Sappho

Sappho is described as the greatest female poet of ancient Greece. Or, the greatest Greek lyric poet, period. Her reputation as one of the world’s finest poets has persisted for more than 2500 years, but the overwhelming majority of her work has not.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to stuff you missed in History class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hey everyone, Before we get started today,
we wanted to let you know that there are only
a few spots left on our upcoming trips to Paris. Yes,
which startles and delights me. I thought no one would

(00:23):
want to come with us, and it turns out everybody does. So, Yes,
we are going to Paris June second through night. If
you come to our website, which is missed in history
dot com, you can click the link that says Paris
trip exclamation point in either the top menu bar or
under the little menu icon. If you're on a mobile device,

(00:45):
that will take you to the site we can learn
all about the trip and sign up for it. Yes,
so we hope to see you in Paris. We're going
to have a splendid time. We're both extremely excited. Hello
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy B. Wilson and
I'm Holly Fry. The poet Sappho is the first known

(01:08):
woman writer in the European literary tradition, and she is
described as the greatest female poet of Ancient Greece or
the greatest Greek lyric poet period regardless of gender, or
even the greatest female poet of all time. There's a
addition to her work where C. R. Haynes, who edited
that edition, put it this way quote with the possible

(01:30):
exception of Shakespeare, Homer is still the supreme poet, and Sappho,
without any exception, the poetess par excellence. Except those last
two words were in Greek, so I got to figure
out how to translate them, which was a challenge. Sappho's
reputation as one of the world's finest poets has persisted
for more than hundred years, and that's fascinating because the

(01:53):
overwhelming majority of her work has not. And then also
fascinating is that the words sapphic and lesbian, which is
derived from the island of les Boss, where Sappho lived,
they've become synonymous with same sex relationships among women. But
we actually know very very little about Sappho's life or
her relationships, and two thousand years ago those terms had

(02:16):
really different meanings from what they do now. So we
are going to get into all of this today. Sappho
is also a frequent listener request and over the past
few years we've gotten requests from Helen Sillian pat Esther
and one person who didn't have a name on their emails,
and then as a heads up, we talk about people's
relationships often enough on the show, we don't usually need

(02:38):
to mention a specific sex act. That is not the
case today, so use discretion if it seems like that
sort of territory might be an issue for you or
people that you listen with. Now, I feel like we
need to do a show called sexy History, be a
whole other thing, completely different, and we wouldn't need as

(03:00):
Runnings new. So the most referenced source of information about
Sappho's life is a tenth century Byzantine compendium called the Puda.
In the Studa is sort of a lexicon or encyclopedia
of the ancient Mediterranean. It has two Sappho entries, and
we'll get into why that is a little bit later.
Sappho's name also comes up in lots of other entries

(03:22):
in the Suda, including ones for her relatives, places she lived,
people she knew, and definitions of various literary terms. She's
also mentioned in lots of other historical writing that has
survived until today, although usually those references are shorter and
less detailed than what's in the Pseuda. This all makes
it very tricky to piece together Sappho's biography. The Pseudo

(03:45):
was compiled more than a thousand years after Sappo actually lived,
and then on top of that, it's not exactly reliable
all the time. It's cobbled together from all kinds of
different sources, and some of its entries pick up information
that is clearly not factual. In terms of the entries
on Sappho, it's just not clear how much of the
information came from historical sources, how much from what people

(04:07):
just knew in quotation marks about Sappho in the tenth century,
and how much of it was gleaned from things that
are mentioned in her poetry. It's always tricky to try
to use poems as a source for the poet's biographical details,
but it's even more of a challenge here because by
the tenth century a lot of Sappho's work had already
been lost, so we don't know the full context of

(04:29):
those lines that we have. According to the Suda, Sappho
was born in the forty two Olympiad, which was between
six twelve and six O nine b C. But the
wording of it could also be translated as flourished and
not born, which would mean that those years were the
height of her career and not her birth. The pseudolists
eight different men as Sappho's potential father. Herodotus, on the

