Turning the pages back... October 22, 1995 (10/22/06)

Turning the pages back...

October 22, 1995

With the U.S. State Department on October 3 adopting the Ukrainian-based spelling of Ukraine's capital, Kyiv - based on a unanimous vote by the U.S. Board on Geographic Names (BGN) to change the standard transliteration of the name of the Ukrainian capital - readers are reminded that it was 11 years ago that The Ukrainian Weekly reported that Ukraine officially agreed on its capital's spelling. Alternate spellings included the Russified "Kiev" and the awkward "Kyyiv."

The Respublika News Agency reported that on October 14, 1995, the Committee on Legal Terminology, headed by Serhiy Holovaty, then minister of justice, voted to adopt the spelling "Kyiv" for all legal and official acts of Ukraine.

The "Resolution of the Ukrainian Committee on Legal Terminology No. 5, Protocol No. 1 of October 14, 1995," explains that the legislation was based on expert analysis by the Ukrainian Language Institute under the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and recognized the need to standardize the recreation of Ukrainian proper names through Roman letters due to Ukraine's integration into the international legal realm.

Furthermore it stated: 1) that the Roman spelling of "Kiev" does not recreate the phonetic and scriptural features of the Ukrainian language geographical name; 2) that the spelling of "Kyiv" is now adopted as the standardized Roman-letter correspondence to the Ukrainian language geographical name; and 3) that the standardized Roman-letter spelling of "Kyiv" shall be mandatory for use in legislative and official acts.

Previously, in 1993, the Ukrainian Mapping Agency, the state cartographic service, had adopted the spelling of "Kyyiv." Likewise, the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, the National Geographic Society, The Ukrainian Weekly and atlas makers Rand McNally and Hammond began to use this adopted spelling.

Significantly, this most recent decision by the U.S. Board on Geographic Names will probably bring the spelling "Kyiv" into use by news services like the Associated Press, by the National Geographic Society and other media that use the BGN as the source for their spellings of toponyms.

Source: "Kyiv it is," by Mary Mycio, The Ukrainian Weekly, October 22, 1995.

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