ACADEMY OF SAINT GABRIEL REPORT 2512 http://www.s-gabriel.org/2512 ************************************ From: Lisa and Ken Theriot 11 Apr 2002 Greetings from the Academy of Saint Gabriel! You asked whether is an appropriate name for a 13th century woman born in Novgorod, the daughter of a woman named . You wondered what name she'd use if she was living with a Norse husband. You also expressed an interest in the name . Here is the information we have found. is a fine choice; this form of the name dates to at least 1239. is a fine choice for your mother's name; it dates to the 12th century [1]. You wanted a metronymic, or a byname based on your mother's given name. As you discovered, metronymics are rare but not unknown in Russian; one of the earliest known examples dates to 1187 [2]. The most common method of forming a patronymic or metronymic based on names ending in <-a> is to change the <-a> to <-in>. In other words would become . For a woman's byname, an would be added to feminize the name, resulting in [2, 3]. is also a descriptive byname meaning 'the Russian' [2]. If you want to make clear that your name means 'Rusa's daughter' you might want to add the element 'daughter' [3]. Here the apostrophe represents a soft sign (a letter in the Cyrillic alphabet) following the final consonant. is a fine 13th century Russian name, pronounced \DyEH-vah roo-SEE-nah dohtch\. Here \y\ represents a very light consonantal sound, the is trilled as in Spanish or Italian, \oo\ is pronounced as in , and \oh\ represents the sound of in . A Russian name would normally be recorded using Cyrillic characters. If you would like to write your name in Cyrillic, you can use a chart to convert from Roman characters to Cyrillic; we found one on the web at: http://www.colby.edu/library/collections/technical_services/wp/Cyrillic.html Note that they do not use the term 'soft sign' but the Russian 'miakhky znak', transliterated (as we have done) with an apostrophe. This is a modern Russian alphabet; we believe that it is appropriate for your use with the exception of one character. The \oo\ sound is represented in modern Russian by a letter that looks like a capital . In early medieval Russian, this sound was represented by a letter that looked like an with a small sitting on top of it (or like the number 8 with a bite out of the top). Documents from your period show a mixture of this character (called "uk" or "uku") and a digraph, or two-letter character, , for the same sound. Over time, the digraph became more common, and eventually the was dropped, leaving the alone; we believe this happened well after your period [4]. You said that your persona left Novgorod and is married to a Norse man. A Russian woman living in a Norse-speaking community would be known to her neighbors by a Norse name, possibly derived from her original Russian name. In our experience, that's how travellers were identified: in the local language, not in their own language. Unfortunately, we've found no Norse names similar to , nor any example of a Norse adaptation of this Russian name; however, the sounds are not too dissimilar to those found in Swedish names. Based on the spelling of similar sounds, we wouldn't be surprised to find the Russian spelled or in Swedish texts, where and are used to represent the sound of , or even as [5]. Since your Scandinavian neighbors would have known you through your husband, you might have been known by a name which identified you as his wife. Unfortunately, we have relatively little Swedish data from your period, and all of our Swedish examples of this type of byname are from the 15th and 16th centuries. We do, however, have a handful of examples from Norway ca.1300, e.g., 1289, 1282, and ca.1300. [6] We therefore think it very plausible that you might have been known by your husband's name in the genitive (possessive) case and 'woman, wife'. The name , for instance, would have been understood as 'Deua, Biorn's wife'. You might be able to find a name for your husband at the following website: Sveriges Medeltida Personnamn (Swedish Medieval Names) http://www.dal.lu.se/sofi/smp/smp.htm SMP is a dictionary of all known spelling variants of Swedish personal names in medieval sources. The online edition unfortunately only goes through the letter , but all the entries are dated. You also expressed an interest in the given name . We find it recorded in 12th century Novgorod [7]. It appears to be a form of ; it is an excellent choice for a medieval woman from Novgorod. We haven't found anything similar in Sweden, so we don't know how your Norse neighbors might have represented . We hope this letter has been useful. Please write us again if any part of it has been unclear or if you have other questions. I was assisted in researching and writing this letter by Arval Benicoeur, Aryanhwy merch Catmael, Iago ab Adam, Julie Stampnitzky, Lindorm Eriksson, Raquel Buenaventura, Talan Gwynek, Ursula Georges and Walraven van Nijmegen. For the Academy, Adelaide de Beaumont 11 April 2002 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - References: [1] Paul Wickenden of Thanet, "A Dictionary of Period Russian Names", 2nd edition (WWW: SCA, Inc., 1996), s.nn. Deva, Rusa. http://www.sca.org/heraldry/paul/ [2] Unbegaun, B. O., _Russian Surnames_ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 21, 22, 132, 138. [3] Paul Wickenden, see the section on Grammar. http://www.sca.org/heraldry/paul/zgrammar.html [4] There is a chart on the web giving characters in Old Church Slavonic, which is similar to medieval Cyrillic: http://justin.zamora.com/slavonic/alphabet/transliteration.html You'll see the digraph on the chart, and the uku character should come up if you put into the "Untransliterator" available on the page. You'll note from this page that there is no distinction between upper and lower case letters; that distinction was not made until the sweeping reforms in written Russian implemented by Peter the Great in the early 18th century [8]. [5] _Sveriges Medeltida Personnamn_, Vol. 1- (Uppsala: 1967-), online edition. Data includes spelled 1241 and 1446, as well as 1300. http://www.dal.lu.se/sofi/smp/smp.htm [6] Bjerke, Robert, _A Contrastive Study of Old German and Old Norwegian Kinship Terms. Indiana University Publications in Anthropology and Linguistics_, Memoir 22 of the International Journal of American Linguistics (Baltimore: Waverly Press, Inc., 1969), pp. 160ff. [7] Predslava Vydrina, "Russian Personal Names: Name Frequency in the Novgorod Birch-Bark Letters" in Known World Heraldic Symposium Proceedings 1997 (SCA: Rochester, NY, 1997; WWW: J. Mittleman, 1998). http://www.s-gabriel.org/names/predslava/bbl/ [8] Cubberly, Paul, 'The Slavic Alphabets', in _The World's Writing Systems_, ed. by Peter T. Daniels and William Bright (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996), Table 27.1 (p.348), p. 350. The author notes that the adoption of an alphabet intended for another language system (Greek) led to difficulties that were first addressed by Peter the Great's 'civil script' of 1708-10.