(04:53):
other hand, lived about two hundred years after Sappho did,
and he wrote that her father was named scam Andronymus,
and that's one of the eight men that the sud
elicit as a possibility. Hundreds of years later, Sappho's mother
may have been named Claius, and we have to say
may have been, because a couple of Sappho's fragments mentioned
a daughter named Claius, and it was traditional for daughters

(05:16):
to be named after their grandmother. But even that is
pretty murky because the the word that's used for daughter
could also just mean child, and in some cases it
could actually be translated as slave. So this Claius, who
may or may not have been named after Sappho's mother,
may or may not have been her child. This is
like the most provisional discussion of history ever. I feel

(05:39):
like if you've heard the words possibly and may have been,
you've heard most of Sappho's biography. We do know she
lived on the island of Lesbos and the aegan C
and that's just across the water from what's now Turkey.
At the time that was Sartists, which was the capital
of Lydia. Sappho's place of birth on the island was
probably the town of Heiressis or the capital of Middlini.

(06:03):
She most likely lived most of her life in Middlini,
although it is possible that she and her family either
moved or fled to Sicily for a time, either because
of general political upheaval on Lesbos or because of their
own political affiliations. She may have had three brothers. The
Suda names them as Larkos, Caraxos, and Eurygios, and two

(06:25):
of those names appear in a poem that was unearthed
in which we talked about in one of our Unearthed
episodes that year, and that poem has been nicknamed the
Brother's Poem because it contains these two names. From here,
the pseudo wanders into some more questionable territory. It says
that Sappho's husband was Kirklius of Andros, but Kirklius is

(06:49):
very close to a slang term for the word Penis
and Andross was a real place, but was also the
word for man. So the suitas name for Sappho's husband
is sort of like saying he was Dick Johnson of
Man Island. So this is more likely to be a
crude joke than her husband's actual name. I want to
make a sitcom now about Dick Johnson on man Island. Uh.

(07:12):
And then the suda names three of Sappho's friends, Athis, Tellusippa,
and Megara, using a word to describe them that could
mean companion, but it could also mean cortisan, and the
studha says her relationship with them led her to be
accused of a friendship or a love that was shameful.
From there, the student goes into some more mundane territory,

(07:34):
naming a few of Sappho's students, saying that she wrote
nine volumes of poetry and crediting her with inventing the plectrum,
which is like a pick for plucking the strings on
a liar. It also describes her poetry as including epigrams,
l j x iambics and monodies. Her surviving work also
includes a lot of epithalamia, and these are poems that

(07:56):
were celebrating a marriage which she was probably commissioned to right.
In addition to the Sudas mentioned of students, a number
of classical sources described Sappho as a teacher, but none
of these sources mentioned what or where she taught. In
spite of that lack of detail, a lot of articles
that exist today definitively say that Sappho ran a thesos,

(08:18):
which is sometimes described as a sort of finishing school
for women waiting to get married, and it's also sometimes
described as a religious community dedicated to Aphrodite, and sometimes
as a group of temple courtisans. But really there's no
substantiation to any of this or for the idea of
a Theosos as an actual established school of some sort.

(08:40):
None of sappho surviving writing mentions that the asos at all.
You will see a lot of just incredibly definitive saying
with a h confidence, statements that are like, Sappho ran
this the ass that taught these young women how to
be wives and mothers, and maybe it's not documentation of that.

