Photos of Kyiv here

[Michelangelo]

yikes!  Now it is even harder to pronounce )  LOL

[Bruno]

I realize people spell it the way it sounds or what they are used to, but in my work I have to tow the official line, you might say.

And what is need to say : Mos-cou, Mos-cow or Mok-ba... i have hear the 3 prononciation... :?

 

[BC]

here it's moska

[Rvrwind]

I think the new moderator should go back and correct all of the past misspellings of Kyiv. It should only take a few days.

Too Funny LMAO  But actually if he has the right edit program like I have he could do it in less than 5 minutes. I still have a few translators that mispell words throughout a whole document & I can edit them all in less than 30 seconds.

Actually Moscow is still Mocba but I have found most Russians pronounce it Moskva because 'b' in Russian is pronounced like the English 'v' & the 'c' in Russian is pronouced like the English 's'. So consiquently you get Moskva.

My job is kinda fun, every once in awhile we get a letter from some official or other demanding we change this or that spelling or wording. Sometimes we do, sometimes we don't. Kinda depends on who the official is & what he/she wants changed & how much power they wield. LOL

Don't want to confuse the general public to much, like poor Micheal there!!! LOL;)

Now I'll throw another one at you - Ruble - wrong, the correct spelling is - Rouble, that from the biggest bank in Russia. Russian Standard Bank, but I still see a lot of people spell it ruble. That is todays lesson, everybody spell ROUBLE not Ruble, ROTFLMAO.

RVR

Canadian Cowboy

[Photo Guy]

Too Funny LMAO But actually if he has the right edit program like I have he could do it in less than 5 minutes. I still have a few translators that mispell words throughout a whole document & I can edit them all in less than 30 seconds.
Canadian Cowboy

Keep on laughing and the correct spelling for 'mispell' is actually 'misspell'.  LOL   Sorry...could not resist the irony.

[jb]

Since we are dealing with "Transliteration" and not "Translation", there is no correct or incorrect way of writing these names, we merely write what sounds right to our ear.  We most often rely upon what was written before and assume it was right.  Almost all of the world atlas maps list the capital city of Ukraine as "Kiev".

Who am I to argue?

[Rvrwind]

Keep on laughing and the correct spelling for 'mispell' is actually 'misspell'. LOL Sorry...could not resist the irony

Good one, I didn't use spell check, so I missed that. Believe me my spelling isn't perfect & neither is my grammar at times, that is why I am eternally grateful for spell & grammar check. LOL

Don't worry JB when they print some new maps & Atlas's they will contain the correct spelling. LOL

RVR

Canadian Cowboy

[Photo Guy]

It's 'Kyiv'.  ...written that way at the official U.S. Embassy website.
Completely bonafide. :cool:

[itstime]

[user=134]Photo Guy[/user] wrote:

Here we have two fantastic musicians. I saw and heard them playing in other locations in the city later in the week. The violinist was world class. I am not exaggerating.

Wow! Did you take that photo the same day you posted? I also wandered down the market on that same day with my girlfriend and we stopped to listen to the musicians. I bought her one of their CDs.

Small world...

Funny thing though, I didn't notice any western men at all except for one portly gent who was greeted by a thin young thing after he got off the plane in a south central Ukrainian city last Wednesday. But then my girl and I did not go into any bars and only went to Ukrainian style restaurants 3 times.

 

[itstime]

My god, what a bunch of silly fools you are. You know nothing about languages, culture, politics, history.

For your info, Ukraine is a bilingual country. In the Soviet Union, Russian was the official language of Ukraine and the Russian name of the city, Kiev, was used officially. Now, the Ukrainian name Kyiv is used. Pronunciation is similar; you won't notice the difference if you know no Russian or Ukrainian, rozumiv? Of course all names are really written in either Russian Cyrillic or Ukrainian Cyrillic, not in Latin letters.

As for Moscow, or Moskva as it is known in Russian, if you say "I am from Moscow" in Russian it sounds like "Ya iz Moskvi". A few hundred years ago there was an O sound in there which has since disappeared. This is the origin of the English name Muscovy. Of course the Poles knew better so they wrote the name in their alphabet, also based on Latin, as Moscowa. That W is an English V sound. When English speaking people adopted the Polish spelling, they dropped the A just as they did with the name of the Polish capital, Warsawa.

Moscou is the French name and results from a French attempt to pronounce Moscow as if it is written phonetically. Before WWII, the French language was the international language of diplomacy. Lingua franca is latin for "French Language". As a result, Russians used French phonetic spelling to transliterate Russian into Latin letters. OU represents the sound of the Russian letter which looks identical to our Y. Therefore "rouble" is the official spelling in Russia. But ruble is also a proper English spelling of the name, i.e. "ruble" is an English word but "rouble" is a Russian word, transliterated into latin letters using French phonetics. People's names on passports, etc. can also be transliterated differently. For instance Yuri is officially Ioury and Tatyana is normally written Tatiana according to the French system.

By the way, I have never heard of mockba. However, the Russian letters for the name of the capital do look exactly like MOCKBA. But they are pronounced Moskva. The English letter "m" is actually a lower case "t" in Cyrillic italic/script fonts. There is no Cyrillic letter that looks like "k" because the lower case "K" in Cyrillic has no extra long stick coming out the top. And "b" has nothing to do with the Cyrillic letter that looks like "B". Instead "b" is the soft sign which indicates that the preceding consonant is soft not hard. This letter often is transliterated into an apostrophe in latin letters, i.e. oshibit'sya. By the way, only two Cyrillic letters change form significantly in lower case form. "AE" becomes "ae". Also "YP" becomes "yp" but that is a trivial shape shift.

My girlfriend wrote me a letter in Cyrillic script in which she writes "m" and "t" identically but it is still readable. Some Russians add a dash over the top of their lower case "t" to make it clear.

I was bemused to hear American tourists on the plane to Kiev commenting on Russian letters everywhere as the plane approached the terminal. I, on the other hand, was noticing that there was no Russian at all on signs. Everything was written in Ukrainian.

 

[Photo Guy]

My trip and photos were in April. There are so many times here in Phoenix when I would come across a street beggar-musician, and think, 'How sad. He is homeless AND his music ability is really terrible.'   Not with those two guys in Kyiv. They are probably not homeless either. I wished I had my video camera with me.

[Photo Guy]

Independence Square.  ...A very cool place. No 'open container' law, which would prohibit walking around with a tasty Ukrainian beer.
Our hotel, the Kozatskyy, is the narrow building with the red banner on top.