non-siouan inquiry

[David Erschler]

It's a pity that no photograph of the actual tag is attached, some
characters could have get garbled in copying. (Or what is on the second page
of the file is indeed a photocopy? I haven't understood that.)

It doesn't look neither like Russian nor like Ukrainian to me (I'm a native
speaker of Russian.) "edno sjirze" could perhaps be едно свирче  "jedno
svirche", the Macedonian for "one whistle".

David

On Wed, Oct 27, 2010 at 9:02 PM, Catherine Rudin <CaRudin1 at wsc.edu> wrote:

>  OK, here's my best shot.
>
> It's not Bulgarian, or at least if it is it's written by someone
> semi-literate.
>
> It IS, however, a Slavic language, written in Cyrillic alphabet (mostly --
> a couple of Roman letters mixed in, specifically one "R", one "S", and one
> "i", so definitely eastern Europe/Russian empire.  Are the shoes by chance
> from Alaska??  The Ukrainian version of cyrillic uses an "i".  Maybe this is
> Ukrainian. Or Russian, written by someone who was bilingual, not
> terrifically literate and tended to use some Roman letters interchangeably
> with cyrillic; I know Turks who do this when writing in Bulgarian and I've
> done it myself in English when going back and forth between writing
> systems.
>
> In any case, it appears to be two names.  Perhaps the owners of the
> shoes??
>
> Here's a transliteration:
> First line:  OA Evaoriia Uvunova
> Second line:  SA Georgiva Vasileva
> And the smaller words not in all caps:  edno sjirze sae (or fae???)
>
> I don't know what "OA" and "SA" are.  "Evaoriia Uvunova" and "Georgiva
> Vasilieva" look like women's names:  feminine patronymic + last name (though
> Evaoriia is a weird enough name that I wonder if it was mis-copied).  "edno"
> means "one" or "a", but I don't recognize "sjirze sae".
>
> Catherine
>
> >>> Mark J Awakuni-Swetland <mawakuni-swetland2 at unlnotes.unl.edu>
> 10/27/2010 11:21 AM >>>
>
> Aloha all,
>
> Knowing that many of the List folkshave expertise in non-Siouan languages,
> I thought you all might find this of interest.
>
>
> The Department of Anthropology received the attached letter requesting
> translation assistance on a paper tag attached to a pair of moccasins/shoes.
>
> I am attaching a pdf of the letter for your consideration.
>
> Any suggestions are welcome.
>
> Thanks
>
> Mark
>
>
> Mark Awakuni-Swetland, Ph.D.
> Associate Professor of Anthropology
> and Ethnic Studies (Native American Studies)
> University of Nebraska
> Lincoln, NE 68588-0368
>
> http://omahalanguage.unl.edu
> http://omahaponca.unl.edu
> Phone 402-472-3455
> FAX: 402-472-9642
>



-- 
Dr. David Erschler

Independent University of Moscow
Bolshoy Vlasyevskiy per. 11
Moscow 119002
Russia
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