(09:01):
And then there is the story of Sappho and Phayon,
and the basic gist of this story is that Sappho
fell in love with a ferryman named Phayon, and when
he rejected her, she threw herself off a cliff. That
story makes up the bulk of the Suda's second Sappho entry,
which says that this supposedly different Sappho was also from Middelini,

(09:24):
also played a harp and may have written lyric poetry
as well. This story about the ferryman is repeated over
and over and over. It's depicted in numerous works of
art and literature, including in Avids herodes or epistles of
the heroines. But Phayon was a mythical figure, and it
seems like this idea that the real Sapphos threw herself

(09:46):
over a cliff for him dates back to a comedy
by Menander written about two hundred years after Sappho died,
and in the thousands of years since then, the fact
that at least one of Sappho's fragments mentions Phayon has
been used to try to substantiate this fictional story as
though it were fact. So when it comes to Sappho's biography,
we have a whole lot of contradictions and questionable sources,

(10:09):
and in some cases or poetry has been used to
try to substantiate those claims. So we are going to
take a look at her poems and some more detail
after we take a quick sponsor break. Sappho was a
lyric poet, meaning that she composed poems that were meant

(10:31):
to be sung accompanied on a liar in In ancient Greece,
lyric poetry tended to be short and very personal, often
sung from one person to another or written in the
voice of one person addressing another. Many of Sappho's poems
that have survived until today either are or are believed
to be love poems. It's hard to tell sometimes because

(10:53):
what survives can be incredibly short. Homer, on the other hand,
wrote epic poetry, and this was much longer, with a
narrative that told the story of the heroic deeds of
the characters in the poem. And we should also note
that it's very possible that the work attributed to Homer
was really written by several people and not just one. Regardless,
though in the ancient Western world he was called just

(11:15):
the poet and Sappho was the poetess. Lyric poetry really
flourished in ancient Greece between about six hundred and four
fifty b C. So that was when Sappa lived. It
wasn't newly invented during that time. This was more a
revival of an earlier poetic form. And then two people
were considered to be the most notable lyric poets of

(11:38):
this period. They were Sappho and I'll see Us, both
of whom were from Lesbos and may have known each
other and even written to each other. Sappho wrote her
poems in Aolic Greek, which is sometimes also called Lesbian Greek,
and in that dialect her name was more like Shapa
than the Sappho that we know today. In about the
third century b c. E Sappho's poet Tree was compiled

(12:01):
into an eight or nine volume collection in Alexandria, Egypt.
The volumes were arranged by the meter used for each poem,
which set it apart for most other compilations, which tended
to be organized instead by subject or seem. There were
as many as ten thousand lines of poetry in this compilation,
but it's possible that Sappho wrote much more than that,

(12:23):
especially since many of her works were commissioned for special
occasions like weddings, and they might not have been preserved
after they were performed. Today, Sappho was known most for
one particular poetic form, and that's the Sapphic, which is
also called Sapphic meter or Sapphic stanzas. We don't really
know whether Sappho developed this form herself or refined a

(12:44):
form that already existed, but she was so skilled at
writing in this form that it ultimately carried her name.
The Sapphic used four line stanzas, with three longer lines
followed by one shorter line, and then within those lines.
The meter came from Lesbian Greek's pattern of long and
short syllables. When people are translating Sappho's work today, sometimes

(13:04):
they approximate the meter using the characteristics of whatever language
they're working in. So, for example, in English, there's a
pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables, with the stressed syllables
standing in for the long syllables in Greek, and the
unstressed syllables taking the place of the short ones. These
tend to be very personal, passionate, and emotional poems, and

(13:26):
they're simultaneously very simple and elegant. During Sappho's lifetime, poetry
was also believed to be magical, so poetry was thought
to be able to influence or shape reality. So Sappho's
poetry was considered to be beautiful and melodic and powerful.
But we have unfortunately very little of this poetry today,

(13:47):
and even less of it in the form of complete poems.
The vast majority of what we have is just short fragments,
and some of these fragments are from damaged pieces of
writing material or pieces of clay pots. Other are quotations
from other people's surviving work. For example, Cassius Longinus quoted
four stanzas by Sappho in on the Sublime, which was

(14:09):
published around one hundred CE. Today, out of those ten
thousand or so lines that we think that Sappho wrote,
we have roughly six hundred and fifty lines of poetry remaining.
That is spread out across about two hundred and fifty fragments,
And of those six and fifty lines, fewer than a
third of them or even complete lines of poetry. A

(14:30):
lot of them are partial lines. Six of the fragments
are longer and more substantive, but still not entirely intact,
and one of those longer fragments is the brother's poem
that we mentioned earlier, which is missing only its first
few stanzas. Only one of Sappho's poems is believed to
be complete today, and that is the Ode to Aphrodite.

