[HPforGrownups] Re: Karkaroffa educator

[MadameSSnape at aol.com]

No: HPFGUIDX 95490

In a message dated 4/9/2004 3:42:55 AM Eastern Daylight Time, 
clio44a at yahoo.com writes:
Maybe I'm wrong (since I don't speak Russian), but I think that the 
ending -off points more towards a Russian origin of the name. A 
familiy name ending with an -ov would speak for the origin in 
another slavic language. Written Russian does not use latin letters, 
so this might be up to the translator, as Sherrie pointed out. IIRC 
the ending no matter how it is written means 'son of'.

========================
Sherrie here:

And yet, it's Anton Chekov (or sometimes Chekhov) - never "Checkoff" - and 
I've never seen the late Soviet Premiere referred to as "Brezhneff"... The more 
I think about it, the more my creaky old brain seems to believe that the -off 
transliteration was used primarily in older works, and maybe some British 
ones.  I do know the Yul Brynner film uses "Karamazov", e.g.  Technically 
speaking, the -ov ending would be the more correct/direct transliteration of the 
Cyrillic characters.

The "son of" you're thinking of is -ovich (sometimes -ovitch), which is added 
to the father's name to form the patronymic, the second of a Russian's three 
names.  (As in Solzhenitsyn's "Ivan Denisovich".)   (For girls, BTW, it's 
-ovna.)

(And I do apologize if I insulted anyone by the use of the term "dialects" - 
my intent was simply to list some of the other languages spoken in that area, 
not to denigrate any of them, or imply that they were all related!)

Sherrie
"Unless history lives in our present, it has no future." 
PRESERVE OUR CIVIL WAR BATTLEFIELDS!


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