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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

Is this a form of rebranding? Has a nation ever undergone a significant attempt at rebranding?

I was joking with my colleague about how Russia probably just wants Ukraine to add a buffer between the West and Moscow. He educated me on the meaning of "Ukraine" being essentially "borderland." Got me thinking about the seemingly absurd concept of disregarding all national history and focusing exclusively on "brand". Find a great sounding country name, a cool memorable flag, a catchy national anthem, a relatable alphabet.

If you look at nations as brands, many (most?) are pretty forgettable. Countless flags that look randomly generated and lots of anthems that don't linger in your ear.

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>He educated me on the meaning of "Ukraine" being essentially "borderland."

Incidentally, this is why they've been getting people to stop calling it The Ukraine - because Ukraine is more like a normal country name, while "The Ukraine" is like saying "The Borderland (of Russia)"

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

> He educated me on the meaning of "Ukraine" being essentially "borderland."

He's probably a speaker of Russian, so he assumes the Russian meaning of the word to be canonical. Which is rather ignorant, because the word has a different meaning in Ukrainian - it literally means 'country'. It is similar in Polish ('country' vs 'edge'/'border'/'region' in Russian) and probably other Slavonic languages.

I don't know how accurate this is, but I found this on Wikipedia:

> The traditional theory (which was widely supported by historians and linguists in the 19–20th centuries, see e.g. Max Vasmer's etymological dictionary of Russian) is that the modern name of the country is derived from the term "ukraina" in the sense ‘borderland, frontier region, marches’ etc. These meanings can be derived from the Proto-Slavic noun *krajь, meaning ‘edge, border’. Contemporary parallels for this are Russian okráina ‘outskirts’ and kraj ‘border district’.

However:

> Some Ukrainian scholars, such as Hryhoriy Pivtorak, Fedir Shevchenko, Mykola Andrusyak, Serhiy Shelukhin believe that the name is derived from ukraina in the sense of ‘region, principality, country’. Many medieval occurrences of the word can be interpreted as having that meaning. In this sense, the word can be associated with contemporary Ukrainian krajina, Belarusian kraina and Russian and Polish kraj, all meaning ‘country’ (see Translations, 'region of land').

So different people have different interpretations.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Name_of_Ukraine

The problem with the latter explanation is that it doesn't explain where "u" came from. Etymologically, "kraina" is indeed "country" or "land", that's true. But "u" is a preposition meaning "at", "by", "near" (in both languages - it's unchanged from Old East Slavic). So "u+kraina" would mean something like "near the country"... which sounds a lot like borderlands, does it not? At which point we're back at square one.

In general, when linguistics gets politicized, and there are multiple competing theories with various implications, take a look at the geographic spread of each. If it's politically relevant for one country, and one particular theory is only popular in that country, it's probably being promoted for political reasons. If it's widespread in academic circles of many different countries, including those that don't have any stakes in any associated politics disputes, it's more likely to be factual.

"So "u+kraina" would mean something like "near the country"... which sounds a lot like borderlands, does it not? "

It doesn't really. Ukrainian meaning of "u" is different from Russian, it's more like a Russian "v". For example "u lavtsi" translates to something like "in the shop", but never "near the shop", at the same time in Russian it would be "v lavke". It's just that heavily pushed "borderland" narrative makes it hard to think straight about this, especially for Russians.

In modern Ukrainian, sure. In modern Russian, the word isn't correctly formed, either.

But we're not talking about either one of those. The word is much older than that - about 8 centuries old if you count back to the first time it can be found in written text, and about 4 centuries if you count to its first use specifically to refer to Ukraine.

Well, 8 centuries ago even the word "Въкраина" was used. It doesn't fit into the narrative.

For what, the territory that's now the country Ukraine?

I'm not saying that 8 centuries ago, that territory was called by that name. Why would it be, when it was still the heartland of Kievan Rus? I'm saying that the word "оукраина" was used to mean borderlands then, such ones as they had.

And then 4 centuries later, that exact word became the name of the border territory of Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that covers pretty much the entirety of today's Western and Central Ukraine, in the language of people inhabiting that territory, said language being a direct descendant of the language spoken 4 centuries before...

I would dare say that a straightforward explanation is that the word retained its meaning, and was used in that meaning, because at that time it really was applicable to the territory in question. All the dots connect here in obvious ways. In contrast, if we assume that "ukraina" was derived from "kraina" for "homeland" instead, and try to backtrack, we need to explain how "u-" got there, and why the fact that the result matched the word that historically meant "borderlands" is entirely coincidental. I've seen some very convoluted explanations of this that could work, but Occam's razor still applies - between two explanations that both match observed evidence, the simpler one is preferable.

Which is probably why the "borderlands" etymology is widely accepted among linguists throughout the world, while various alternative theories all seem to have Ukrainian authors. I get that this is a very politicized question in Ukraine, especially since Russian nationalists and irredentists have been trying to interpret the "borderlands" etymology to imply that Ukraine was historically self-identifying as a border territory of Russia - which is, of course, blatantly false. But I don't think that starting with a premise that is more politically palatable, and then backtracking from there to recreate the (less likely) etymology to fit, is a good way to deal with it.

