Karkaroff an educator (slavic word origins)

[muscatel1988]

No: HPFGUIDX 95559

"slytherin_jenn" <slytherin_jenn at y...> wrote:
>The -off ending in Karkaroff and there's some Durmstrang student if 
>GoF that has the same ending for their last name I don't
>think is Russian, or at least I've never heard any Russian name
>end in -off but rather -ov. The -off suffix may be Germanic in 
>origin but I don't know any of those languages so I can't say with 
>any certainty.

[Snip]

It might be worth pointing out that the Slavic languages (as well as
the Germanic ones, apart from English) have a phonological process
known as final devoicing, where a voiced consonant (more accurately,
a voiced obstruent) (/b/, /d/, /g/, /v/ etc) becomes voiceless when
it's the last segment in a word - in other words, changes
to /p/, /t/, /k/, /f/. The relevance of this to Karkaroff is that
although -ov is a more typical orthographic representation of the
final syllable of a number of names (Markov, Gorbachov, Chekov,
etc), that final syllable is pronounced "off".

I haven't checked back through all the Karkaroff posts, but has
anyone suggested that he might be Bulgarian (Georgi Markov,
anyone?)? I think I remember Bulgaria being suggested as a possible
location for Durmstrang, so that might make sense.

Mus