(14:52):
Different collections of Sappho's poetry use different numbering systems to
keep up with all of these fragments, but most of
the time Owed to Aphrodite, sometimes translated as Him or
Prayer to Aphrodite is number one. Here's the beginning of
Ode to Aphrodite, translated by T. W. Higginson in event
one quote beautiful throned immortal Aphrodite, daughter of Zeus beguiler.

(15:15):
I implore THEE weigh me not down with weariness and anguish.
Oh Thou most holy, come to me now, if ever thou,
in kindness harkenist my words. And in the poem, Aphrodite
does come and says, who has harmed thee? Oh, my
poor Sappho. Though now he flies ere long, he shall
pursue THEE. Fearing thy gifts. He too, in turn, shall

(15:38):
bring them loveless. Today tomorrow he shall Woozee, though thou
should spurn him. Another of the longer fragments is the
one that was quoted in On the Sublime, which we
mentioned earlier, and it describes the speaker's response to sitting
across from a woman that the poem is addressing. This
is usually interpreted as Sappho herself describing her own response

(16:00):
of the woman that she's facing, but that's not really
clear here. It is as translated by John Addington Simmons
in three Peer of the Gods. He seemeth to me
the blissful man who sits and gazes at the before
him close besides these sits and in silence, here's the
silverly speaking laughing Love's low laughter. Oh this this only

(16:25):
stirs the troubled heart in my breast to tremble. For
should I but see thee a little moment? Straight? Is
my voice hushed? Yea, my tongue is broken, and through
and through me neath the flesh impalpable fire runs tingling
nothing see mine eyes and our noise of roaring waves

(16:45):
in my ear sounds. Sweat runs down and rivers. A
tremor seizes all my limbs, and paler than grass in autumn,
caught by pains of menacing death, I falter lost in
the love trance, But almost all the aments are not
nearly so long as this. Here is an example, Sweet mother,

(17:05):
I cannot weave my web broken as I am by
longing for a boy at soft aphrodite's will. One that
we think from a wedding poem goes neither honey nor
be for me. I don't know why I love that
I do neither of the above. Another fragment just says
shot with a thousand hues, and one reads and I

(17:28):
flutter like a child after her mother, And one fragment
is simply the words you burn me. Sappho's fragments can
be really evocative, and then combined with her pretty mysterious biography,
they can just be beguiling. But the fact that they're
so fragmented and scattered makes her work really difficult to study.

(17:49):
We have a sense that she wrote lots of love poems,
and that she wrote lots of poems for people's weddings.
Her work seems to carry a lot of affection as well,
including physical affection from and women, but we don't necessarily
have the greatest sense of what the whole body of
her work is like. There's some guesswork going on, especially
since some of the fragments are so short that we're

(18:11):
not even a hundred percent sure that Sappho really wrote them,
And we'll get into why there's so little of Sappho's
work left today to study after we have another sponsor break.
As far as we know, during her lifetime and at
least for a while afterwards, Sappho was deeply respected and

(18:34):
admired as a poet and a person. Plato, who lived
roughly two hundred years after she did, wrote quote some
say them uses are nine, but how carelessly look at
the tenth Sappho from Lesbus. It doesn't seem as though
her contemporaries really questioned her character in any way. I mean,
after all, she was getting a lot of commissions to

(18:55):
write poetry for people's weddings, and that doesn't seem like
it would be happening if she were socially reviled. But
in the century since then, people have interpreted Sappho in
vastly different ways. In the words of Holt and Parker quote,
every age creates its own Sappho, and many of these
creations have imagined Sappho as being, at least in the

(19:18):
morality of the time, deviant or depraved. Some of these
shifts are thanks to her being from the island of
les Bus. While she was living, les Bus was considered
to be a place full of passion and poetry and sensuality,
although also with a lot of political turmoil and in fighting,
which is why Sappho and her family may have fled

(19:38):
at some point possibly see our Haynes, who we quoted
at the top of the show, described it this way
quote the Aoliens of Lesbas were a vigorous and gifted race,
brave and war enterprising and trade, vehement and politics eminent,
and poetry and music. But within a few centuries after
her death, prevailing opinion of the island of Lesbas had shifted.

