petitebrie, apologies for not quoting your post as it is rather long, but all I can say is WOW!!!!
Thank you so much for providing the definitive answer for pretty much every topic I had brought up in this thread!
It is so comprehensive, and yet easy to understand at the same time! It is not easy to hit both those targets at the same time, so well done!
I particularly found interesting the second paragraph. I hadn't realised that a lot of Russian names actually meant something. Well, I suppose it's like English family names that are derived from a distant ancestor's job, for example Cooper (barrel maker); Fletcher (arrow maker); Baker (bread maker).
But, I am now really intrigued as to why some people's ancestors got named after animals!
And I feel really stupid now for not working out that "Moskvina" meant "from Moscow". For goodness sake, when the city is transliterated from Cyrillic into Latin characters, it comes out as "Moskva"! It should have been blindingly obvious! I suppose in this respect it is kinda like Arab names, like Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti, i.e. Saddam Husein, from Tikrit.
So, the discrepency between the transliteration of Miss Leonova and Miss Savchenko's names is all because somebody left out the umlaut on Miss Leonova's name when writing it in Cyrillic. And the person at the ISU transliterating it into Latin characters was none the wiser that it should have been there.
Oh, leaving out accents is something that REALLY winds me up.
I know we don't have accents in English, but we tend to not include them when typing foreign words for the simple reason that they are not handy to access from a computer keyboard. But including them is so useful when it comes to working out how to pronounce foreign words.
Put it like this - if I ever adopt a skater who has accents in their name, I would make sure to include those accents in the title of their Fan Fest!
The subject of masculine and feminine versions of Slavic names has been discussed many times over the years. But, since Thuridir was mentioned, I thought it would be interesting to look at how a different culture does it.
And although I realised that the custom had largely been abandoned in the Scandanavian countries on mainland Europe, I didn't realise that the custom still survived in the form of middle names. So, thank you for pointing that out.
That they are basically doing the same as the Russians now!
Since you are such a relatively new member, may I also welcome you to the forum. I hope you enjoy your time on here. Because we are already enjoying having you here!
CaroLiza_fan
