How Chernobyl became Chornobyl

On Thursday, CBC News posted a story about a member of the New York Police Department who was born in Chornobyl, Ukraine, and often spent her childhood summers in Petitcodiac.

• Child of Chornobyl reunites with second 'mother' in Petitcodiac

At the end of stories posted on CBC News sites, there is a link to report a typo or error. Many readers did.

"Chernobyl, not Chornobyl," they stated.

Actually, it is Chornobyl. Now.

Yes, when Nuclear Reactor No. 4 exploded on April 26, 1986, it was Chernobyl and people around the world took note of a place they had probably never heard of until then.

• Chornobyl, 30 years later: A 360 tour of a ghost town

But not as many of us took note when Ukraine declared independence from Russia in the 1990s and formally adopted new English spellings.

Ukrainian and Russian use variations of the cyrillic alphabet and they are slightly different.

A few characters appear in one alphabet and not in the other, while several characters are pronounced in different ways.

Like many other former Soviet republics, transliterations in Ukraine have been revised to reflect the official language of the new, independent country.

That means Chernobyl is now Chornobyl. 

Ukraine's capital city is now Kyiv, not Kiev. (But it's still Chicken Kiev to CBC, because the spelling change only applies to the geographic location.)

After declaring independence, Ukraine requested other governments adopt the new English spellings. The foreign affairs departments in Ottawa and Washington have done so, as has the United Nations.

So has CBC.

Keep those typo reports coming. They are valued and they are read, but sometimes we get it right.