(20:01):
That tendency towards passion and wealth moved more into perceived
hedonism and excess. Lesbis went from being thought of as
a place of beauty and refinement to one of licentiousness
and corruption. The Greek word lesbias in meaning acting like
someone from Lesbus, became associated with impurity and one specific

(20:22):
sex act, that being Fallacio. It wasn't just about the island,
though eventually this also extended to Sappho herself. Greek comedy
tended to be in one way or another satirical, although
the exact nature and the primary targets of the satire
shifted over time. In the in the sort of history
of Greek comedy, and starting a couple of centuries after

(20:46):
she died, Sappho became the target of this satire. Her
name was used for characters in several Greek comedies, and
those characters were usually depicted as wanton and lustful and
just excessively sexual with young men. Society's understanding of relationships
and gender roles shifts over time, so it's certain that

(21:07):
romantic and physical relationships were viewed very differently on Lesbos
in the seventh century b c. Than they are in
various cultures today. But we know virtually nothing about the details,
and many of the authors who have speculated about it
have tried to draw conclusions based on ancient Sparta. But
our understanding of Spartan society is also limited, and it

(21:29):
was a completely different society from Lesbi's, located in a
different part of Greece, and it flourished starting two hundred
years or so after Sappho's death. However, we do know
that same sex relationships became increasingly taboo in parts of
Europe in the centuries after Sappa lived, so they don't
really know how they were regarded while she was living

(21:51):
and where she was living, but we do know that
it became more and more taboo afterward, and as that happened,
the idea that Sappho was dv because of her lust
for young men morphed into the idea that she was
deviant because of her lust for young women. The first
reference to this that we know about was written in
the second or third century CE. In the sixteenth century,

(22:14):
humanist scholars claimed that Christian Church officials had burned Sappho's
work for this reason at least twice. That Bishop Gregory
nazi Enzen of Constantinople had done so in three eighty,
followed by Pope Gregory the Seventh in ten seventy three,
but it's not clear whether these burnings actually happened, especially
since Bishop Gregory himself was known to quote from Sappho. Yeah,

(22:38):
it's there's some conjecture that over the centuries, two different
Gregory's were conflated together into this one person who supposedly
did this burning. Even if her work was burned by
the church because of perceptions about Sappho's morality, that would
not account for so much of its loss. There were
also floods and accidental fires, and that aging of the

(23:00):
material that the poetry was recorded on, and fewer and
fewer people speaking a Olian Greek, meaning that there was
less and less demand for new copies of her work
to be printed or written or copied. Sappho didn't fade
into total obscurity, though we mentioned in our Christine to
Pizzant episode that she's named in the Book of the

(23:21):
City of Ladies, which was written in fourteen o five.
By the sixteenth century, though, what most people knew about
Sappho really came from Ovid's Herodies rather than from anything
about her actual biography or her work. By the eighteenth century,
even less of Sappho's poetry was known to the world
than the six hundred fifty lines we have today, and

(23:42):
the words Sapphic and lesbian had taken on entirely different
meanings than what they'd initially meant, which was basically related
to Sappho or related to the island of Lesbis. Lesbian
was first used in writing to describe a woman who
is physically or romantically involved with another woman in seventeen
thirty two, and saffic was used in association with same sex,

(24:05):
desire and relationships among women. A few years later. The
first appearance of the word sapphic in writing was in
a seventeen sixty one translation of Plato, which read quote,
their affections tend rather to their own sex, and of
this kind are the sapphic lovers. So by the Romantic
era in Europe, both Sappho and the island of Lesbus

(24:27):
had become inextricably connected to the idea of homosexuality among women,
which was also culturally very taboo and in some cases outlawed.
But in spite of that, in the nineteenth century, Sappho's
poetry experienced a surge in popularity. The Romantics found the
emotional depth of her poems and the fragments really appealing.

