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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   16056 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022

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"Yeah, I spent some time in the Ukraine."

"You can't say the! It implies imperialism! But Ukraine is a real country not just "the borderland!""

"But that's how we say it!"

"Doesn't matter! Shame on you! Follow the current thing!"

In English "the" often indicates a region: The Rockies, the Balkans, the Mississippi, but we say the Congo for the country and don't say the Livonia for the region. Our ancestors said "the Yemen", the "Sudan", "the Lebanon".

In Russian and Ukrainian there are no articles. Instead it works like this:

na = on

v = in

Note that In English, we have in, on and at. Some words use both e.g. sitting na lake but swimming v lake.

There are many specifics and exceptions:

  • na: post office, factory, beach, dacha, city square, stadium, kitchen, East, North, activities (work, lessons)..

  • v: used with countries (because they contain you)

But we're talking about places, Ukraine:

  • na used for geographic things you are on (islands, mountains) and regions (Caucasus, Carpathians, Kuban)

  • v with some regions like Siberia, Polesia or the Carpathian region (uses both)

  • v with places ending in -landia (Iceland, Ireland, Curland, Ingermanland, Scottland, Livonia (Lifland) although they're islands

  • Sicily and Sardinia use v 1/3 as often as na (from google search hits), Corsica gets 5% (most islands never use v). Other trivia like na Malta country/island, but v Malta a village in Irkutsk...

Ukrainian culture warriors say v Ukraine while Russian warriors says na Ukraine. Others fill the middle ground, squeezed between both, while older literature and old ladies do the darnedest things.

But it goes deeper. Other Slavic languages have the same issue. In Poland, they shifted to w Ukraine in the 90s. But if I ask google translate: na Ukrainie. Asking friends:

if someone says w ukrainie, It's a mistake. it's hard to change because we have many cultural stuff that include "na ukrainie". In the song Hej Sokoly we find the line "Na zielonej ukrainie".

Indeed, the Polish national epic starts: "O Lithuania" here referring to the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth. It's title features: na Litwie. With na! (In the verses, w is also used.) Now, Lithuania has many Poles. Anna Pieszko shows how Poles and Lithuanians fight this war:

Poles in Lithuania incorrectly use na with Lithuania, because it implies it's part of Poland like na Kresy. [I highly recommend Kate Brown's A Biography of No Place about the Kresy, to learn a lot about the USSR and nationalism,]

The Lithuanian Algimantas Zolubas believes if "a Pole considers himself a Polish in Lithuania, not a Lithuanian Pole, he's a guest" [not a citizen. An anti-Polish cultural organization Vilnija of course believes usage of na "threatens the integrity of the Republic" in "non-compliance with the constitution."

But Poles also say na Slovakia, na Latvia, na Belarus, na Hungary (Poland's honored brother). Does this imply that Polish na doesn't carry a regional distinction? Either way, the Polish position is continuity with tradition. The New Dictionary of Correct Polish says:

the use of the preposition "na" with the names of certain geographical regions and countries is motivated by a centuries-old tradition, which there is no reason to change, and does not mean treating them as politically dependent territories, and especially dependent on Poland.

Impressive cultural steadfastness. In English we no longer use the article and many Russians have moved to v Ukraine. While we say Germany instead of Deutschland and Türkiye probably won't gain much circulation, Myanmar is gaining on Burma and we have stopped saying Bombay, Ceylon, Siam, Persia (for the modern country), Kiev. (N.b. Peking and Bejing transcribe the same word, just with different systems) And often people don't care: What Italian complains about our Florence, Venice etc.?

In Serbo-Croatian (also outside of Serbia): na Kosovu, but all other culturally relevant regions I could find are u (like the Banat, Vojdovina, Srem, Raška...) except na Balkanu. Friends could not think of more.

The historian Timothy Snyder says names are part of an overreaching colonial process. But how much can it matter? What's in a name? Do Slavs think worse of the Germans who they call mute (Nemcy, Lenard Nemoy's last name means mute)? Do we think worse of the Slavs whose name gives us slave?

Above I wrote "continuity of tradition." What does that really mean across the vagaries of the years of centuries? The Hebrews called Southern Ukraine "Ashkenaz" but as Jews came into Europe (from the Mediterranean Northwards) Northern France and Western Germany came to be the Ashkenaz, Iberia Sepharad and the Slavic lands Canaan. Eventually those Ashkenazi Jews were pushed Eastwards, merging with those in Canaan - the new new Ashkenaz. It stayed this way as borders ebbed and flowed, nations rose, fell and rose again (Poland and Lithuania).

