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From: markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder)
Subject: Re: Russian words in English
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References: <38rmoi$k4j@lyra.csx.cam.ac.uk> <1994Nov2.155336.13627@guvax> <CypEv1.Fn4@spss.com> <Cywv9p.50C@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>
Date: Tue, 8 Nov 1994 18:43:59 GMT
Lines: 56

In article <Cywv9p.50C@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>,
Ivan A Derzhanski <iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk> wrote:
>If one native speaker of English hasn't heard of a word, this doesn't
>have to mean anything.  If the _OED_ hasn't heard of it, things get a
>little more serious.  Quite a few of your words aren't in the _OED_
>-- _pravda_, for example, and the monstrosity _nikulturny_.

Perhaps on your side of the big pond people carefully check the OED before
using a word, but here this step is sometimes omitted.  I've already given
a citation for _pravda_, but I've also said that I see a scale of acceptance
of foreign words, not a binary category, and _pravda_ falls pretty low on
the scale.  Tom Wolfe in _The Painted Word_ uses _ne kulturny_, italicized
but unglossed, and not in a discussion of anything Russian either; and
I've seen it elsewhere too (but not often enough to get the spelling right :).

>>Bogomil refers to a member of a Byzantine religious sect, and can be
>>found in history books.
>
>Yes, but there is nothing Russian about it.  Last I checked, the
>priest Bogomil was Bulgarian, as were most Bogomili.

My dictionary says that the word comes from Russian (which in turn got it
from Bulgarian).

>>Mendelevium is an element; you might have been asleep the day they
>>passed around the periodic chart.
>
>There is nothing Russian about this one either.  Mendelevium was
>discovered in California, presumably by English-speaking researchers,
>and, as I suggested and M Carrasquer confirmed, the _-ium_ elements
>are named by an international organisation, whose full name escapes me
>at the moment.  This means that the Russian _mendelevij_ is derived
>from the Latin (?) _mendelevium_, not the other way around.

*Latin*?  The word has as much right to be called Russian as Latin.
More accurate than either, however, would surely be to say that it's
a compound of a Russian root and a Latin ending.

>>Soyuz is, like sputnik, the name of a Soviet space capsule
>
>Like _sputnik_?  I thought _Soyuz_ was a particular _sputnik_, or a
>series of _sputniki_, rather.

Well, I've never heard "sputnik" in English used to refer to anything
but the first Soviet unmanned satellites.

>>-- oops, that one is a "Russian item", something we're not allowed to
>>talk about in English.
>
>We are allowed to talk about it, of course, but since it is a proper
>name, it doesn't count as a word borrowed from Russian, any more than
>_Apollo_ counts as an English loanword in Russian.

I see no reason why proper names don't count as borrowed words.  Is 
"Moscow" a borrowed word?  It certainly isn't a Russian word, so if 
it isn't an English word, what is it?