(24:49):
She started appearing in poems by people like Byron and
bade Laire, although not necessarily in what we would call
a favorable light. Then, in the late nineteenth and early
twenty centuries, a collection of manuscripts was unearthed near the
Egyptian city of Oxyrynchus, drastically increasing the number of known
Sappho fragments and giving people way more of them to

(25:12):
study and read. Running alongside this increasing popularity was an
attempt to reform Sappho's image into something that wasn't contrary
to nineteenth century morality. In eighteen sixteen, Frederick Gottlin Welker
published Sappho Freed from a Prevailing Prejudice, which tried to
reinterpret her poetry in a way that minimized the homo

(25:33):
eroticism of her work, and this did start to shift
people's opinions about Sappho. But then in Pierre Luis published
Chanson de Bilitis, which was supposedly a collection of newly
discovered poems written by one of Sappho's female students, who
was named in the French pronunciation beauty. These were really

(25:54):
a work of poetic fiction, though these poems are very
erotic and sensual on though people really quickly figured out
that they were not really written by one of Sappho's students,
it did reinforce the connection between Sappho and homosexual relationships
among women that Welker had been trying to minimize and
his earlier work, and that led to another effort to

(26:16):
try to reimagine Sappho's identity in nineteen thirteen led by
Ulrich von Velamovitz. His Sappho and somonodies drew from Welker's
eighteen sixteen work, and it depicted Sappho as a spinster
ish schoolmarm. This work also really reinforced the idea that
Sappho was a teacher at a formal school with young
women as her pupils, and this depiction is based on

(26:39):
his reinterpreting her poetry, not on historical research. Today, Sappho
seems really intrinsically connected to the idea of lesbian, which
can describe a person's sexual orientation as well as their
political or social identity, and that connection was really reinforced
during the early years of the gay rights movement in
the United States when it was still known as the

(27:01):
homophile movement. In nineteen fifty five, for lesbian couples formed
the Daughters of Belts that's spelled the same way as Belaitis,
which Tracy said earlier pronounced differently uh. They included activists
Phillis Lion and del Martin, who later became the first
same sex couple to get married in San Francisco, and
it began allowing same sex marriages in two thousand four,

(27:23):
and this was part social club, part support group, part
education and advocacy organization. They named themselves the Daughters of
Beltis after that eight Chanson Debilities collection. And by this
point everyone knew and quotation marks that the historic Sappho
was a lesbian. So the name Belitus let the organization

(27:44):
connect itself to Sappho and signal to potential members what
the organization was for without needing to publicly express who
and what the organization was for. Because of the social
climate and in some cases the law, just publicly declaring
that this was an organization for lesbians was not possible.
In the Daughters of belid Has created a newsletter called

(28:07):
The Ladder, which developed a national readership, and the organization
itself became the first national lesbian organization in the United States.
And as time went on, Sappho became increasingly present in
the pages of The Ladder, which also had a poetry
column called Sapphistries. All of this continued to reinforce that
connection between Sappho and the lesbian community. So that is Sappho.

