Re: USAGE: Translation of Russian _inorodtsy_

On Wednesday 21 January 2004 11:19 am, Andreas Johansson wrote:
> 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
>
>
Bear in mind that the swastika (usually with the points going the other way)
is an ancient Buddhist symbol and still used as such in Japan. On Japanese
maps, if you see a swastika it marks the site of a Buddhist temple the way a
cross might mark a Christian site on a European map.
--
Elyse Grasso

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