that, it's just an observation.
About "Ukraine" and "The Ukraine" - Polish had a similar situation with "w Ukrainie" (in Ukraine) and "na Ukrainie" (on Ukraine) - with the second one now dropped.
There's no evidence of second one dropped with exceptions of some sources using preposition "w". In addition to that the same applies to Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, Hungary and Slovakia. Yet none of those seem to be bothered.
Czech and Slovak languages also use preposition "na". "Na" is used with respect to Slovakia as well, but Slovaks don't mind at all. In addition to that they do not cook sh**storms about Slovenes "stealing" their name. Yeah, Slovakia is called "Slovensko" in Slovak.
According to professor Miodek it's still correct to say "na Ukrainie" like "na Łotwie", "na Litwie", "na Białorusi", "na Słowacji" and "na Węgrzech". According to professor Bralczyk it's "politically correct to say «w Ukrainie»". Therefore I will always use "na Ukrainie" (not "w Ukrainie") and "na Ukrainę" (and not "do Ukrainy") as a Pole.
a little correction about the -pole cities.
even though the south of Ukraine had had Greek colonies, these cities got their names from a russian queen trying to "legitimize" russia's connection to the antient word of Byzantium/Rome.
Before the russian annexation of 18c Sevastopol was called Akmescit (white mosque) and was populated mostly by Muslim Crimean Tatars. The city of Nikolpol was originally known as the settlement of Mykyta's Cape. Under the pretence of "protecting the Christians" russia deported all Crimean Christians (mostly Greeks from LATER waves of immigration UNrelated to the colonies) to the mainland, where they called their new settlement the city of Mary - Mariupol.
btw I love the background music (started singing the lyrics even before I recognized the name)
- How to pronounce Bakhmut ?
- Artemovsk !
Slava Baklava 👍
Baklavas top food no joke like Xalvas and Kadaifi
@@gnas1897
Only after gournopoula and kokoretsi....
@@Z1BABOUINOS and ofc mageiritsa there's no forgetting about that
Artemisque 😉
@@erkinalp
Αρτεμίσιο (artemisio) 😉
if you wanna go to the original root.
Means: dedicated to the Greek goddess Artemis. (goddess of the moon and hunting.
Diana, in later Roman mythology.
Good video, Luke, as always!
There are some things that came to my mind as to a Ukrainian speaker.
1. I didn't really catch on what you meant by mentioning a pitch component to stress accent when you explained about Bakhmut. I could be wrong, but I've been quite sure there were no such thing in Ukrainian, and honestly the variants you pronounced sound kind of the same to me or like just some regular "syntactic" intonation. Maybe while researching you have payed much attention to a thing that is so subtle that I'm not sure it's really there. It might be the samples you've listened to, which often have some over-emphasised pronounciation, not in a very natural way, so to say.
Although indeed the primary version and more correct stress here would be on the second syllable, an initial-stressed pronunciation is also common. I think that is due to the fact that the current "new-old" name of the city was reintroduced just seven years ago, being Artemivsk for almost a century prior to that, and the correct pronunciation was not so obvious for everyone for a while. It also might be due to resemblance to the last name Pákhmutov(a), which was on hearing and is initial-stressed, and may also even share the etymology.
2. Speaking of double purpose of the letter Y in transcribing into Roman alphabet, notice how inconsistently it is usually applied. Although there is an offical transliteration system which is used by government for names in passports (and it's in not nearly perfect), the overall usage of romanization is a mess honestly. Look how ZaporizhzhIA and BerdYAnsk are transcribed differently for literally no reason (ironically being in the same region). The usage of Y for palatalization and [j] is similar to what happens in a system for Russian language. For me, the issue here is that in Ukrainian Y=И is far more frequent than Y=Ы is in Russian, and if we apply the same rule in Ukrainian, it would be overloaded with those Ys, and in addition leaving some ambiguity (like in "Pryazovya"). Therefore I prefer the "Polish style" for after palatalized consonants, which are used offically, but these are also ambivalently used for /ja, jo, ju, je/ which leads to such ridiculous (as for me) spellings like Iuliia. Ideally, I would introduce the J for that purpose, which is completely absent from any system for some reason and unfortunately it's not in common practice using it. So it would be Pryazovja, Berdiansk, Zaporizhzhia, Julija and so on, much better I think. :)
I agree with your recommendation of the j! That would be a much better convention. As for the pitch component of stress accent, I didn’t mean something phonemic like phonemic pitch. What was trying to say you actually wrote more elegantly here: pitch variations are a normal part of speech. In stressed syllables in Ukrainian, the pitch tends to be lower when the word is in isolation or in other situations, whereas we don’t often do that in English, so we get super confused haha, also because Ukrainian is syllable-timed while English and Russian are stress-timed; when the syllables are roughly the same duration, this causes us confusion because we except unstressed syllables to be shorter.