(28:31):
We know literally almost nothing about her, and this whole
story reminds me a lot of Jenny Lynde who was
supposed to be just the world's most incredible opera singer,
but of whom we have no recordings. Yeah, yeah, I
think there's always that thing. Right. We talked about how
there are many attempts to reinterpret and and shift her

(28:54):
identity over time, And it is like that trick when
you only have these tiny bits and fragments. The people
can want a thing so badly that they will interpret
it in whichever way makes them the most comfortable with
the material or like aligns with their ideas of of
this historical figure that we really have just the vaguest
smattering of information about. Yeah, well, and there's so many

(29:17):
of the things that we in in theory know about
her are like, Okay, are these three brothers? Are those
three brothers her brothers and she mentioned them in her poetry?
Or have those names been picked to stand for her
brothers because those are names that appeared in her poetry.
It's sort of a chicken and egg situation where like

(29:38):
we don't really know which then led to which, or
they someone else's brother nothing to do with her at
all because it was a commission. Right, Was this poem
written in a someone else's voice, not Sappho's personal expressions. Anyway,
I love her and I think she's fascinating, even though
I know literally tiny amount about any of it. Uh.

(30:03):
There you go. Do you have a listener mail? Uh?
Sort of. Um. We recently did an episode about Olga
of Kiev, and when we started promoting that episode, we
heard from a couple of listeners about the spelling that
we used for Kiev. Because we used the spelling ki
e V, which is like the spelling you'll find it

(30:25):
a lot of American English dictionaries and style guides and
a lot of news media used that spelling. It is
not the preferred spelling in Ukraine, which is where the
city is actually located. And it's not just that that's
not the spelling in Ukraine, it's that the government of
Ukraine has literally asked all of the news organizations and

(30:49):
publications and just general people to please use a different
spelling for the name. Um. I was absolutely ignorant of
this entire discussion, so I apologize for my oversight, and
I just wanted to read the statement that the Ministry
of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine put out about all of it,
because I think it's sort of clearly sums up why

(31:13):
the spelling difference exists and why it matters um and
it says, in accordance with the tenth United Nations Conference
on the Standardization of Geographical Names, we politely request all
countries and organizations to review and where necessary, amend their
usage of outdated Soviet era place names when referring to Ukraine.

(31:36):
Ukraine has been an independent sovereign nation for more than
twenty seven years, but the Soviet era versions of many
geographic names stubbornly persist in international practice. The transliteration of
the names of cities, regions, and rivers from the Cyrillic
alphabet into Latin are often mistakenly based on the Russian

(31:56):
form of the name, not the Ukrainian. So this uh
statement then goes on to list a lot of the
most commonly misspelled names. That one at the top of
the list is the Ukraine with a the which we
have fortunately avoided using our own show. The second one
after that is Kiv, which is spelled k y i V,

(32:20):
not ki e V the way we spelled it. There's
a slight nuance to how these are pronounced, and it's
as a speaker of neither Russian nor Ukrainian, I like
I can't really accurately replicate that slight difference. UH to
return to the statement. Under the Russian Empire and later
the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic's USSR, rucification was actively

(32:44):
used as a tool to extinguish each constituent country's national identity, culture,
and the language and light of Russia's war of aggression
against Ukraine, including its illegal occupation of Crimea. We are
once again experiencing rucification as a tactic that attempts to
destabilize and delegitimize our country. You will appreciate, we hope,
how the use of Soviet era place names rooted in

(33:07):
the Russian language is especially painful and unacceptable to the
people of Ukraine. To help avoid these mistakes, we refer
you to page twenty seven of the Resolution x slash
nine Romanization of Ukrainian Geographical Names adopted by the tenth
u N Conference on the Standardization of Geographical Names, which
recommends the Romanization system in Ukraine as the international system

(33:31):
for the transliterations of Ukrainian geographical names. To better inform
the international community about the correct forms of Ukrainian place
names and to avoid mistakes. We are launching the campaign
hashtag correct UA. Your support in helping to ensure that
the correct internationally agreed place names for Ukraine are adopted

(33:51):
in your organization is greatly appreciated, So thank you to
the folks who pointed out that oversight to us. I
apologize for it. It was a hut of sent me
being ignorant um and not an attempt to wilfully ignore
the wishes of the nation of Ukraine um, and we
will uh be better about that going forward. I have

(34:14):
bookmarked the most commonly misspelled names for my future reference.
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(34:35):
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(34:59):
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