Kozak/Cossack

[Paul B. Gallagher]

nataliek at UALBERTA.CA wrote:

> ... The current campaign is to replace Cossack with kozak. Why? Well
> kozaks/Cossacks are to Ukrainians what cowboys are to Americans, to
> paraphrase Subtelny. And Cossacks/kozaks, like cowboys, or any other
> group for that matter, did not always behave well. Shedding the term
> Cossack and replacing it with kozak allows the retention of the 
> positive aspects of this group while negative aspects are jettisoned.
> The term kozak is seen as more Ukrainian and thus pure, free of 
> negative traits. By implication, the negative traits were attributed
> to Cossacks by non-Ukrainians.

This is all very confusing. If the Cossacks were in fact Turkic people 
as per the Oxford English Dictionary, what difference does it make to 
the Ukrainians how we spell their name in English? If they were 
Ukrainians, I could understand the Ukrainians wanting to lionize them as 
some sort of national heroes. But if they were an offshoot of the 
Qazaqs, that's (forgive me) a horse of a different color.

Sidebar on the "Kazakhs" and their name: Russian lacks the uvular series 
that occurs in many Central Asian and Middle Eastern languages, so it 
substitutes its velar series. Qazaqstan has recently adopted (but AFAIK 
it has not really caught on) a Latin alphabet that is essentially a 
modification of Turkish. In that alphabet, the Qazaq Cyrillic form 
"Қазақ" is rendered as "Qazaq." Linguists report that the velar and 
uvular series are in complementary distribution in Qazaq (velars with 
front vowels and uvulars with back vowels), implying that the 
distinction is not phonemic, but it is not hard to find counterexamples 
in a dictionary.

-- 
War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left.
--
Paul B. Gallagher
pbg translations, inc.
"Russian Translations That Read Like Originals"
http://pbg-translations.com

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