Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [253]
* Compare what happens to t and d in British English before long u: the words tune and dune are pronounced [tyūn] and [dyūn] in careful speech, but affricated to [tšūn] and [dzucar;ūn] in everyday pronunciation.
* A Varangian fortress on the strait between the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea: evidently the falcons were trying to beat a path far to the east of Kiev.
* The old title knyazy, ‘prince’, is likewise a borrowing of a Western term: it is the Russian reworking of the old Germanic title kuningas, literally ‘man of birth’, which is also the origin of English king.
† Kozak (in Crimean Tatar, Chagatay Turkic) means ‘free man, wanderer, bandit’. In other Turkic languages (e.g. Kïrgïz, Azeri, Bashkir) the word kazak, qazaq has meanings such as ‘independent man’ or ‘seeker of adventures’. All are derived from old the Turkic verb kez-, ‘walk, wander, travel’.
* These of course were not the only Slavic-language groups of central Europe. But the others, among them the Wends, Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenians, Serbs, Bosnians and Croats, were never available for incorporation into early modern Russia. Their languages, like Polish, were not mutually intelligible with Russian; and their peoples were firmly held within the bounds of other empires.
* In the census of 1897, the Ukrainians would constitute 18 per cent, the rest of the Russians 44 per cent.
* Much later, in 1944, after Nazi atrocities in the region, Stalin deported the remaining 190,000 Crimean Tatars en masse to central Asia. In the 1990s about 50,000 of them returned (Dalby 1998: 616).
* The word Kazakh has the same Turkic etymology as Cossack; but here it refers to a real Turkic tribe of nomads, closely related to the Kyrgyz.
* The Bible was actually available in Kalmyk and Tatar (not to mention Finnish, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Armenian and Georgian) half a century before it came out in Russian. Publication of the Russian Bible could not be authorised until 1876, by chance just after the first Russian edition of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital (Hosking 1997: 138-42, 233-4).
* In 1994, there were 436,600 Russians in Estonia, comprising 29.0 per cent of the total population; in Latvia, there were 849,000, 33.1 per cent. Meanwhile, in Lithuania, the Russian population stood at 316,000, just 8.5 per cent (Europa World Yearbook, 1995).
† A May 1995 referendum granted Russian the status of an official language, along with Belarusian. Russian is the language of instruction in virtually all university departments in Belarus. And whereas in 1994 220 schools in Minsk, the capital city, had taught in Belarusian, two years later under twenty did so.
§ At high cost, but with dubious symbolism, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan, speaking Turkic languages, all converted their alphabets back from Cyrillic to Latin in the decade after independence. But each system is a little different, and none has adopted Turkey’s own spelling conventions of 1928.
* Another Germanic language, Norse, was also being taken far afield by its speakers in the latter centuries of this millennium: the Normans took it to Normandy, the Varangians to Rus, the Vikings to England, Scotland, Ireland and Iceland. In every case but one, they gave up their own language for that of the people with whom they settled: