helicopters

[William Ryan]

Ralph makes good new points, not least about the official desire for a 
'Russian' name which was certainly a regular feature in new technical 
terminology for much of the Soviet period, just as it was, and is, in 
France for 'French' terms (usually Frenchified Latin or Greek). In the 
case of 'samolet', of course, the situation was easier because an 
appropriate word already existed.
The June revision of the entry in the OED for 'aeroplane' is interesting 
in that it appears that the word is first used in French in 1855, but 
with an unclear etymology. 'Aer-' is clearly Greek, but is the 'plan-' 
from Greek (wandering), or Latin 'planus', or French 'planer', 'to glide 
though the air'? The third option might have given rise to the Russian 
term now mostly reserved, it appears, for ballooning, vozdukhoplavanie. 
The was a journal published 1880-1883 called Vozdukhoplavatel'. The 
adjective vozdukhoplavatel'nyi is used in a physics manual by 
Gilarovskii (1793)
How helpful the internet is for etymologists!
Will Ryan


Ralph Cleminson wrote:
> Ušakov is right: the word вертолет was coined in 1929 by N.I.Kamov,
> co-inventor of the Kaskr-1, which is an autogiro, so clearly at the
> beginning this is indeed what it meant.  
>
> Hélicoptère dates back to 1861, and was borrowed into Russian as геликоптер
> (perhaps via English, given the initial г-), a word definitely in use at
> the time of Kamov's invention and indeed a decade later, when A.A.Žabrov
> published a book entitled "Автожир и геликоптер", showing that at this
> period Russian made the same distinction as English between aircraft
> with unpowered and powered rotors, and, apparently, neither of them was
> known generically as a вертолет.  Автожир survives to this day, but at
> some point геликоптер was replaced by вертолет: could it be that in the
> course of the Soviet Union's efforts to establish itself as родина слонов
> it was felt preferably to have a "Russian" name for this symbol of
> progress?
>
> Regarding the origin, autogiro (c.1920) should theoretically give
> *самовёрт, but gyroplane (1907) is a better bet.
>  Вертолет may be a direct calque from this, or else it may stand in the
> same relation to самолет as gyroplane to aéroplane (yes, the word did
> exist in 19th-century French).
>
> Since an autogiro cannot take off vertically, the original point -- the
> fanciful nature of Vvedenskaja and Kolesnikov's etymologies -- still
> stands.
>
>
>   
>>>> John Dunn <J.Dunn at SLAVONIC.ARTS.GLA.AC.UK> 30/08/08 3:15 PM >>>
>>>>         
> The first volume of Ushakov was published in 1934, when helicopter
> manufacture was, to judge by the Wikipedia article, still in its
> infancy.  If one adds this to Kamov's apparent coinage of the term in c.
> 1929, it would seem reasonable to conclude that when it first appeared,
> the word вертолёт [vertolet] did indeed mean the same as автожир
> [avtozhir] and that its meaning shifted as the mass production of
> helicopters took off (sorry!) and autogiros were cast into (near)
> oblivion.  This would then reinstate the plausibility of the link with вертеть
> [vertet'] and the possibility of a calque from ...giro.
>
> John Dunn.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: William Ryan <wfr at SAS.AC.UK>
> To: SEELANGS at BAMA.UA.EDU
> Date: Sat, 30 Aug 2008 14:13:51 +0100
> Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] helicopters
>
> I thought so too - but see Russian Wikipedia:
>
>     Когда изобрели летательный аппарат, которому не нужен разбег перед
>     взлётом, поскольку он способен вертикально подняться и полететь с
>     любой площадки, то для его наименования создали слово /вертолёт/
>     (/верт/икально + /лет/еть), отражающее специфику этой летательной
>     машины (Л. А. Введенский, Н. П. Колесников. Этимология: Учебное
>     пособие // СПб., Питер. 2004, стр. 107). Впервые термин /вертолёт/
>     был применён Н. И. Камовым
>    
> <http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9A%D0%B0%D0%BC%D0%BE%D0%B2,_%D0%9D%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BB%D0%B0%D0%B9_%D0%98%D0%BB%D1%8C%D0%B8%D1%87>
>     к автожиру
>    
> <http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%90%D0%B2%D1%82%D0%BE%D0%B6%D0%B8%D1%80>
>     КАСКР-1
> <http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9A%D0%B0%D1%81%D0%BA%D1%80-1>.
>
> Ushakov says a vertolet is the same as an avtozhir - which it isn't 
> because an autogyro needs forward movement to fly and its rotor is not 
> powered - therefore, unlike a helicopter, it cannot fly vertically. This
>
> makes the final statement in the passage quoted above puzzling.
>
> Will Ryan
>
>
> John Dunn
> Honorary Research Fellow, SMLC (Slavonic Studies)
> University of Glasgow, Scotland
>
> Address:
> Via Carolina Coronedi Berti 6
> 40137 Bologna
> Italy
> Tel.: +39 051/1889 8661
> e-mail: J.Dunn at slavonic.arts.gla.ac.uk
> johnanthony.dunn at fastwebnet.it
>
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