Something like this happens in Italian too: in isolation words like amare importante often have a higher pitch on the syllable before the stressed one.
Thanks for the comment!
Thanks for your work, great video with very detailed explanations!
I am sorry, but I can't agree with your example regarding the spelling of Odesa, Kyiv and the rest of the toponyms listed in that block. You gave the example of Italian cities, which English took from a language older than modern Italian. If you compare it with the Ukrainian context, it is as if someone borrowed the name "Kyiv" from the spelling of the tenth century and kept it for 1000 years, adapting it to update their own language. How, for example, the Spanish kept "Ucrania" from ancient maps instead of transliterating the modern name as "Ucraina"
And in this case, when "Kiev" appears, it is either ignorance of the nuances, or deliberate disrespect. By using "Kiev", "Odessa", "Kharkov", "Lvov" or "Dnepr" you call our cities by the names that the colonizers - the russians - told you about them. It's like saying "Ceylon" instead of "Sri Lanka". Our colonizer's language is more like ours than English is Sinhala, but we still live through post-colonialism as we see fit.
Being Ukrainian, I never really understood the "the Ukraine" issue. On the other hand, there is an issue of saying "на Украине" (on Ukraine) which many Ukrainians had a problem with because saying "на" (on) instead of "в" (in) implies that Ukraine is not a name of a country, but of some territory. Many Ukrainians saw this as Russians implying that Ukraine is just a territory of Russia.
A point about the names. The existance of different names in different languages shows that that place has existed in the minds and mouths of people who speak that language. For example, most large FInnish cities have a Finnish and a Swedish name. The Swedish names are testament to the closeness of the two cultures and the presence of these cities in the mind of Swedish-speakers (and it goes both ways, many cities in Sweden have a different name in Finnish). Finland and Sweden were united in the past. Similarly, Ukrainian cities have their own names in FInnish, Kiev is Kiova, Kharkov is Harkova. Finland and Ukraine both belonged to the Russian empire at the same time.
Indeed.
At that some names in Ukraine are really ancient. For example, a small town in Kharkiv region bears name Meréfa, which is Scythian for "Dead Snake"; also name of a village in Cherkasy region - Irklíyiv comes from Scythian "Curvy Stream". The name of my native city Chilia in Odesa region comes from the Greek name Achillea. That's right, this is the native land of the Troyan War hero Achilles, and the remains of his tomb and sanctuary still are at the Snakes Island in the Black Sea nearby the city, where fierce fights against Russian occupants were fought last spring, and we won! 🇺🇦
Thank you Igor Voloshin; this is fantastic info. Really appreciate sharing. Wikipedia awaits me.
@@igorvoloshin3406 I'm just curious what goes through the mind of someone like you. You do use the word "occupiers" with a pejorative connotation, right? And you are obviously cheering as an expression of the nationalistic/patriotic feelings you have. But it seems like you glorify or at least are proud of the fact that your place of birth was also a Greek colony. Were they occupiers too, and were they "good" occupiers in that case? And since we are at that, how did that part of the country become Ukraine in the first place and since when? What's the history behind it exactly? All these questions might be hard and even triggering I realize that.
@@jabrilbalakrishna err... it seems you're not very much acquainted in ancient history of Ukraine. In fact, the lands of Southern Ukraine were part of the cradle of the Greek nation, including those vast territories which are under waves now - Ghilea, the green and plentiful land to the south of Odesa and Meothia Swamps which are now at the bottom of Azov sea. It was in Ghilea where hunter Acteon angered goddes Arthemida, and was turned by her into deer to be hunted by his own dogs. And in the middle of Meothian Swamps there was the cave entrance to the realm of Aid, where poet Orpheus descended trying to bring his beloved Euridica back to the realm of alive. Greeks were not colonists here, they were local natives, and our land is the land where legendary heroes walked and myths were born. The Greeks lived here in Southern Ukraine for millenia... and were oppressed by Russian Empire / Soviet Russia just the same as Ukrainians and other nations of these lands.
