I get confused with Kyiv and Kiev are they the same city?

Yes, it’s the same city.

The Ukrainian language translation is Kyiv, pronounced keev.

Kiev is the translation of the name of the city from Russian. It is pronounced kee-ehv.

The name is written in Cyrillic (Russian/Ukrainian alphabet), so our spelling is a transliteration. The versions are just a convention. Westerners’ pronunciation of Kiev went pretty much uncorrected as kee-yev until the country and its capital started coming up a lot in the news. Then Western newscasters, or American ones, at least, discovered that they (we) had been saying it wrong forever. The changed spelling (Kyiv) reflects a new awareness of the correct pronunciation.

I was confused too until recently. I just read that the Kiev spelling and pronunciation “Keeyev” is the Russian way it is/was pronounced whereas Kyiv, pronounced ” KEEV” is the Ukranian way and thus the correct way.

Yes, they are one in the same. Kiev was the Russian spelling. When Ukraine became independent the spelling was changed to Kyiv

Samey samey !

Yep, “Kyiv” is a transliteration of the Ukrainian name Київ. The pronunciation in Ukrainian is something like “kee-yew”, but in English we say “keev”. Using “Kyiv” in America at least is relatively recent and started mainly because of this crisis.

@Demosthenes I’ve been seeing it that way for the past few years, not just recently, but I never understood why before now.

This is so silly. The English word is Kiev, and is pronounced Kee-yev.

The Russian name is Киев. The Ukranian name is Київ.

It’s not “Keeve” or any of the nonsense that attempts to approximate the Ukranian pronunciation. Unless you’re a native Ukranian speaker, or familiar with the phonetics to actually pronounce it “the way Ukranians say it”, then you’re not saying it the way “Ukranians say it”.

@Kropotkin I was wondering about that. I was going to ask our Ukrainian jelly about the pronunciation. I probably will message her.

Are Americans going to start saying Roma, Firenze, and Venezia?

She said kee-yeev is more accurate.

@JLeslie That is closer to the Ukranian pronunciation. Except anglophones unfamiliar with slavic phonetics will just start saying “Keeve”, which is what’s happening, and it’s stupid.

“Kiev” isn’t a Russian word, it’s an English exonym. We’ve been using it because we can say it easily, and we say it in a very English way. We don’t feign a Russian accent to even say the vowels the same way.

Are Americans going to start saying Roma, Firenze, and Venezia?

We say Beijing today instead of Peking. I think the impetus for that and “Kyiv” are both came from the nominal places. Call people what they want to be called.

If Italians asked us to use the Italian names, we could.

That being said, I have always found alternate names to be weird. Why would we make up “Germany” for a place called “Deutschland”?

Those are exonyms, names used by outsiders but not by the people themselves (the latter being endonyms). Peking was the name of the city derived from the Cantonese and southern Chinese varieties that were first encountered by Europeans. Germany comes from the Roman name for the area. Some exonyms stick and others don’t, though sometimes a concerted effort is taken to get the endonym used instead of an exonym, e.g. Bombay has fallen out of usage in favor of Mumbai due to the efforts of the Indian government to use the local Marathi name for the city.

@Kropotkin This is how Lyse Doucet of the BBC pronounces it. Does this sound right to you?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p0br687x
I hope you can play that link.
Similarly since independence the name of the country is “Ukraine” not “the Ukraine”

@Call_Me_Jay I’m fine with it all either way. English sometimes uses the pronunciation in the mother tongue and sometimes changes it. I do think sometimes the change doesn’t really matter as much to the people it affects as some might think.

I like staying in the language of the actual country for cities and other geographical locations, but do people even realize there is thousands of places that we change the name in English? Let alone names we use in America that we pronounce completely different than the original, but maybe that’s a different story? Like Toledo and Milan, Ohio.

I used to work with a woman who had half her classes in English and half in Spanish growing up in Miami and geography was in Spanish, so she said much of the world is the Spanish term for her.

I think it’s best to know both your own language and the home language. Like Deutschland is Germany, which was mentioned above. Hell, A lot of Americans probably think the Penn Dutch are Dutch rather than German. We should use Penn Deutsch more regularly probably.

Ukrainian people, from what I understand, are more concerned about the lack of understanding of their history; what they have endured over time and the ongoing loss of their culture and language.

I think you could pronounce it as kyeev. It looks like one syllable, but it should naturally come out as two syllables.

Does this change the name of the dish Chicken Kyiv?
BTW, there is no saying the populous is chicken. These guys are all bad ass!