BAN #405: Science fair talk tonight, Київ

28 February 2022 Issue #405

February 28, 2022

Upcoming Appearances/Shameless Self-Promotion

Where I’ll be doing things you can watch and listen to or read about

Tonight — Monday, February 28 — I’ll be giving the concluding keynote talk for The CoorsTek Denver Metro Regional Science and Engineering Fair at or around 6:15 p.m. Mountain time (8:15 p.m. Eastern US time). It’s called “Star Tech: How We See the Universe” and it’s about how technology has changed the way astronomy works.

The talk will be live-streamed over Zoom, and you can register for it here. It’s free!

I’m really pleased to do this; I love science fairs. Years ago I was invited to one and asked to give the opening talk, and had a rare blast of full-blown inspiration. I grabbed a pencil, and on a piece of slightly torn yellow notepad paper I quickly wrote down words that became the talk very nearly verbatim. It inspired Gavin Aung Than, who draws the wonderful Zen Pencils comic, to create a phenomenal comic based on it. I have a copy framed, and it’s one of the proudest things I have.

Random Thoughts

Stuff I think about in the shower, typically

Allow me a moment, please, for a small thing that’s a big thing.

I was listening to the radio as I was driving home from an appointment the other day and NPR was of course running non-stop items on the invasion of Ukraine by Putin’s Russian forces. I listened with both fascination and horror.

A journalist was reporting from Ukraine, and several times said he was in a city called — and this is how he pronounced it — “keev” (I’ve since also heard it pronounced with a very slight inflection, making it not quite two syllables but more like one with a dip in the middle, like saying, “kyee-eev”). I let myself get distracted by this; was he talking about a different city than what I have always heard as “kee-yev” (two distinct syllables) or is this just a different pronunciation? The former seemed unlikely, but if the latter why pronounce it differently?

When I got home I looked it up, and it wasn’t hard to find the reason. Kyiv is the transliteration (that is, how you’d spell it in English) from Ukrainian: Київ. They pronounce it “keev” (or again with that slight dip).

Kyev (note the e) is transliterated from the Russian Cyrillic Киев and is pronounced “kee-yev”.

Well. That got me thinking.

When I was a kid, I listened to a lot of classical music — it’s what I heard around the house, mostly from my dad — and Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” (the Ravel orchestration from Mussorgsky’s piano piece) was a favorite. It’s iconic, generally considered among the best classical music ever written. It supposedly follows Mussorgsky himself as he walks through an art exhibit in a museum (there are several time signature changes from bar to bar, rumored to represent Mussorgsky’s limp) and it’s an incredible work, despite perhaps some antisemitic tones in the movement about two bickering Jewish men.

It ends with one of the most triumphant works of music ever written. The artwork it’s based on is of a magnificent gate that was to be constructed commemorating Tsar Alexander II’s escape from an assassination attempt. To say the soaring brass and viscerally resonating chords in this piece, the finale of Mussorgsky’s magnum opus, were formative in my own taste for classical music would be to seriously understate the case.

The piece is called “The Great Gate of Kiev”.

Ah. Now, I have always, without fail, heard that pronounced “kee-yev”.

And this brings me back to my confusion when the reporter called the city “keev”. The Russian pronunciation of “kee-yev” was adopted when Ukraine was annexed and became part of the Soviet Union. When the USSR collapsed in the early 1990s, Ukrainians pushed for the city to be named in the Ukrainian way once again. NPR adopted this pronunciation just last month, and spell it Kyiv as well.

It sounds odd to my ear, and odd to say, after a lifetime of hearing it as “kee-yev”. Changing the way you say a word can be difficult. But you know what?

Words have meaning. They represent concepts, ideas, identity.

Ukraine and Russia have a complicated history. Russia took Ukraine away from the Ukrainians in the 1940s. Ukrainians subsequently struggled for freedom and achieved it in the 90s, and for 30 years have wrestled with themselves, as people in many countries do — including my own, even now — to become an independent democracy.

But now Russia, in the form of Putin, wants to take that freedom away again.

It’s a small thing, perhaps; a word, a city name, a pronunciation. But it matters.

And in a piece of music written by a Russian about Ukrainian city, it matters. It’s about a Ukrainian city. Their capital city.

So. From now on, in my head and out loud, it will be “The Great Gate of Kyiv”. Keev.

And I will always think of Ukraine when I do so.

That may be a small thing, but there are big things too. If you want to help Ukraine in a substantive way, there are lots of things you can do. There are far too many charities to support Ukrainians than could possibly be listed, but this tweet links to many:

Here’s another with links to places with lots of choices:

The refugees from the invasion will be a crisis, and you can help by giving to The UN Refugee Agency:

Also, I’ve opened up comments to everyone; if you know of more that you trust then feel free to add them there.

Blog Jam

[Evidence of an impact 280 million years ago has been found, and I could’ve seen it from my house. From Monday’s article. Credit: Mark Garlick/Science Photo Library via Getty Images]

Et alia

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