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Дмитрий Анато́льевич Медве́дев  

Dimitri Anatolyevich Medvedev: New Russian President

The Etymology of His Names

 

It’s the name of newly elected Russian president, Dimitri Medvedev, Putin’s plastic puppet, the name that US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton could not even get close to pronouncing correctly. La belle dame sans souci, Hillary almost swallowed her tongue trying to enunciate an important name that was on the lips of every TV commentator that week of the Russian so-called election. But Hillie did not have time to keep up on US foreign policy basics. She was too busy plotting Nixonian dirty tricks on fellow Democratic candidate Obama. Anyway, as to Hillie’s lingual roadblock - great foreign policy knowledge there, Hillie! It always shows class if the US president mangles the very name of a potential Russian guest in the White House. Med-VED-yev.

Дми́трий Анато́льевич Медве́дев

Here in Canada, Medvedev is the Russian surname that one of Canada’s leading newspapers tried to be clever about. The Toronto Star is written by a crew of smart-ass liberal jocks. Torstar knows all, sees all, and only screws up when they try to print all this knowledge on a newspaper page. To show just how smarty-pants the city desk at Torstar is, the Star ran a little explanatory box on its front page, explaining that Medved was the Russian word for bear. They then proceeded to quote Medvedev making a modest pleasantry about his name involving the word honey. But, as so often with the know-it-all Toronto Star, they screwed up by neglecting to tell us what the Russian word for bear really means.

First of all, the Star copied the Medvedev name origin off a European wire service. Then they did not go the one step further to explain what the compound Russian word for bear actually meant, something every Russian knows and the necessary etymological knowledge to get his joke. Thus, instead of explicating the Russian president’s little joke, they obfuscated his joke, because the Star newsroom was too cocky, too world-brain, to pick up the telephone and check the ultimate etymology of Medvedev with any expert, say, a professor in the Department of Slavic Studies at the University of Toronto, only a few blocks from the Toronto Star’s grey bunker headquarters. Anyhoo – here is some of the material the Star might have published, had they bothered to contact any of us who study surnames. Humbly do I add that I have been doing so for 40 years. I think this material might have interested Torstar readers.

 

Medvedev is a compound surname made up of an initial word, medved, Russian ‘bear’ literally ‘honey-eater’+ -ev or –ov a surname suffix that means ‘descendant of.’

Russian surnames were formalized quite late in western history. They reached final forms only during the first Russian population census in 1897 CE. Russian names now consist in general of a given name, a patronymic and a family name (surname).

Dimitri Anatolyevich Medvedev

Dimitri is his given name, explicated below.

Anatolyevich, his patronymic (from Greek ‘father-name’) is just that, his father’s name with a patronymic suffix added, usually for males –vich. Thus, if his patronymic is Anatolyevich, it is highly probable that Medvedev’s father’s name was the common Russian male given name, Anatoly. Family members, friends and close acquaintances may address him as Dimitri. But most other polite Russians will refer to or address a man using his first two names. Hence a current Russian joke:

Q: When do you get to see Dimitri Anatolyevich trample his wife?

A: When his secretary calls into their breakfast room, “Putin on the phone.”

Medvedev, his given name, began as the family founder's only name, way back in the Slavic mists of time, when most Slavs had but one name. Medvedev signifies “descendant of an ancestor whose nickname or clan name was ‘Bear.’ ”

Медведь or Medved, a Honey of a Russian Name

The common Russian surname Medved is an apotropaic circumlocution for ‘bear’ meaning literally ‘honey-eater.’ This is an old Slavonic periphrasis for bear. Med is Russian for honey, and the ved root means 'eat.' The ved and yed roots are related to eсть [yest'] (Russian ‘to eat’) and are cognate with other Indo-European verbs like Latin edere to eat’ (which gives us the adjective edible) and even with the English verb to eat. Another Russian word containing this Slavic root is the interesting and racist Samoyed, the name of a people and a breed of dog. Samo-yed means 'self-eater' in Russian, a synonym for cannibal! The Samoyed people do not call themselves by that name. They possess their own proper ethnonym, and it does not mean ‘eating people is fun’ or ‘cannibal.’

Russian Мед is Cognate with English Mead

The Russian word for honey ‘med’ is cognate with the name for a drink made from fermented honey, one of the oldest liquors made by humans, namely: mead.

Other Indo-European cognate relatives of mead and med are:

methu Greek ‘intoxicating drink made from honey’

madhu Sanskrit ‘honey, drink made from honey’

But the etymon or root maybe of Middle Eastern origin, because also apparently related are:

m-t-q a Semitic triliteral root, one of whose Hebrew reflexes is mathoq ‘sweetness.’ The m-t-q root also means ‘to suck,’ for mother’s milk is sweet to the nursing babe. One Arabic relative is matqa ‘sweetness.’