In 1919, the Karaite Adolph Joffe, a Soviet Bolshevist, running negotiations after the Polish-Soviet war with the Baltic countries, found himself negotiating with Max Soloveitchik in Yiddish. Max, the Lithuanian diplomat, asked for what they Jews called "Lita", that is: the whole of the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

Also, the same Westerners who are absolutely convinced that Ukraine is actually a real nation with a long history of her own blood and soil are usualy the same people who will insist that the white race doesn't exist, race isn't real, ethnicities are social constructs and that, say, any Somali goat herder can become a fully-fledged member of the German nation by simply arriving there as a "refugee".

This whole thing is just an idiotic farce.

It appears that history doesn't matter. Only the fervor and unity achieved in the present is what creates a "real" nation.

This but unironically. If the people in a region have a grand shared purpose now, then they are a nation now. A rich and storied history is a good way to achieve that, but on its own is neither necessary nor sufficient.

Bombay, Ceylon, Siam, Persia

You're actually mixing up a lot of different things. Bombay was never renamed - it's transliteration into Latin characters was changed to better reflect it's pronunciation in Indian English. It's always been मुंबई in Marathi and Hindi. (They mostly share an alphabet.)

Florence is simply the original Latin name of a Roman city, and Firenze is what the name of the city drifted to as the local language evolved from Latin to Italian.

Persia was an actual name change; basically the Parsis were (and still are) the dominant ethnic group of the larger region that is now Iran but were originally from a smaller area called Pars. They formed an empire and conquered other ethnic groups/regions (Kurdistan, Balochistan) that - to this day - wish to escape Persian rule (or at least some do). The name change to Iran was meant to be more inclusive. Also, both the official Wikipedia page and most quora questions very carefully forget to mention that shortly after the Shah's 1935 declaration that Persia is "Land of the Aryans", Hitler declared them to be "pure Aryan" in 1936 and forged a close alliance with them.

(Amusing observation: every Persian female I've met in the US purports to be ultra woke socialist leftist, but will revert back to a sneering 1488-style biodeterminist at the idea of Kurdish or Baloch self-determination.)

Siam was also a real renaming - from the Kingdom of Siam to Thailand, the latter of which has the double meaning "Land of the Free" (never colonized) and "Land of the Tai [ethnic group]".

Also, both the official Wikipedia page and most quora questions very carefully forget to mention that shortly after the Shah's 1935 declaration that Persia is "Land of the Aryans", Hitler declared them to be "pure Aryan" in 1936 and forged a close alliance with them.

It was more than that if I recall correctly - the idea for the name change was originally a suggestion by the Nazi ambassador to Persia.

The historian Timothy Snyder says names are part of an overreaching colonial process. But how much can it matter? What's in a name? Do Slavs think worse of the Germans who they call mute (Nemcy, Lenard Nemoy's last name means mute)? Do we think worse of the Slavs whose name gives us slave?

I would say the desire to control the language of the other side comes from feelings of inferiority and new found power. Mexicans use the phrase "fucking gringos" all the time without Americans getting particularly upset about it. I'm sure the Poles have some names for the Germans that aren't particularly nice. I bet in India there are a few nasty nicknames for the English.

The more interesting case is the Falkland Islands where it's the leftish side refusing to let the locals name something and pushing "Islas Malvinas" for the past 250 years.

I would say the desire to control the language of the other side comes from feelings of inferiority and new found power.

I think that it mostly comes from status anxiety which kind of overlaps with your "feelings of inferiority". Where a lion might not care what sheep think of him, ridicule is a narcissist's kryptonite. They don't like being ignored, they don't like being insulted, and they absolutely hate being reminded that they are not all that important.

Mexicans use the phrase "fucking gringos" all the time without Americans getting particularly upset about it.

Mexicans also don't get particularly offended about complaining about "all these Mexicans", either. White Anglo-Americans in close contact with Mexican-Americans don't get particularly offended in large part because it's known that they can take it as well as they dish it out.

Blacks ranting about evil whitey engender a different reaction, for the same reasons, despite also being in a firmly subordinate position economically.

The more interesting case is the Falkland Islands where it's the leftish side refusing to let the locals name something and pushing "Islas Malvinas" for the past 250 years.

Being less white(although, is Argentina still less white than Britain? They probably were in the 80's, but are they today?) does not actually make you leftist.

It's good right up until it isn't. The gf who laughs at Mexicant laughs right up until she reports you.

In my experience people who make a point of saying Malvinas in English are on the left and come at the issue from a general anti-colonial / anti-English framework without much specific knowledge about the situation.

If you're ever talking with older AWFLs who cut their political teeth in the 80s they'll be firm on the Falklands War and the sinking of the Belgrano being examples of horrible illegal things Thatcher did.

The younger, more race focussed, leftist crowd either goes along with them or is just unfamiliar with the issue.

