One possible reason is to make it harder for young people to find earlier info about Kiev, as they won't be spelling it correctly for the old searches.
It's been Kiev my entire life so far.
I'm still peeved about them changing Peking to Beijing and brontosaurus to allosaurus. Oddly, the spell check flags allosaurus, but not brontosaurus or Peking. :)
Киев is the Russian spelling, Ки́їв is the Ukrainian spelling
perhaps и tranlates as "i" from Russian and и́ to "y" from Ukrainian so that all words with и́ in Ukrainian would come out as containing "y" by convention.
I don't know about Ukrainian but the Russian, Cyrillic letter "y" translates to an oo sound in English, and the other letter you posted is ""ee " sound.
I was wondering that myself as I saw on Google Maps suddenly the name is spelled with a Y and was wondering "when the hell did that happen?"
I dunno, but it makes no linguistic sense at all.
One possible reason is to make it harder for young people to find earlier info about Kiev, as they won't be spelling it correctly for the old searches.
It's been Kiev my entire life so far.
I'm still peeved about them changing Peking to Beijing and brontosaurus to allosaurus. Oddly, the spell check flags allosaurus, but not brontosaurus or Peking. :)
Great observation. As I said, it makes no sense since both Russian and Ukrainian use the Cyrillic alphabet.
And the real ethnic Russ live in Ukraine I believe.
perhaps и tranlates as "i" from Russian and и́ to "y" from Ukrainian so that all words with и́ in Ukrainian would come out as containing "y" by convention.
I don't know about Ukrainian but the Russian, Cyrillic letter "y" translates to an oo sound in English, and the other letter you posted is ""ee " sound.