 

“Russian Bear,” a porcelain figurine by Royal Crown Derby

 

Taboo Name

In order to keep bears away and/or to placate the spirit of the totemic animal of his ‘bear’ clan, ancient Eastern Slavic tribesmen never uttered the name of the animal, for fear that if one spoke aloud the word bear, then the animal itself might appear to devour one. For the same reason, the word mother-in-law is seldom said aloud in North America. Among many peoples of the world the imposition of taboo on certain words is still an operant superstition.

How did one avoid saying the word ‘bear’ out loud? One made up other names for the animal, and one old Slavic circumlocution was honey-eater or medved. An almost similar type of periphrasis occurs in the monument poem of Old English, Beowulf. The hero Beowulf has a name that means ‘bee-wolf.’ That was a synonym, an Anglo-Saxon kenning for ‘bear.’ It was probably not because the word bear became taboo. Kennings were common in Old English poetry. They added flavour and verbal brio and memorable word formation to the poetry, very much like the compound Homeric epithets of The Iliad and The Odyssey, for example Homer's reference to “the wine-dark sea” or to “rosy-fingered dawn.” Both are Homeric epithets. Such poetic figures are also mnemonic devices. All these long poems were recited by a bard. Standard epithets and kennings, all with proper metrics, allow the reciting bard some memory help and allow the audience the pleasure of recognizing familiar tropes.

Other examples from the poem Beowulf are kennings, or poetically phrased synonyns, for the word sea. Compounds that meant ‘sea’ include seġl-rād ‘sail-road’, swan-rād ‘swan-road’, bæþ-weġ ‘bath-way’ or hwæl-weġ ‘whale-way’ and hronrāde ‘whale-road’.

 

DIMITRI: Etymology of a Russian Given Name

 

Dimitri is an old and favourite Russian given name for men, derived from the name of Saint Demetrius, an early Christian martyr of the four century CE. Saint Demetrius is a popular saint in the Russian Orthodox Church. His Latin name is Demetrius and the earlier Greek version is Demetrios. In the upper-right of the modern icon-like painting above, the saint’s name is spelled in Greek capital letters, Demetrios, with the terminal /s/ swinging gaily on the /o/.

Δημήτηρ or Demeter was the ‘Barley Mother’

The male name Demetrios is Greek and means ‘devotee of Demeter’ or ‘child consecrated at birth to Demeter.’ Demeter was one of the Greek earth-mother goddesses. Her name is likely to be Cretan Greek deai ‘barley’ + meter Greek ‘mother.’ As a barley-mother goddess she perhaps evolved to watch over and promote the fertility of grain crops. Demeter is depicted in ancient art and song as a goddess of agriculture. If interested, find, on the internet, a translation of the “Homeric Hymn to Demeter.”

In this lush, ripely pre-Raphaelite Victorian imagining by the artist Sir Frederic Leighton, a joyful mother Demeter, arms outstretched, welcomes her daughter Persephone back from the underworld, from whose chthonian depths Persephone has been freshly rescued by the dauntless derringdo of Hermes, messenger of the Greek gods.

Noble Hermes carries his herald’s wand, the caduceus or kerukeion (Greek kerux ‘herald’ ) ancient Greek staff of a messenger who comes in peace bearing news, a symbol later adopted by medical doctors, although twin snakes entwined on the caducean rod are found in the ancient Middle East as a symbol of renewal and fertility as far back as Akkad and Sumer.

Hermes (Mercury to the Romans) also wears his wee flying hat. But where are Hermes’ winged sandals? Perhaps Persephone forgot to put them back on his little footsies after she tore them off, during a rest-stop on the way up from Hell for a brief interval of connective repose. Naughty, naughty.

 

Demeter as Drug Dealer

One of Demeter’s less savoury divine duties may have been as a poppy goddess on the ancient island of Crete. One fact archaeology has proven is that opium was made from poppies on the island of Crete. So, to pun atrociously, Demeter was quite the little heroine. The knowledge of opium might have been brought to the Greek Eleusinian mysteries by some Cretan cult, opium for ceremonial use. I guess that's one way to see god! Check it out, dopers! In several extant Minoan statuettes, Demeter is depicted wearing a necklace of poppy seeds, a double symbol, seeds both of nourishment and of the dangerous mental oblivion of opium.

So, Toronto Star, if I may say so with all due lack of humility, THAT's how to write a piece about the origins of a man’s name.

© 2008 William Gordon Casselman

 

 

 

   

 

 

 

 

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