ACADEMY OF SAINT GABRIEL REPORT 2512
http://www.s-gabriel.org/2512
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From: Lisa and Ken Theriot 
11 Apr 2002


Greetings from the Academy of Saint Gabriel!

You asked whether <Deva Rusavina> is an appropriate name for a 13th century
woman born in Novgorod, the daughter of a woman named <Rusa>.  You wondered
what name she'd use if she was living with a Norse husband.  You also
expressed an interest in the name <Maremeiana>.  Here is the information we
have found.

<Deva> is a fine choice; this form of the name dates to at least 1239.
<Rusa> 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 <Rusa> would become
<Rusin>.  For a woman's byname, an <a> would be added to feminize the name,
resulting in <Rusina> [2, 3].

<Rusina> 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 <doch'> 'daughter' [3].  Here the apostrophe represents a
soft sign (a letter in the Cyrillic alphabet) following the final
consonant.  <Deva Rusina doch'> is a fine 13th century Russian name,
pronounced \DyEH-vah roo-SEE-nah dohtch\.  Here \y\ represents a very light
consonantal <y> sound, the <r> is trilled as in Spanish or Italian, \oo\ is
pronounced as in <cool>, and \oh\ represents the sound of <o> in <more>.

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 <Y>.  In early
medieval Russian, this sound was represented by a letter that looked like
an <o> with a small <u> 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,
<oY>, for the same sound.  Over time, the digraph became more common, and
eventually the <o> was dropped, leaving the <Y> 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 <Deva>, 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 <Deva> spelled <Deua> or <Defua> in Swedish
texts, where <u> and <fu> are used to represent the sound of <v>, or even
as <Deva> [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., <Ragnillde {th}oralfs kono> 1289, <Gudrune Eilifs
kono> 1282, and <Bergliot V{th}yrms kona> 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 <kona> 'woman, wife'.  The name <Deua
Biorns kona>, 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 <F>, but all the entries are dated.

You also expressed an interest in the given name <Maremeiana>.  We find it
recorded in 12th century Novgorod [7].  It appears to be a form of
<Miriam>; 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 <Maremeiana>.


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

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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 <oY> digraph on the chart, and the uku character should come
up if you put <Rusina> 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 <David> spelled <Dauid> 1241 and <Dofuith> 1446, as
well as <Eva> 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.