26 March—Is it Zelenskyy, Zelensky, Zelenskiy, or Zelenskyi? Depends where you read it. It’s largely a matter of transliteration—Cyrillic to Latin letters.

Zelensky—here in Latin (or Roman) characters—is a Slavic masculine surname originating from the place name Zelyonoe, meaning “green.” (The feminine, of course, is Zelenska.) In Ukrainian Cyrillic the name is spelled Зеленський. In Russian Cyrillic it’s spelled Зеленский. Here we’re interested only in the finial diphthong ий.

But first, Ukraine’s president himself spells his name Володимир Зеленський in Ukrainian and Volodymyr Zelenskyy in what we’ll call English. Note the yy. The Cyrillic letters ий are called Ivan and Ivan kratkiy or kratkaye (here we go again) by friends, by the way, and represent what’s essentially the “ee” sound: Ivan is a simple vowel as in “see,” while Ivan kratkiy is a semivowel (or soft vowel) as in “toy.”

Zelensky grew up in what used to be called the Ukraine (with the definite article, which I still find myself, of Ukrainian heritage, using) as a native speaker of Russian. While only about two-thirds of Ukrainians can speak Russian, just about all Ukrainians understand it when they hear it, doubtless because Russian is—or at least was—the dominant language of Ukraine’s media.

Like Spanish in the United States before too long.

Zelensky passed the English as a Foreign Language test when he was in high school and he speaks it like much more better than many American high school kids. He prefers the Zelenskyy spelling, allegedly because the Zelensky spelling harks back to the Russian, though I don’t see where the extra “ь” (a so-called soft sign which modifies a preceding consonant) affects the “ий” diphthong at the end of his name.

Zelenskyy vs. Zelensky isn’t quite as obvious as Kyiv vs. Kiev, which latter we were all brought up on. Kyiv is clearly transliterated from Ukrainian Ки́їв, while Kiev is just as clearly transliterated from Russian Киев. And there’s even a KyivNotKiev campaign online.

Whether for purely linguistic reasons or as an act of defiance, if Volodymyr Zelenskyy wants his “yy” he certainly deserves to have it . . .