In Ukraine ... not in the Ukraine

Over at You Don't Say John McIntyre ruminates about how hard it is to keep up with name changes around the world.

We made the mistake over the weekend to referring in an article on the Baltimore Marathon to "the Ukraine," and we promptly got an irate note.

Ukrainians find the usage offensive. It was "the Ukraine" when it was a region, a part of Russia or the Soviet Union. It is an independent nation now, and its name does not take the definite article. (At least we didn’t commit the gaffe of using the old nickname, "Little Russia.")

It may also take us some time to accustom ourselves to the relatively new style of the names of major Indian cities...

The change from "the Ukraine" to "Ukraine" is an interesting one.

First of all, there's the name itself.

It's generally accepted that "Ukrayina" means "borderlands" or something like that. However, which borderlands? There's some evidence that it originally referred to the lands around Kiev - Kievan Rus - and not to some space between Asia and Europe, or the edge of modern Russia.

Russia itself was called Muscovy until Peter I the Great renamed it in 1721. Rus referred to the Kievan state which had crumbled under Muscovy's onslaught. (There were a number of Russias - now only two remain, Russia itself and Belarus, aka White Rus.) In fact, Russia is called, in Russian, "Rossiya" - the vowel is different. Right now, much of Russian political thought is working on how just how "Russian" "Rossiya" is going to be - a problem difficult to explain concisely in English, where you have to say something like "how much of ethnic Slavic Russian culture will the nation of Russia embrace?" or "must citizens of Russia adopt the culture of the ethnic Russians?"

So, Ukrayina was the borderlands around Kievan Rus, the Golden Kingdom which emerged in the 9th century. Modern Russia of course borders Kievan Rus, after centuries of Muscovite expansion. In the late 18th century there was some movement among Ukrainian nationalists to reclaim the name "Rus", but it didn't take - too much chance for confusion between "Russky" and "Rusky" (or possibly Rusi). Ukrayina it remains.

Now, what about the 'the' in the now-discredited "the Ukraine"? Well, there are two preposition in Russian and Ukrainian (as in other Slavic languages) - в and на - that roughly correspond to English's "in" and "on", but in some cases the usage isn't parallel. One of those cases is that some place names take the "on" equivalent, rather than the "in", and in virtually every case of this, there's a "the" used in English: the Crimea, for instance.

Ukraine takes the "on" preposition in Russian (it's в России, v Rossii - in Russia; but it's на Украине, na Ukraine - in the Ukraine), and it used to in Ukrainian (на Україні, na Ukrayini), but now, post-independence, Ukrainians are shifting to saying "in" (в Україні, v Ukrayini). A Google search gave 402,000 hits on "на Україні" (the 'on' or 'in the' equivalent) but 7,980,000 hits on "в Україні" (the "in" equivalent).

So - if you're having trouble remembering to change your usage and say, simply, "in Ukraine" - well, you're in good company.

Oh, yes... what about that "Little Russia" McIntyre mentioned? Малая Русь, orignally, and Малая Россия, or Малороссия - Malaya Rus / Rossiya. Is that really just an "old nickname"? Well, yes. And no.

Little Russia and Great Russia - as with most of the "little" and "great" names (such as Great Britain) originated with the Ancient Greek naming system that gave us "Micro [or Mikro] Ellas" and "Macro [Makro]Ellas". "Great" is perhaps a misnomer - Greater is more nearly it, as in "the greater New York area". Little/Micro Greece was the heartland, the peninsula itself - the small area of the original homeland. Great(er)/Macro Greece was the far-flung area of colonization, the islands and Asia Minor. So, "Little Russia" was Kievan Rus, the homeland, and "Great(er) Russia" was the wide-open and later-settled area.