10/28 Dear Russian motdians, how do you tell if someone's from Ukrain,
Russia, or other Republics? For example, can you tell from their
last name like <something>ski, <something>gorodov, <something>ninoff,
etc?
\_ Ask them.
\_ Russian endings: ov/ova, iy/aya (e.g. ivanov, kulikovskiy)
Ukranian endings: ko (e.g. bondarenko)
Armenian endings: ian (e.g. kevorkian)
Georgian endings: dze/tze shvili (e.g. shevardnadze dzhugashvili)
These are rules of thumb though, and jewish last names are pretty
diverse.
\_ More standard assumptions (i.e. what people will assume without
asking in Russia based on last name alone):
Russian: -in/-ina, -off (old latinization of -ov)
Polish/Belarussian: -skiy/-skaya (generally assumed NOT russian,
contrary to the above).
Lithuanian/Latvian: -is/-as/-us
Azerbaijani: -gli/-glu (same ending, different latinization, same
as -glI in Turkish, which Azeri is effectively a dialect of); I
suppose these can also show up in Turkmen, Uzbek, and the like,
but they seem to not do so too often.
Central Asian / Azerbaijani: Russian endings attached to Turkic,
Arabic, or Altaic first names. Hard to quantify in terms of
endings alone.
Estonian: anything sounding like Finnish; double consonants and
double vowels anywhere, stuff ending in -u
Standard Jewish: -man/-zon/-son
Anything else remotely germanic-sounding (or foreign-sounding
in general, for most people in an average village) -- Jewish
is assumed anyway.
-alexf, whose last name "sounds unusual" and thus is
immediately [correctly] assumed to be Jewish by most people
from the former USSR
\_ my proj lead is Ukrainian and his last name is
zhegorodov. He said he used to be a farm boy, whatever
that means.
\_ That's why they are rules of thumb. People intermarry,
etc.
\_ Indeed, rules of thumb only. Although a Russian _could_
probably _guess_ that the above is Ukranian or at least
near the border -- the stem is "Zhegorod", a place name
(since "gorod" is the root for "city"), and the _place
name_ sounds Ukranian more than anything. Keep in mind that
anyone who grows up in a diverse environment which doesn't
have a US-style pressure against drawing lines along ethnic
boundaries will learn a ton of subtleties of this sort
without noticing, since everyone uses them to distinguish
between "us" and "them", for all values of "us." -alexf |
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