Little-known geographical names
Nicholas Zharkikh
Rotten-Straw Horde is not lazy to remind about its existence (so far), and here on January 14, 2023, somewhere at 9:30 – 9:32, while I was writing the previous chapter, I heard up to eight explosions from the work of our air defense.
And during this concert in Sicheslav (Dnipro) was a rocket hit a residential building, 44 killed, among them 5 children… Well, I already wrote about the probability of my death from anti-Dühring missile fire (in reviews of O. Litskevich’s book).
Pushkinists are still afraid that their existing deeds are not enough to recognize them as war criminals.
And ours have already hinted at a possible answer. The commander of the aviation regiment was walking down the street, slipped and fell from the window of the 23rd floor of a two-story building. Doesn’t that happen? (January 17, 2023 at 8:50 am).
Conclusions
A year has passed since the beginning of work on this chapter…
On the night of January 28/29, 2024, the air defense of Ukraine destroyed all 8 Iranian "Shaheds", which were used to attack Ukraine. They also write about one Iskander-M ballistic missile and three S-300 missiles launched in the Donetsk region. The 705th day of the great war, which has been going on for several centuries. This popular expression in modern journalism successfully reflects the real situation (January 29, 2024 at 9:00 a.m.)
The conclusions from the review of little-known names are disappointing. Obscure names remain unclear. For the localization of little-known names, jarlyks do not provide any food, moreover, on their basis it is not even possible to claim that this or that object really existed at the time of issuing the jarlyk.
Three groups can be defined by the number of unknown names: the early jarlyks (15th century) contain many such names, the middle group (1507-1541) contains the fewest, and in the late group (1542-1574) the number of such names increases again.
On the example of these names, it is very clear that the translators had no idea about the existence, location and real names of such objects. In the original jarlyks, written in Arabic letters, there were only skeletons of single-consonant charachters, the pronunciation of which the translators guessed based on their life experience and geographical knowledge.
That is why we see cases when the name, unclear in the early jarlyks, unexpectedly became "clear" in the middle ones and then again unclear in the later ones:
Here is the oak tree, here is the lake, Svetly Yar called by ours. And Kitezh itself is a big city on the opposite side.
What are you, dog! There is a small elm tree, a young birch tree grows there, and the places are empty and desert.
One man looks – and "sees" the city, and the other looks at the same thing – and "sees" only the forest.
Therefore, the clarity of many variants of names from the middle group of labels is illusory and reflects not reality, but only the achievements of translators in the struggle with the skeletons of names. The source value of such interpretations is very low.