Name of Ukraine

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The name Ukraine (Ukrainian: Україна, Ukrayina, /ukraˈjina/) has been used in a variety of ways since the twelfth century. Today it is the official name of Ukraine, a country in Eastern Europe.

Cyrillic letters in this article are romanized using scientific transliteration.

Contents 1 History 2 Etymology 2.1 Pre-toponymic etymology of ukraina 2.2 Theory A: Modern country name derived from ‘region, country’ 2.3 Theory B: Modern country name derived from ‘borderland’ 3 Syntax 3.1 Ukraine or the Ukraine? 3.2 Conventional name 3.3 Preposition usage in Ukrainian and Russian 4 Phonetics and orthography 4.1 Vowel quality of /ai/: western phonetic and orthographic variations 5 See also 6 References

[edit] History

The word ukraina is first recorded in the fifteenth-century Hypatian Codex of the twelfth and thirteenth-century Primary Chronicle, whose 1187 entry on the death of Prince Volodymyr of Pereyaslav says "The ukraina groaned for him" (see the full text of the Chronicle). The term is also mentioned for the years 1189, 1213, 1280, and 1282 for various East Slavic lands, probably referring to different Principalities of the Kievan Rus' (e.g., Pereyaslav Ukrayina, Galician Ukrayina etc.; cf. Skljarenko 1991, Pivtorak 1998).

In the sixteenth century, both Polish and Ruthenian sources used the word ukraina with specific reference to the large south-eastern voivodship of Kiev, including the voivodships of Bratslav after 1569 and Chernihiv after 1619.

At the same time, Ruthenian sources from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries continued to use the word ukraina to refer to any territory, even outside the Slavic regions: e.g. the Barkalabava (Borkolabovo) Chronicle tells about the Sejm at Warsaw in 1587 that there were twenty ambassadors from "different ukrainas", including Turkey, Russia, the Holy Roman Empire, and Sweden (cf. [1]); and the Peresopnytsia Gospels uses the collocation "Jewish ukrainas" for Judea in John 7:1 and elsewhere).

To the eastward, the word was also taken to refer to the south-western borderlands of Muscovy, for example in the texts by Andrey Kurbsky and Grigory Kotoshikhin. Occasionally, the word had been used to apply to other borderlands of Muscovy as well: Ukraina za Okoju referred to the Upper Principalities, uralskie ukrainy referred to the lands stretching beyond the Ural. In two fifteenth-century Pskovian chronicles and the Tale of the Battle of Kulikovo, ukraina stood for the territory currently known as the Abrene district. Ukraina Terskaja still refers in local parlance to the southern shore of the Kola Peninsula (cf. Vasmer 1953-58).

Seventeenth-century Cossacks of the Zaporozhian Host used the term in a more poetic sense, to refer to their 'fatherland'. Western cartographers, including Guillaume Le Vasseur de Beauplan and Johann Baptiste Homman, drew maps of "Ukraine" as the "land of the Cossacks". After the decline of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the word fell into disuse. The Cossack state became the autonomous Hetmanate owing fealty to Muscovy, and eventually became the Russian imperial guberniya of Little Russia (Malorossija). The name Ukraine stuck to the Cossack territories near Kharkiv, alternatively known as the Sloboda Ukraine (literally, ‘borderland of the slobodas’).

During the nineteenth century a cultural and political debate arose among Ukrainians and others about their national status, in both Imperial Russia and Austro-Hungarian Galicia. The 'Russophiles', who saw Moscow and St. Petersburg as the centres of East Slavic culture considered themselves ethnic Little Russians (Malorossy), part of the "Russian" (i.e. East Slavic) people. The 'Old Ruthenians' in Galicia saw themselves as inheritors of the heritage of Kievan Rus’ through the Galician-Volhynian Kingdom. They stuck to the traditional self-appellation Ruthenians (Rusyny, as opposed to Russkije 'Russians', both words being cognates of Rus’).

However, others saw themselves as an independent nation of East Slavs, south of Russia and stretching between Poland and the Caucasus. In the 1830s, Nikolay Kostomarov and his Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius in Kiev started to use the name Ukrainians (Ukrajinci). Their work was suppressed by Russian authorities, and associates including Taras Shevchenko were sent into internal exile, but the idea gained acceptance. It was also taken up by Volodymyr Antonovych and the Khlopomany ('peasant-lovers'), former Polish gentry in Eastern Ukraine, and later by the 'Ukrainophiles' in Galicia, including Ivan Franko. By the beginning of the twentieth century, Ukrajina superseded Malorossija in popularity and came to be applied to the whole of modern-day Ukraine, minus the Crimea.

