NY Times: Wait, How Do You Pronounce Kiev?

[Botany]

KEEV in Ukrainian
Key-EV in Russia


https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/13/us/politics/kiev-pronunciation.html

Key-EV or KEEV? Ukraine or THE Ukraine? The testimony in the public impeachment hearing before the House Intelligence Committee on Wednesday spurred discussion of the right way to say each, so we asked two experts.

The first question, they said, is by far the trickier of the two.

Yuri Shevchuk, a lecturer in Ukrainian at Columbia University, said that native Ukrainians stress the first vowel, and pronounce it like the “i” in the word “kid” or “lid.” The second vowel is pronounced as a separate syllable, and sounds like the “ee” sound in “keel.” The v is also pronounced a bit differently, like the end of the word “low.” It’s a bit hard to describe.

But spoken in Russian, Kiev, Ukraine’s capital and home to about three million people, sounds more like “Key-EV.” Americans tend to be more accustomed to hearing it the Russian way. (The official language in Ukraine is Ukrainian.)

[El Supremo]

1. It's like this mistake: