![]() ![]() We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.īut you know what? We change lives. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.” My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. “Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. And the capital of Ukraine is known broadly in the English-speaking world as "Kiev."Ībout a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”: It may sound culturally imperialistic to say so, but "How is this place known in English?" is still a valid criterion for editors making style decisions. Some of the forms used in earlier centuries, Kiou, Kiow, or Kiew, might get English speakers closer to the Ukrainian pronunciation without taking them too far out of their phonetic comfort zone. Then there's the question whether "Kyiv" is the best transliteration of the Ukrainian name. One needn't be a fan of Vladimir Putin to say that. In other words, the Ukrainian form of the name is much harder for the ears of English speakers to catch than the Russian form. And the final consonant, represented by a letter that looks like a "b," seems to disappear in pronunciation. It represents a vowel sound that doesn't exist in English. Instead of the "e," the third sound of the name is a letter that looks like an "i" with an umlaut. In Ukrainian, the name of the capital is spelled with a letter that doesn't exist in Russian. "Kiev" is a pretty good transliteration of a name that isn't that hard for English speakers to approximate. In Russian, "Kiev" is spelled as a four-letter word, with letters corresponding roughly to the "k" of king, the "i" of machine, the "e" of get (albeit a bit weakened, because it's an unstressed syllable), and the "v" of victory. The argument against "Kiev" is that "it's the Russian name for the city." But let's take a step or two back first. ![]() ![]() for use in legislative and official acts." This came four years after the world was asked to stop calling the country "the Ukraine."īoth the US State Department and the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office have concurred on "Kyiv," adopting this spelling in their written references to the Ukrainian capital – even, alas, as they warn their respective citizens away from traveling there.īut "Kiev" remains the standard usage among the overwhelming majority of English-language news organizations. In 1995, an official Ukrainian commission, "proceeding from the urgent need to standardize the recreation of Ukrainian proper names through Roman letters in the context of Ukraine's integration into the world legal realm," came down on the side of "Kyiv" as "the standardized Roman-letter spelling. Now that Russian troops have invaded Ukraine, a question that has been on the sidelines up to now becomes more pointed: Shall we refer to the capital city of this country in turmoil as Kiev – or Kyiv? ![]()
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