So may it seem, Greeks lived in Ukraine long before Ukrainians or any other Slavic tribes even formed? Not so simple. As recent paleogenetic studies prove, modern Ukrainians still bear the genes of the ancient local peoples beginning from the very first Indo-Europeans of the Yamna culture, which inhabited South-East of Ukraine as long ago as in 4th millenium BC. So we Ukrainians also have the firm right to live at our ancient lands.
But current invaders are definitely out of any right to raid our lands. They'we unlawfully broken treaties and borders signed and approved by them. How can you or anyone even try to excuse them?
The spelling "Odessa" is ingrained into our consciousness, and since the pronunciation is identical in English anyway, I don't think it makes a difference to spell it with one S or two.
Likewise with Chernobyl, for rather infamously unfortunate reasons. It would take a monumental effort to get people to spell it as Chornobyl.
But Kyiv will stay Kyiv, despite our derived terms "Kievan Rus’" and "Chicken Kiev". Not only is it the preferred term by Ukrainians and the media, the other spelling is used deliberately by ruZZian imperialists and their apologists in order to demean Ukraine and show support for the terrorist invasion. So Kyiv it is, just like Luhansk, Kharkiv, and Mykolayiv.
There were some old names of cities
Херсон - Белиховичі
Kherson - Belykhovychi
Нікополь - Микитин ріг
Nikopol - Mykytyn rih
Одеса - Хаджибей - Коцюбіїв
Odesa - Khadzhybei - Kotsiubiiv
Маріуполь - Домаха
Mariupol - Domakha
English has many flavours but locally to me the word coat is not a good example in the North of England as it has a hint of two vowel sounds eg co-at, with two syllables and the road is pronounced ro-ad quite similar to OP Shakespeare. The accents of the Midlands and the North is sometimes like archaeology (Brit here)with hints of Old English, Norse,Cumbric and Gaelic.
Good note
Thanks for this video! Дуже велика робота! Дякую!
Слава Україні! 🔱
@@polyMATHY_Luke Героям Слава!
i am not familiar with phonetic script. but i would pronounce don-etsk more like a sloppily pronounced english "done"etsk or the german "dann"etsk. like simulating to say an "o" but keeping the mouth open as if saying an "a" and also keeping it short. ... an example came to mind: like dunn in ryan dunn.
Very useful suggestion, thank you.
Impressive, but I disagree on pronouncing "X" as "k". I think it's somewhat similar to Spanish "j" as in Juan.
About the "growing prestige" of Ukrainian, I'd rather call it "growing acknowledgment that it isn't a regional dialect of Russian as assumed through ignorance, but a linguistic national standard on its own, close but distinct from Russian, with a proper literature and mass use aside and sometimes code-mixing with Russian due to the, ahem, 'interesting' story of Ukraine in the last three centuries under Moscow's boot".
But I assume that was a bit too long. 😜
Haha well said. Naturally I did my best to avoid overt political commentary in this video. Indeed, I’d say last year was the realization of what you said. This year we’re seeing a deep admiration for Ukraine’s abilities, successes, and resolve under great duress. This is what I’d add to your very apt description.
Even Slovak is closer to Ukrainian
I just found an interesting thing. Romanians overall don't like Hungarians, just as Slovaks. Romania has been historically friendly to Czechoslovakia. At the same time, Romanians seem to not mind that both Czechs and Slovaks use Hungarian name adaptation Temešvár for one of their cities and do not require them to write Timišoára instead. Same goes for Serbs. Maybe because Romanians as a nation are more mature.
I like Ukrainian :))
Though, Kyiv in Ukrainian sounds like someone hopelessly swallowed the wrong way but wanted to say that word now!! 😂
Lvov is Lvov in Russian and Lwow in Polish. Ukraininan is the odd one out with Lviv. 2 votes vs 1 I prefer the 'o.'
No, in Polish letter " ó " is not 'o' - it's flat 'u' (like in 'foot')
Thank you so much for covering this topic ✨
It is extremely important for us to teach the world to recognise our Ukrainian ways to pronounce those names.
Your pronunciation is amazingly accurate, which is not a surprise for me since I hear how flawlessly you pronounce Latin words (always a pleasure for any ear).
Just a little correction: your [l] sound is a little bit off in Ukrainian. Through some experimentation I can draw a conclusion that you articulate it a bit too far from the teeth. In Ukrainian, as in other Slavic languages, it's a bit closer to the upper teeth, both the regular and the palatalised one. Hope it helps :)
Thank you again for the video!