After the Russian Revolution of 1917, the word ukraina finally became a country name by being applied to a specific geographic territory. The Ukrainian People's Republic (later incorporating the West Ukrainian People's Republic), the Ukrainian State under the Hetmanate, and the Bolshevik Party which created the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic by 1920 (helping found the Soviet Union in 1922), each named their state Ukraine. In 1991, Ukraine became an independent state.

[edit] Etymology

[edit] Pre-toponymic etymology of ukraina

From the Ruthenian sources (cf. the History section above) it seems clear that the word ukraina was used with two main meanings before it became a country name in the nineteeth century:

1. ‘Region, principality, country’ etc.
   These meanings can directly be derived from the Proto-Slavic root *kraj-, meaning ‘to cut’, i.e. ‘the land someone carved out for themselves’. In this sense, the word can be associated with contemporary Ukrainian krajina, Belarusian kraina and Russian and Polish kraj, all meaning ‘country’. (An alternative etymology would be to derive this meaning from the following one by generalization.)
2. ‘Borderland, frontier region, marches’ etc.
   These meanings can be derived from the root Proto-Slavic root *kraj-, meaning ‘edge, border’ (which is itself related to the verbal root *kraj- mentioned above). Contemporary parallels for this are Russian okraina ‘outskirts’ and kraj ‘border district’.

The question which of these meanings gave rise to the modern identification of the word with a specific country is disputed. There are two main versions of the etymology for the country name:

[edit] Theory A: Modern country name derived from ‘region, country’

One of modern Ukrainian scholars Pivtorak states that the name is derived from ukraina, which indicates:

• 1. "The land the Rus' people or their princes) carved out for themselves".
• 2. Over time, as the dominant self-identification paradigms were changing, the word’s initial meaning ‘the land of the Prince’ transformed according to this theory to a wider meaning ‘the land of the people’, ‘our land’.
• 3. Use of the word ukraina in its meaning from the 12th century, ‘a separate Principality’ (cf. Pivtorak 1998), also continued in later centuries, referring now to:
• 4. Different separate parts of the land (even though by the time these ceased to be Principalities). For example, from the second part of the 14th century most of the southern Principalities of Kievan Rus became part of Poland or Lithuania. From this time the word ukraina was also used to denote these two territories of the former Kiev Rus:
• 5. Lands that became part of Lithuania (Chernigov and Seversk Principalities , Kiev Principality, Pereyaslav Principality and the most part of the Volyn Principality) were sometimes called "Lithuanian ukraina", while lands that became part of Poland (Halych Principality and part of the Volyn Principality) were called "Polish Ukrayina" (Pivtorak 1998).

[edit] Theory B: Modern country name derived from ‘borderland’

Some scholars support the theory that the modern name of the country is derived from ukraina in the meaning of ‘borderland’. This theory had been widely supported by historians and linguists of the 19-20 th c.

This would be a semantic parallel to -mark in Denmark, which originally also denoted a border region (in this case of the Holy Roman Empire, cf. Marches).

In the sixteenth century, the only specific ukraina mentioned very often in Polish and Ruthenian texts was the south-eastern borderland around Kiev, and thus ukraina came to be synonymous with ‘the voivodship of Kiev’ and later ‘the region around Kiev’. In the nineteenth century, when Ukrainian romanticism and nationalism came into existence this name was adopted as the name of the country.

[edit] Syntax

[edit] Ukraine or the Ukraine?

In English, the country is sometimes referred to with the definite article, as the Ukraine, as in the Netherlands, the Gambia, the Sudan or the Congo. However, usage without the article is becoming more frequent, and has become established in journalism and diplomacy since the country's independence (for example, within the style guides of The Economist [2], The Guardian [3] and The Times [4]). Some point to a declining awareness of the name's etymology, similar to Denmark, which is used as a proper name and is not perceived as a compound "the Dane-mark" any longer, while Netherlands continues to be perceived as a plural "the nether lands".

[edit] Conventional name

Ukraine is both the conventional short and long name of the country. This name is stated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of Ukraine. Before the independence in 1991, Ukraine was a republic of the Soviet Union known as Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.