A lot of national identity is tied to symbolism that from an absolute point of view, is meaningless, but carries meaning because of other things that it's associated with or connected to, and because of how people think about it. In some sense most culture is probably this way. Why do we put up fir trees at Christmas? There's some symbolism, but it was mostly invented long after Jesus died and the logic is all post-hoc. Maybe it even swallowed existing pagan traditions (I've heard this claim but haven't looked into it myself). If Christianity had spread further south instead of north, it might have warm-weather symbolism instead. Similarly for nations and national anthems, which are largely full of romanticized or even fictionalized history. The opening line of "America the Beautiful" originally said "halcyon skies" instead of "spacious skies;" should we change it back? Was the decision to change it wrong originally? If removing "the" and changing "Kiev" to "Kyev" makes Ukrainians currently fighting a war for independence feel better, isn't it accomplishing a positive goal, even if it's fairly arbitrary?

In Poland, they shifted to w Ukraine in the 90s.

No we didn't. Some people shifted from "na" to "w" this year, after the Russian invasion, but it's pure wordcelery, trying to justify word changes with sort of made up stories about prejudiced connotations you're describing, like how this week's document from Stanford (?) tries to connect "hip hip hooray" to the Holocaust. Somebody using "w" became a pretty good litmus test for determining if that person is a prog.

The weird thing about this theory is that “Russian” in Russian is in fact «русский», “russkiy”. There is also the less common word «российский», “rossiyskiy”, which describes something more related to Russian state rather than Russian ethnicity. Thus, there are Ukrainians who are «российские», but not «русские».

It's like British vs English. Something the natives care about, but everyone else doesn't. Except Ukrainians, of course, who label everything related to Moscow-based Russia "російський" and keep "руський" for our common predecessor state. And Poles, who use "ruski" for the language they spoke in Lithuania.

This reminds of that woke scifi about AI being unable to grasp gender. Here we also have a binary (v/na) which isn't universal. How English-only speakers grapple with this distinction can tell us how sound the premise of that book is.

You are missing the point of why people think the AI is promoting social justice. The question is not "does it make sense that the AI could misunderstand something" but "is gender one of the things it makes sense for the AI to misunderstand".

The idea that gender is just arbitrary like v/na is what makes it a social justice idea. If gender and v/na are dissimilar, then the inability to understand the latter doesn't tell you how much sense it makes to not understand the former.

But conversely, if even such an arbitrary distinction as v/na can be grasped by non-natives, then a much more natural (ie non-socially contructed) binary that is sex, is unlikely to be beyond comprehension.

It seems like Americans having trouble with ser/estar is another, probably more common analogue.

Hah I’ve been thoroughly convinced I didn’t give Ancillary Justice a fair shake. May have to go back and read it after all.

This also reminds me of when I saw tons of people back in March bitching about people spelling the capital as Kiev, saying this was culturally insensitive and that this actually matters.

The switch to Kyiv seems to be much older than March. Even on fox news I found hardly any instances of Kyiv since the official change in name.

The name change goes back to a Ukrainian social media campaign from 2018: KyivNotKiev. I'm generally sympathetic to the idea that we should transcribe their place names from Ukrainian rather than Russian (although it's worth noting that both are spoken there). It's an increasingly common but hardly universal trend to better localize such names. We've practically renamed Mumbai and Czechia. It's unclear if they can make Türkiye happen, and few seem anxious to change Suomi or Deutschland in English.

"Finland" is actually one of the two formal names of Finland, though not due to it being the formal form in English but due to it being the formal form in Swedish, the other national language.

Fox and the others probably switched to Kyiv when the Ukranian official spelling switched to Kyiv... but the pronunciation "Keev" (which I think is not quite right, and sounds awful) seems to have only been used starting this year.

which I think is not quite right, and sounds awful

/'kɪjəw/ is probably the best approximation one can do with English phonemes, and /'kiːjəf/ for the Russian version. /kiːv/ is just weird.

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It's a great side to serve with liberty steak.

Oh yeah, that really bugged me, too, even though I was too young to have any political opinions back then. I'm half tempted to believe that this shows I'm balanced, since I just hate anyone who takes this sort of linguistic policing approach, and half tempted to say that this shows how much the times have changed, since 20 years ago it was the right that was trying to pull this crap, and now it's the left. I guess for what it's worth, I'm surrounded all day every day by people who were pissed off at the right 20 years ago about "freedom fries", who are now the same people bitching about "Kiev", so at least I didn't succumb to whatever mind disease they did in the past 2 decades, somehow.

I’ve just noticed that when the red tribe wants to rename something, it’s treated as pointless signaling or laughably poor gamesmanship, but when the blue tribe wants to rename something, all of the institutions of American public life get behind them. This asymmetry is one more reason Chthulu swims leftward.

