In Google Translate (English to Russian), "Ukraine" and "the Ukraine" both give the same result, namely "Украины". Not surprising, given Russian lacks the definite article "the".

However, "the Outskirts" translates to "окраины", which when pronounced, sounds very close to "Украины". "Uh cra eena" vs "Oo cra eena".

Translating Russian to English involves interpolating articles, definite and indefinite. I now have an inkling of how this controversy arose.

There's actually an equivalent of the distinction between "Ukraine" and "The Ukraine" in Russian. As you rightly note, it doesn't have the definite article, but the distinction does show up in prepositions instead.

In Russian, when you speak of a named geographic region, the preposition for "in" (as in "10 million people live in ...") is used - in Russian, it's "v". On the other hand, if it's not a name, but rather a descriptive designation like "borderlands", then the preposition for "on" is used - in Russian, it's "na".

So, English "in Ukraine" becomes "v Ukraine". But English "in the Ukraine" becomes "na Ukraine". In modern Russian, both are considered acceptable, but the latter is generally considered normative, and is what most people use. Needless to say, Ukrainians strongly prefer "v", even when speaking Russian (it's unconditionally "v" in Ukrainian, where the same distinction exists). This is a regular cause of flames and edit wars on the Net between Russian and Ukrainian users.

> In Russian, when you speak of a named geographic region, the preposition for "in" (as in "10 million people live in ...") is used - in Russian, it's "v". On the other hand, if it's not a name, but rather a descriptive designation like "borderlands", then the preposition for "on" is used - in Russian, it's "na".

Except that there is no "rule" for that, other than established use, and even that is not consistent. People who insist on "na Ukraine" would somehow never say "na Serbskoi Kraine" or "na Khabarovskom Krae".

There actually is a russian phrase "на чужбине", "на чужой земле" (in a foreign land) where "на" is used when talking about another country. I guess using different prepositions is something historical, so "на" is not used anymore, but it is left in some set phrases.

In natural languages, established use is what defines rules, more or less. This particular one is not very consistent, I agree. Nevertheless, "na" is normative for a bunch of country names.

Personally, I use "v Ukraine", if only because it's a middle finger to the Kremlin. But I also don't think that the use of "na" necessarily denotes disrespect, or that people should be told how to properly speak their language.

I guess the nearest abstract equivalent to this would be the debate over gender-neutral pronouns like "xe" in English. You have one side laying arguments (many of them pretty good) as to why having such a thing is a good idea; and the other side pointing out that it just feels awkward and non-English-like.

That reminds me of the situation of Korea, where the two Koreas cannot agree on how to say "Korea" in Korean. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I can't believe that this flamewar, too, have been imported to HN now.

Pay attention to the accents though. They make the two words sound very different, one has heavy accent on "i" and the other on the preceding "a".

Украи́на [1] vs. окра́ина [2]

But I see what you are saying. They are related.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%A3%D0%BA%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%B...

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%BE%D0%BA%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%B...

I think I'd rather learn Kazakh using Latin letters than Irish with it's séimhiú system that h really is hard to grasp (I'm attempting to self learn it as a hobby).

I wish there were accents not just fada it would seem more intuitive hey maybe Irish would be better written in Cyrillic. Maybe there should be a Celtic alphabet just for Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Manx, Cornish, Breton.

In Arabic, some country names get the definite article "al ال" like "(The) Iraq العراق" while most don't and "Ukraine أوكرانيا" is definitely one of them.

Interesting how this varies by language. Dutch doesn't have it (I've never learned it with a definite article), German and French still use it mostly as far as I can tell, and in English it is gradually disappearing.

French does it for every country (as far as I know): la France, l'Angleterre, les Etats-Unis. It's not something specific to Ukraine.

There are some exceptions : Israël, Taïwan, Cuba, Haïti

That I did not know.

I found a page with a bunch more of them: https://forum.wordreference.com/threads/fr-cuba-article.2157...

No one seems to really know why.

Interesting! That certainly seems like an act of branding to me, eh?

Yes, or something like it. It wasn't deliberate enough to suggest "branding" to me, per se, but it did mark a change in self-perception, and a change in how Ukrainians wanted to be perceived by the rest of the world.

Slavic languages lack articles, so in Russian and Ukrainian the linguistic phenomenon SerLava describes manifests only as a choice between using the preposition на versus в (which roughly correspond to the English prepostions in and on) to say "in [the] Ukraine". Using на was standard until after Ukrainian independence, but because на connotes being in an open space or in an indeterminate area (as on sometimes does in English , e.g., on Trafalgar square, on the border) whereas в is the usual preposition signifying being inside a definite space, including being inside a country's borders, Ukrainians reacted against the usage of на, feeling it emphasized the "on the borderlands" understanding of what [the] Ukraine was.

Using в quickly became standard in Ukraine, and the choice of в versus на became a sort of liguistic tell to a Russian-speaker's political and cultural tendencies. The distinction between using or not using the definite article in English and other languages followed. Interestingly, I always say Ukraine rather than the Ukraine in English, but I tend to use на in Russian.

> Using в quickly became standard in Ukraine, and the choice of в versus на became a sort of liguistic tell to a Russian-speaker's political and cultural tendencies.

Doesn't seem THAT telling to me. Saying "на Україні" is very common in the Ukrainian language, and lots of Ukrainians use bits of Ukrainian while speaking Russian. I wouldn't be shocked to hear "на Украине" from a Ukrainian, and I most definitely wouldn't make assumptions about political tendencies based on it.