[edit] Preposition usage in Ukrainian and Russian

In Ukrainian and Russian, there was a change in the usage of the preposition na or v with Ukraine following the country's independence. Traditional usage is na Ukrajini (loosely, at, as it were referring to a part of a larger entity), but recently Ukrainian authorities have been using v Ukrajini (in, referring to a spatially discrete entity), as this preposition is used with most other country names. While in Ukrainian the newly-introduced usage of v Ukrajini took hold, the usage in Russian varies. Russian-language media in Ukraine are increasingly using this form. However, the media in Russia use standard na Ukraine, in some cases defending it as correct usage and discounting the Ukrainian government's authority over the Russian language.

Note that historically, the U- of Ukraine is itself a preposition.

See also Kiev or Kyiv? for a similar debate.

[edit] Phonetics and orthography

[edit] Vowel quality of /ai/: western phonetic and orthographic variations

Among the western European languages, there is inter-language variation (and even sometimes intra-language variation) in the vowel quality of Ukraine's /ai/ combination. It is variously:

• Treated as a diphthong, rendered in some languages as /αi/ (for example, German Ukraine /u'krαinə/) and others as /ei/ (for example, English Ukraine /ju'krein/)
• Treated as a pure vowel (for example, French Ukraine /ykrɛn/)
• Transformed in other ways (for example, Spanish Ucrania /u'krαnjα/)
• Treated as two juxtaposed vowel sounds, with some phonetic degree of approximant [ j ] in between that may or may not be recognized phonemically. This version of pronunciation is sometimes represented orthographically with a dieresis (tréma) (for example, Dutch Oekraïne, or also Ukraïne, an often-seen Latin-alphabet transliteration of Україна that is an alternative to Ukrayina). This version most closely resembles the vowel quality of the Ukrainian version of the word. This treatment is sometimes heard/seen in German and French, although it may not be regarded as standard in those languages.

[edit] See also

• Etymology of Rus’ and derivatives
• List of subnational name etymologies: "Ukraine"
• Kiev: "Kiev or Kyiv?"
• Toponymy

[edit] References

• Balušok, Vasyl’ (2005). "Jak rusyny staly ukrajincjamy (How Rusyns became Ukrainians)" (in Ukrainian). Dzerkalo tyžnja 27. 
• Borschak, E. (1984). "Rus, Mala Rossia, Ukraina". Revue des Etudes Slaves 24. 
• Gregorovich, Andrew (1994). "Ukraine or 'the Ukraine'?". Forum Ukrainian Review 90 (Spring/Summer). 
• Magocsi, Paul Robert (1996). "The name ‘Ukraine’", A History of Ukraine. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 171–72. ISBN 0-8020-7820-6. 
• Ohijenko, Ivan [1949] (2001). "Naši nazvy: Rus’ – Ukrajina – Malorosija (Our names: Rus’ – Ukraine – Little Russia)", Istorija ukrajins’koji literaturnoji movy (History of the Ukrainian standard language) (in Ukrainian). Kiev: Naša kul’tura i nauka, 98-105. ISBN 966-7821-01-3. 
• Pivtorak, Hryhorij Petrovyč (1998). Pochodžennja ukrajinciv, rosijan, bilorusiv ta jichnich mov (The origin of Ukrainians, Belarusians, Russians and their languages) (in Ukrainian). Kiev: Akademia. ISBN 966-580-082-5. .
• Rudnyc’kyj, Jaroslav; Volodymyr Sichynskyi (1949). "Nazva Ukrajina (The name Ukraine)", Encyklopedija ukrajinoznavstva (Encyclopedia of Ukrainian studies). Munich/New York, 12-16. 
• Šerech [= Shevelov], Yury (1952). "An important work in Ukrainian onomastics". Annals of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences in the U.S. 2 (4). 
• Skljarenko, Vitalij (1991). "Zvidky pochodyt’ nazva Ukrajina? (What is the origin of the name Ukraine?)" (in Ukrainian). Ukrajina 1. 
• Vasmer, Max (1953-58). Russisches etymologisches Wörterbuch (in German). Heidelberg: Winter.  Russian translation: Fasmer, Maks (1964-73). Ėtimologičeskij slovar’ russkogo jazyka, transl. Oleg N. Trubačev, Moscow: Progress.