Stupid west Asia!

[muckefuck]

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the character 俄 é historically meant "sudden" or "soon" (e.g. 俄然 "suddenly", 俄爾 "very soon") but this sense is obsolete in modern standard Chinese, which has made it very convenient to abbreviate 俄羅斯 down to 俄國 Èguó or even--in compounds--just 俄 (e.g. 俄語 Èyǔ "Russian language",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.)

Comments

[aadroma.livejournal.com]

Better still, most early locale transcriptions were brought INTO Japanese from Chinese, even if the resulting on readings didn't match up with the Japanese pronunciation of the locale in question. Thus, if the 俄 were there this whole time, then it would have been in the Japanese renderings too at some point, and it's not.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Are we certain about this? I don't have a historical dictionary of Japanese handy where I could check. However, I did find 俄羅斯 in an online Hanca dictionary (http://handic.empas.com/), so it apparently had some currency in earlier Korean. For instance, the Russian embassy in Seoul was known during the Choseon era as the 俄館. Perhaps the Japanese version replaced the earlier Chinese one in much the same way that 러시아 (apparently based on the English pronunciation) replaced it?

[aadroma.livejournal.com]

Which doesn't explain why a map in the 1600's (which can be found here -- I know you've seen this!) clearly labels Russia as 路西亜, with no extra syllable.
Hi, old map junkie, remember?

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

European traders starting arriving in the mid-1500s, whereas, if the Mongolian theory is correct, 俄羅斯 (and variants) dates back three-hundred years earlier. It's perfectly plausible that the older version could've been replaced at some point in the previous century with a Portuguese loan.

[aadroma.livejournal.com]

And that's quite possible.

So where do variants like 羅剎 fit in? I've seen it suggested that this name predates 俄羅斯 (which, apparently, DID come from the Mongols).

[badukk.livejournal.com]

I read somewhere that 俄 in 俄羅斯 formally appeared only during Qing dynasty. Before that the variants I gave you before were used, and I can suspect not only them.