You are using the modern russian meaning of u, which is not much relevant in most slavik languages including ukrainian u means in.

No, I'm using the historical meaning of "u", from before Russian and Ukrainian were even distinct languages. Here's the "Tale of Igor's Campaign", 12th century, in the contemporary East Slavic:

   Игорь ждетъ мила брата Всеволода.
   И рече ему буй туръ Всеволодъ:
   "Одинъ братъ,
   одинъ светъ светлый -
   ты, Игорю!
   оба есве Святъславличя!
   Седлай, брате,
   свои бръзыи комони,
   а мои ти готови,
   оседлани *у* Курьска напереди.

Note last line. English translation:

   Igor awaits his beloved brother,
   and Fierce Bull Vsevolod speaks:
   “You are my one brother,
   Igor,
   my one shining light;
   we are both sons of Sviatoslav.
   Saddle, brother,
   your swift horses,
   for mine are ready,
   saddled ahead *at* Kursk.

Ukrainian translation:

   Дожидає Ігор брата Всеволода.
   Каже йому буй-тур Всеволод:
   «Один брат,
   один світ світлий,
   Ігорю,
   Обидва ми Святославовичі.
   Сідлай, брате,
   свої коні бистрі,
   Мої-бо вже готові стоять,
   *Під* Курськом осідлані.

The word "ukraina" was first attested at roughly the same time these lines were written.

No offence but pretending that google translate is a proper way to evaluate translations of almost 1000 year old text is beyond funny. It's obviously before Russian lang. existed since Moscow was founded 400 years after this text was written. At this time Kiev was not under any external power so you theory of the origin of the name is also very questionable.

First of all, where do you see any Google Translate above? Both are professional translations of the original. And the first snippet isn't Russian - it's Old East Slavic (from which both Russian and Ukrainian eventually came).

And of course I'm not claiming that the word "ukraina" was used to refer to what today is the country Ukraine back in 1200s - that would be ridiculous, for exactly the reasons you cite above. No, my point rather is that the word "ukraina" - "оукраина" - is attested in documents from that period to refer to areas that they (the Kievan Rus state) considered borderlands, and has fairly obvious and transparent etymology of "u+kraina", both parts of which are also attested in written sources.. It is solely about the etymological origin of the word - that, yes, it does in fact mean "borderlands" historically - not about the origin of the name "Ukraine" for the country. That came much later.

As for the latter, it shows up first somewhere circa 1600s, and it first appears in Polish sources (as self-designation of people inhabiting the territory). At that point, the entire Western and Central Ukraine was a part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth - and for them, it was definitely "borderlands" in all senses. Geographically it was the easternmost territory of the state. Culturally it was significantly different from Polish heartland - language, religion etc - and further east and south there were culturally alien Turkic (Tatar) tribes. Militarily, it was a buffer zone between the Commonwealth and the Tatars, and to some extent with Russia, with constant low-key hostilities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish%E2%80%93Lithuanian_Comm...

It's exactly the kind of area that would be called e.g. "the Mark" in German-speaking parts of Europe. Indeed, when the revived Polish state later occupied large parts of Western Ukraine after WW1, they referred to it as "kresy wschodnie" in Polish, literally meaning "eastern borderlands" - old habits die hard.

The first written mention is Kiev litopis that was way before the polish source, and it would be pretty pointless for Kievans to refer to themselves as borderland. I guess given the politicization of debate it's hard to find any objective info. From point of view of western neighbors it is possible that your interpretation makes sense but it does not explain why Kiev's litopys would use this name. On the translation some of words that have actual meaning are just transliterated which gave me the impression that it was google translation.

Again, the first written mention of what - the word "ukraina", or the use of that word to refer the territory that's Ukraine today? I tried to draw that distinction as clearly as I could above.

So far as I know, all uses of the word "ukraina" in Kievan sources do not refer to the territory as a whole, nor to territories near Kiev, but rather those that were borderlands with respect to Kiev as the capital (e.g. Halych). Of course, I may well be missing something - can you give an example of a Kievan source that use "ukraina" to refer to the country as a whole, or to its heartland?

It's debated whether or not it referred to territory as whole with most historians not supporting that idea, yet the territories it referred to were pretty much next to Kiev so the name borderland again very debatable.

"Country" in Ukrainian is "krayina", not "ukrayina".

FWIW, since the word "Ukraine" is first attested in written form as early as 12th century, its etymology has to be derived from the (then still common) Eastern Slavic of that period, rather than the modern meanings of either Russian or Ukrainian. And in that language, "ukraina" - "оукраина" - did mean "borderlands"

BTW, it doesn't appear to have become the name of the territory, and later the country, because it was borderlands of Muscovy/Russia. Rather, it seems to have originated in the western parts, because they were the borderlands of Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Russia historically preferred the term "Little Russia" (Malorossiya) to imply cultural affinity and justify territorial claims, to the point of proscribing the usage of "Ukraine" in imperial times.

Moscow was founded by Duke of Kiev Yuri Dolgorukiy as a border post. So the Russian border land interpretation is not even funny. One of the first written uses was in Kiev's 'litopys' in relation to the death of grand son of Yuri Dolgorukiy.

