There has been a pretty dramatic shift in ngram frequency between 1990 and 2019 (the most recent data in that corpus), with usage of Kiev falling off dramatically, and usage of of Kyiv rising steadily. Given recent events, and particularly a shift in official style guides of many prominent English language publications, I would expect that trend has accelerated in more recent data. On Mon, Oct 25, 2021 at 10:59 Arthur David Olson via tz <tz@iana.org> wrote:
Here are the results of a Google ngrams search for frequencies of the various spellings between 1700 and 1940:
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Kiev%2CKyiv%2CKiou%2CKiow%2CKi...
@dashdashado
On Mon, Oct 25, 2021 at 1:49 PM Paul Eggert via tz <tz@iana.org> wrote:
On 10/25/21 09:04, Pierpaolo Bernardi via tz wrote:
It is only a coincidence that the English name is more similar to russian than to Ukrainian.
I doubt whether it's entirely coincidence, as the English-language spelling for the city was all over the map (so to speak) long ago, with spellings like Kiou, Kiow, Kiew, and Kiiow. In the 19th century the city was spelled "Kieff" as often as "Kiev" in English-language text, and surely this was because English speakers most often heard about the city from Russian speakers.
You can see a similar effect in "Prague", the English-language name for the capital of the Czech Republic. English-speakers got that spelling from the French, and formerly pronounced it to rhyme with "vague" (a rhyme that still works in French, although most English-speakers would disagree nowadays).
-- Scott Atwood