You brought up my avatar, insinuating nefarious imperialist motives, whereby I felt necessary to clarify my background. If you would please refer from going ad hominem, we'll have a much more pleasant discussion.
The thing is that toponyms don't just vary spatially, but also temporally. In early modern era, there are several alternate names floating around in the same time and place. Trying to capture it in several standardised languages is an artificial excercise in the first place. Anyway Kölsch dialect sounds differently than what they speak in Hamburg. The latter would probably not say Hamborg but Hamburch.
Renaming all kinds of places every couple of years in accordance to the prevalent source material would be crazy confusing and ahistorical, too, as our source material is by no means definitive proof of how people spoke, but only a clue on how they might have. It is a random remnant of a bygone era, a reconstruction rather than definite proof.
Actually, no. The Kölnish L is pronounced more like a slavic hard L than like the German one. If they, for political reasons, decided to separate themselves from hochdeutsch imperialism, they might prefer to write it with a double L.
I strongly disagree.
Debates on which language people spoke back in 1450 in any given area of the Balkans (or anywhere else, really) are bound to rouse nationalist passions. Historians of different countries will get on each other's throats and devs will have to take heaps of difficult decisions. Basing the whole thing on the main culture of the controlling country is a great way to sidestep all these tears and the gnashing of teeth.
Ukrainian is the only language that transliterates the Cyrillic и as an y, and the only one that transliterates г as an h, and that's the whole debate, to be honest. If you transliterate the и as an i instead, as not only Russians, but also Bulgars, Serbs and Belorussians do, you'll find your Old East Slavic "Києвъ" transliterated as Kiev or Kijev, if you prefer.
Yes, I specifically talked about the corpus of English literature from the Time when Kiev was subject to Russia. It's a huge amount of texts (and videos). Every documentary about the Eastern Front of World War II, every cookbook that includes Chicken Kiev, every translation of Bulgakov or Gogol, every old history book about medieval Eastern Europe uses Kiev rather than Kyiv. You say Kiev, and every english-speaking person knows which town is meant by that.
You'll find that Kiou or Kiow are much less common or intelligible. Incidentally, how comes that Germans speak of Kiew?
Like it or not, Muscovite Russian and Ukrainian gradually developed from the same precursor. And in those far-away times of Vladimir the Great, they for some reason decided to write Kiev with an и, a letter Bulgars used for the sound i.
What's this obsession with spitting in someone's face? If I wanted to spit in peoples faces, I'd be speaking Czech, with all their consonant clusters.
I refuse to be goaded into ad hominem arguments, but your use of the word "Belorussian" just says yikes. It's "Belarusian", as in Belarus, not Belorussia.
Hochdeutsch imperialism is a rather big laugh, as it existed and ended with the Nazi regime, which persecuted the use of Low German, Sorbisch, and other languages. Also, Hamborg is how Hamburg is spelled in Niedersächsich. I wouldn't really find arguing about how Cologne is spelled in Koelnisch precisely because we have the Koelnisch spelling, which both of us have acknowledged.
No one is proposing that we use the Rusian "Kyjew/Kyjiw" instead of Kyiv. Nor are we proposing that we should use older names unless they are fitting, such as Old English for Anglo-Saxon England. That argument has gone non-sensical.
Going to the dynamic naming debate, why not? Seriously, why not? Especially in the Hansa Cities and throughout the north, Low German is used. So why not Ukrainian and other neglected groups? Simply do it with no arguments or debates. Kyiv for the Ukrainians, Kieu (Кіеў) for the Belarusians, Kiev for the Russians and those occupying the province at the time if was indeed used. Simple, sweet, and without any bs.
About transliteration, what an odd argument. It's honestly nonsense, and it shows. Old East Slavic is best transliterated as Kyjewъ, to provide a correction, and once again, I emphasise that it is Belarus and the Belarusians, not Belorussia and the Belorussians.
About the use of "Kiev", just because it's common doesn't make it right. From Slavistics to the study of Eastern European history in Ukraine, Belarus and of course Russia, the field has been dominated by Russian views of how things are. Again, I cannot emphasise enough that this is a product of Russian cultural domination of non-Russian spaces, i.e. imperialism, and that the reason those instances of "Kiev" appear is precisely because who was dominating Kyiv from 1654-1991.
It is well understood that there was not just one Old East Slavic language, and Moscow, the source of Muscovite culture, only comes from the Vladimir-Suzdal principality, which arose long after Volodymyr the Great and was ironically just a colony of Kyiv which Slavicised thanks to the resettlement of the Vyatichi to the area, indeed founding the city of Kirov (Vyatka). Russia has its origins admittedly in Rus, but it is not Rus, just like America is not England. The reigns of Yuriy Dovhorukyj, Andrij Boholjubskyj and their successors had created a definitely breakaway from the Rus in Kyiv, and Novgorod by this point was dying to break away, never having considered itself Rus. And for those Bulgarians who still write "i" as "и", good for them, it's their form of Cyrillic, just like all languages that use Cyrillic have.
It's an expression, you bloody well know that...