> It is similar in Polish ('country' vs 'edge'/'border'/'region' in Russian) and probably other Slavonic languages.

South Slavs have multiple historical examples of Krajina(s) and they all represented bordering area, edge, (military) frontier. In a broad sense kraj/krai means area, land, place. But krajina(s) were always bordering areas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krajina

There's also Polish example of Krajna, the bordering region between Greater Poland and Pomerania.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krajna

Of course, linguistics can and do get politicized so...

Turkey did so in its change from an ancient empire to a modern republic. Strange though, that it is taking the Kazakhs so long to make the change. Ataturk made the change in one year; the Kazakhs are taking nearly a decade, during which time the change can be rolled back or abandoned. Mao wanted to go to Pinyin to increase literacy in China; he stopped with simplified characters. Japanese can be written perfectly well with romaji, but it will never supplant that country's writing system. My guess is that Kazakh teenagers are already writing their language using roman characters in order to text and sms each other, just like the Arab teenagers who created Arabizi (Roman alphabet plus 3, 5 7 and 9) on their own in order to use phones that did not yet support R2L script. While modern phones do so, the new writing system still persists and is perfectly serviceable. Also, why do people insist on saying the Roman alphabet has 26 characters? B looks nothing like b. R looks nothing like r. For someone completely unfamiliar with the alphabet, there are more than 26 letter forms or glyphs to learn.

Among other reasons, while there are 52 symbols to learn (ignoring punctuation, numbers, and other fun esoterica), you could substitute lowercase and uppercase letters for each other without losing or changing the meaning of the word - so while there are 52 symbols, they map to only 26 letters, with contextual rules about which symbol is used for which case.

More pragmatically, I'd express it as "using any mix of uppercase or lowercase letters wouldn't obscure or change the word being expressed". (I'm sure there are exceptions where you could conflate a proper noun with another noun without proper capitalization, but since you don't get capitalization in speech, people generally can deal with it.)

e: Thinking slightly more, I'd probably phrase it as "52 symbols map to 26 letters, and the words of the language are defined in terms of letters."

Kazakh teenagers do from time to time write Russian or Kazakh in a very strange mix of latin letters, but most of them write in either Kazakh proper or in Russian (Cyrillic) since it has most of the letters of the Kazakh alphabet.

> Turkey did so in its change from an ancient empire to a modern republic. Strange though, that it is taking the Kazakhs so long to make the change. Ataturk made the change in one year; the Kazakhs are taking nearly a decade

First of all when the turkish alphabet reform happened there was a big revolution happening, and most of the people were illiterate. Also, the ottoman alphabet was incredibly bad for writing turkish (among many causes the language has eight vowels and vowel harmony) that nobody in their right mind would oppose.

Secondly the empire was not ancient at all, in fact what Ataturk completed was started by illuminst sultans like Mahmud II and Abdulmejid I. Also, Turkey is not a continuation of the empire but the last of the states that liberated itself from it.

There's also & which used to be taught as the final letter of the alphabet.

I don't think "rebranding" is a term of art but... the Koreans replaced Chinese characters with hangul; compare it with the Japanese, who despite having developed a phonetic script have kept using Chinese characters till today.

Israel is also an interesting case; it probably wouldn't exist in its present form if Hebrew hadn't been revived.

> Has a nation ever undergone a significant attempt at rebranding?

Estonia comes to mind, which has invested in a high-tech profile, see for example their e-residency program: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-residency_of_Estonia

> The name "Ukraine" (Ukrainian: Україна Ukrayina > [ukrɑˈjinɑ]) derives from the Slavic words "u", meaning > "within", and "kraj", meaning "land" or "border". > Together, "u+kraij" means "within the borders" or more aptly in > English, "the heartland".

To quote wikipedia. I.e. from what I read on Wikipedia, it is the other way round: Ukraine is the heartland, Moscow would be at the outskirt.

Has a nation ever undergone a significant attempt at rebranding?

Siam? Turkey?

Lots. In fact, probably more of them than not, considering national consciousness tied statehood that does not always fall along prior ethnic or cultural lines is something all sovereign states try to cultivate to stay together, and define the ingroup and outgroup. It's also used to set ideological lines, and to purge perceived connections to an earlier, now-undesirable administration.

Just considering common names, here's a few:

Burma -> Myanmar

Belgian Congo -> Congo -> ??? -> Zaire -> DRC

Persia -> Iran

South Rhodesia -> Rhodesia -> Zimbabwe

Upper Volta -> Burkina Faso

Yugoslavia -> Serbia and Montenegro

British Empire's American colonies -> The United States of America

> Yugoslavia

That would be the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia specifically. The much larger Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia had already fallen apart by that time (1992).

> Yugoslavia -> Serbia and Montenegro

Yugoslavia broke up in a civil war. I wouldn't count it as a 'rebranding' any more than British Empire -> United States.

It's possible that in the near future we'll see Republic of China become Taiwan, officially.

>Yugoslavia -> Serbia and Montenegro

And before (soon after WWI) it used to be officially called the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.

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