Re: USAGE: Translation of Russian _inorodtsy_

Thanks everyone who answered!

Quoting Pavel Iosad <edricson@...>:

> Hello,
>
> > I'm reading Geoffrey Hosking's "Russia: People and Empire
> > 1552-1917", which the author helpfully tells the reader than
> > in late Czarist Russia Jews and Central Asians were classed
> > as _inorodtsy_ [...]
>
> The word transparently consists of _in-_ 'another' and _rod_ 'family,
> kindred, kin',
Is _narod_ related, by any chance?

> thus 'one beloning to another people, an alien'. Nowadays
> it can be used as a rather bookish and somewhat pejorative term for a
> non-Russian (but frankly, most of the time it's used is by all these
> 'Russian patriots' and 'true Slavs' - neo-Nazis, in a word).
For reasons that probably need not be detailed, I've always seen Russian neo-
Nazis as several degrees more pathetic than most.

Place of shame, however, goes to that Japanese group, the name of which
escapes me, which uses as symbol a yellow swastika on a blue background
because, you guessed it, those are the Swedish colours. One of the better
arguments for criminalizing idiocy around.

> Hosking is
> right in that it was more of a legal term in pre-Revolutionary Russia. I
> don't know about the Central Asians, but the Jews definitely 'enjoyed'
> the Cherta Osedlosti, i. e. regions of the country beyond which they
> were virtually not permitted to live (probably he writes about it in
> detail): most of modern Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania (thus my Jewish
> ancestors come from Uman' in the modern Cherkassy region, central
> Ukraine).
If my retranslation skills can be trusted, he calls it the "Jewish Settlement
Region". The Central Asians apparently were denied Russian citizenship - I'm
not sure what effects that had in practice.

                                                           Andreas

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