Stupid west Asia!

One of the overwhelming number of things I've wondered idly about in the past but never really researched is the source of the "extra" vowel in 俄羅斯 Èluósī, the Chinese name for Russia. It's not normal for Chinese transcriptions to have prothetic vowels like this (compare, for instance, 羅斯冰架 Luósī Bīngjià "Ross Ice Shelf" or 羅斯托克 Luósītuōkè "Rostock"). Furthermore, it's a completely different transcription from what you find in earlier Japanese and Korean[*], i.e. 魯西亞 Lǔxīyà. (Read Roshia in Japanese--basically, as close as one can come to Russian Россия within the sound system of the language--this was later changed to 露西亞, exchanging 魯 "stupid, vulgar" for the less pejorative 露 "dew".)

Prothetic vowels before intial /r/ are, however, common in other languages such as Basque (Errusia), Hungarian (Oroszország), and Mongolian (Орос Oros). The last is of particular interest, since the Mongols were responsible for establishing the first stable communication between China and Russia. So it's extremely plausible that the Mongol name was taken directly into Yuan Dynasty Chinese, becoming the basis for the modern name. This still leaves me with some unanswered questions (foremost among them: If the name is that old, why wasn't it loaned to Chinese and Japanese?), but short of hunting down a Chinese etymological dictionary, it's the most definitive answer I'm likely to get.

Incidentally, the character 俄 é historically meant "sudden" or "soon" (e.g. 俄然 "suddenly", 俄爾 "very soon") but this sense is obsolete in modern standard Chinese, which has made it very convenient to abbreviate 俄羅斯 down to 俄國 Èguó or even--in compounds--just 俄 (e.g. 俄語 Èyǔ "Russian language", 日俄戰爭 Rì-È Zhànzhēng "Russo-Japanese War", etc.). Perversely, the one element that thus remains is the one which was never a part of the original name!

[*] Nowadays, these languages prefer the phonetic transcriptions ロシア Roshia and 러시아 /Lesia/, respectively.)