Peter Dickinson at the Atlantic Council seems to consider the spelling of the Ukrainian president’s surname in English to be a matter of international importance. While I doubt that it affects Ukraine’s geopolitical standing as Dickinson suggests, I confess that I do find the lack of consistency painful to the eyes. In English we already have a longstanding convention for writing names ending in the Ukrainian -ський or the Russian –ский with a simple “-sky.”
I have a dog in this fight because my Ukrainian grandfather’s last name was Турянський. He spelled it “Turiansky” in English, as our family does to this day. Our English edition of the one-volume classic, History of Ukraine, was authored by Michael Hrushevsky. The setting that we sometimes used for a particular liturgical hymn when I was growing up was composed by Bortniansky.
On the Russian side we have the writer Dostoevsky, the composer Tchaikovsky, the theologians Florovsky and Florensky, the revolutionary Trotsky….
Etc.
In this vein, it makes the most sense to write the president’s name as “Zelensky” in English. This is how I found it on his official website a week or so ago. As Dickinson points out, though, it has since been changed to Zelenskyy. This gives English speakers precisely no clue as to how to say it.
Converting a name from one of the Cyrillic alphabets to the Latin alphabet comprises an inexact science. If we want English speakers to say a Slavic name more or less correctly, we have to avoid a strict transliteration—which would have rendered my grandfather’s name as Turjans’kyj, and the president’s as Zelens’kyj. “-Skyy” leads one to assume that the last two letters are identical in Ukrainian (they’re not), while “-skiy” suggests that the name ends with -ській (it doesn’t).
My two cents. Stay tuned for my return to religious commentary next time.
Giacomo Sanfilippo is an Orthodox Christian of Ukrainian and Lemko descent on his mother’s side, a Ph.D. student in Theological Studies at Trinity College in the University of Toronto, and the founding editor of Orthodoxy in Dialogue. He holds a B.A. in Sexuality Studies from York University and an MA in Theology from Regis College, both in Toronto, and is an alumnus of the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto. Earlier in life, he completed the course work for a master’s in divinity at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary near New York City. Orthodoxy in Dialogue has an extensive Ukraine section in its Archives by Author.