Are you sure the Kyiv/Kiev thing is a red tribe/blue tribe issue, though? My understanding is that support for Ukraine has been and probably also still continues to be greatly bipartisan, as it is in most of the rest of the west, and people have reported seeing Ukrainian flags or expressions of admiration to Zelensky etc. in small Republican-voting towns in their areas here, at least.

Not the OP but will say that IME, yes support for Ukraine seems to be a bipartisan issue. The Kyiv/Kiev spelling thing seems to be a non issue to me, as @sarker notes in most the change in spelling seems to have followed the official change of name a few years back, but pronunciation on the other hand seems to be becoming something of a shibboleth with "Keeve" being a blue tribe marker while every one else says "Key-ev"

Uh, small town red tribers are anti-Russian, but not in the sense of buying into(Or understanding) the shibboleths of Ukrainian nationalism. It would be totally normal to say Kiev in the middle of a rant about stopping Putin.

I live in the rural southern US and this has not been my experience at all. Frustration with the Republican neocon war backing could not be higher.

Ranting about "stopping Putin" will get you 100% assumed to be a liberal since only liberals hate him enough to care.

Frustration with spending all this money and weapons on Ukraine is common, but almost nobody actually likes Putin or Russia. Ranting about stopping Putin/Russia is distinctly boomerish, but not necessarily lib.

While probably generally true, the right in The US seems to have the only Ukrainian skeptical wing. That is, most people support Ukraine but if you find someone who objects to Ukraine policy chances are the person is right wing.

The right in the US is also unique, globally in its covid skepticism. All the while still maintaining that dynamic of most As are X but all Y are A.

I’m not sure about that. I mean even ignoring Canada, Eastern Europe and Africa seemed mostly United in not taking Covid particularly seriously, and there were left wing Covid skeptics in Britain, and Brazil had very similar partisan dynamics to the USA, which Bolsonaro seemed to be the driving force behind rather than monkey see monkey do.

I think it is because of the founding of the US. Unique amongst nations being conservative here has a liberal streak.

the right in The US seems to have the only Ukrainian skeptical wing

There is a nontrivial amount of skepticism from the tankie-adjacent wing of the far left: witness the DSA statements on the matter and that since-retracted letter from the House Progressive Caucus. Those have been largely pushed aside by the ruling faction, but aren't totally silent either.

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Yes. It isn’t so much “rooting for the Russians” and more “none of our business; at least not enough of our business to spend 100b+”

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Irrespective of their opinion on Ukraine as such, Red tribe folks tend to despise language policing and ridicule all «ackchyually, starting today the approved word is LatinX» type innovations. Politically correct identity labels, pronouns, trans women are women, Parents 1 and 2 (which Putin tried to play at), words are violence, retiring «problematic» technical terms like master/slave etcetera – they're always apprehensive at the least; and this basic conservative trait, following from their core impulse of guarding against alien moral coercion, is consistent throughout the battlefronts of the Culture War and across the shades of Red. It would be perfectly natural for gun-toting patriots in those small Republican-voting towns to be in awe of Ghost of Kiev and solicit donations for the Ukraine – while taking the piss out of pearl-clutching Blues who accuse them of perpetuating linguistic harassment peddled by Russian trolls with the intent to subvert Our Democracy.

The red tribe would probably start saying ‘keev or however you say it’ if actual Ukrainians asked them to say Kyiv. But by and large it’s their tribal enemies trying to change language for reasons no one can actually explain(blue tribers largely not being well versed enough in Slavic languages to even pronounce‘Kyiv’ properly), which sets off their bullshit detectors.

Neither Ukranian nor Russian has a definite article; all the whining about the use of the definite article indicating colonialism or imperialism is just plain nonsense. As far as I can tell the Ukranians don't like the definite article for the country because the Soviets used it in their official English translations; all the rest is just noise (and not directly related to any Slavic language feature).

There are a few countries which have "the" in their official English names, and at least one of which is not plural in form: "The Gambia".

How about The United States of America?

Plural in form, like The Netherlands.

The United Kingdom

The Peoples Republic of Chinuh

The USA and the UK are not real countries I guess. I mean, I'm firmly on the Ukraine side as far as self-determination goes, but this now twice-removed linguistic bullshit is just ridiculous.

Do we think worse of the Slavs whose name comes from Slave?

It's the other way around, technically. Slavs is a self-name coming from the words "word"/"glory", which then gave Romans the word for slave because they kept importing those peoples as slaves.

The USA and the UK aren't the same. Most states have official names like the Republic of Germany or the Russian Federation. The use of the is for this formal name and wouldn't be used for the informal name of the actual country. No one talks about the America or the Britain.

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