Kolmogorov.

Comments

1. D.O. says

   October 16, 2014 at 10:43 pm

   And, of course, Lomonosov was born in Kholmogory (more precisely, in a nearby village). The place is a hot bed for great scientists.
2. Brendan says

   October 17, 2014 at 1:20 am

   Steve Shaviro’s post on ‘Blindsight’ is excellent, though you won’t want to read it till you’re finished: http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=522
3. Himadri Chatterjee says

   October 17, 2014 at 7:01 am

   I am familiar with Kolmogorov thanks only to the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test – the only statistical test that is easier to carry out than it is to pronounce.
4. Stefan Holm says

   October 17, 2014 at 7:44 am

   Kolmogory appears to be a russification of Finnish kalma, ‘dead’ (archaic) and kari, ‘rock’ or ‘skerry’ (the latter indicates a Germanic loan: skerry is Sw. ‘skär’). Seems like a dull place.
5. Athel Cornish-Bowden says

   October 17, 2014 at 7:58 am

   Your interesting post led me to the Wikipedia article on Kolmogorov, which says, amongst other things: [He] was born in Tambov, about 500 kilometers south-southeast of Moscow, in 1903. His unmarried mother, Maria Y. Kolmogorova, died giving birth to him. Andrey was raised by two of his aunts in Tunoshna (near Yaroslavl) at the estate of his grandfather, a well-to-do nobleman … In 1910, his aunt adopted him, and they moved to Moscow.

   This has striking parallels with the life of Victor Henri, a physical chemist who is usually regarded as French but was actually wholly Russian in background. His mother was also unmarried, and came from the family of minor nobiility (she was first cousin of the mathematician Alexander Lyapunov), also well-to-do. She didn’t die giving birth, but lived in a ménage à trois with her sister, who was the wife of Henri’s biological father. He was adopted, officially as an orphan of unknown parentage, by his aunt and father. He was born in Marseilles (I have visited the house, which is in what was then a very classy part of the city, and not the sort place you’d expect a child of unknown parentage to be born), and the reason given by his modern relatives is that being born out of wedlock in the Russia of the 1870s wasn’t a good idea, even in a noble family, and his father and mothers came to France specifically so that he could be born here and would enjoy full rights as a French citizen.

   However, unless things changed a lot in 30 years, the story of Kolmogorov calls this explanation into question. Was it really so bad to be illegitimate in pre-revolutionary Russia?
6. Bathrobe says

   October 17, 2014 at 8:57 am

   Will the parrot ever revert to a British accent? Surely early conditioning would be hard to erase.
7. languagehat says

   October 17, 2014 at 9:37 am

   Was it really so bad to be illegitimate in pre-revolutionary Russia?

   Presumably it depended on all sorts of factors; I don’t think you can generalize from one case.
8. marie-lucie says

   October 17, 2014 at 10:20 am

   being born out of wedlock in the Russia of the 1870s wasn’t a good idea, even in a noble family

   Judging from mores in various social classes in Europe in general at the time, I would think that being born out of wedlock would be a bad idea especially in a noble family. Even worse would be having the baby out of wedlock. It was tolerated among the poor (as presumably with Kolmogorov’s mother), but a big no-no farther up the social ladder. Things were not that different in America not too long ago, which is why there was no shortage of babies for adoption if there was no possibility of a “shotgun marriage”.
9. Athel Cornish-Bowden says

   October 17, 2014 at 10:42 am

   OK, I chose my words badly: in a noble family the facts would be scandalous if known, but a wealthy family would have ways of ensuring that the facts could be concealed. However, in Henri’s case the fact that the mothers were sisters and probably the subject of some gossip anyway made it wise not to be in St Petersburg when the baby was born. I have wondered if the reason they chose Marseilles rather than somewhere more fashionable like Paris or Nice was that they would be more likely to run into people they knew in Paris. As I was writing this I remembered the Paris Commune, and Paris probably wasn’t a good place to go in 1871.

   Actually the source of the information (the geologist Andrei Kapitsa, son of the low-temperature physicist Petr Kapitsa, and Henri’s great-nephew) indicated that the problems were legal rather than social. No doubt the facts were just as scandalous in France (if known), but illegitimate children had legal rights in France that they didn’t have in Russia.
10. SFReader says

    October 17, 2014 at 10:47 am

    Generally speaking, it was a bad idea, however, I can recall several illegitimate children who made a spectacular career in 19th century Russia.

    Usually, in most of these cases, royal parentage was suspected.

    General Konstaninov, engineer, inventor and founder of Russian rocketry is widely believed to be an illegitimate son of Grand Duke Konstantin Pavlovich and French actress Claire-Anne de Laurent.

    General Inzov, governor of Bessarabia. Spectacular career and physical likeness to Grand Duke Konstantin Pavlovich led many contemporaries to conclude that he was an illegitimate son of Grand Duke Pavel (emperor of Russia in 1796-1801)

    Admiral Alekseev, viceroy of Russian Far East during Russo-Japanese War. Believed to be an illegitimate son of emperor Alexander II.
11. languagehat says

    October 17, 2014 at 10:53 am

    And let’s not forget Alexander Herzen.
12. SFReader says

    October 17, 2014 at 11:08 am

    Another great career – general Lavr Kornilov who rose from very humble origins to become commander-in-chief of Russian Army in 1917 (later he founded White Army in Russian Civil War)

    He had clearly Asiatic apperance and according to a popular theory he was born from affair between a Don Kalmyk and a Russian woman and was later adopted by family of his mother’s brother.
13. languagehat says

    October 17, 2014 at 12:47 pm

    Steve Shaviro’s post on ‘Blindsight’ is excellent, though you won’t want to read it till you’re finished

    Thanks; having finished the novel, I just read it, and it is indeed excellent.
14. Dmitry Pruss (aka MOCKBA) says

    October 17, 2014 at 7:59 pm

    I am familiar with Kolmogorov thanks only to the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test – the only statistical test that is easier to carry out than it is to pronounce.

    ditto 🙂 but it’s a piece of cake to pronounce 🙂

    Коломяки Kolomyaki, obviously Finnic and meaning some sort of a hill, is a historic neighborhood in St Petersburg – could the “m” in Kolmogorov be a split consonant from “myaki”?
15. Dmitry Pruss (aka MOCKBA) says

    October 17, 2014 at 8:07 pm

    kalma, ‘dead’ (archaic) and kari, ‘rock’

    That’s what Vasmer says, but Russian wiki claims that a more trusted hypothesis is from kolmo “three”? It also mentions that the first documented use of Kholmogory instead of historic Kolmogory is in 1692.

    I surprised btw that people insist on equating “gory” in “Holmogory” with a Finnic root. Across Russian North, categorical parts of Finnic toponyms such yarvi “lake”, myaki “hill”, salmi “peninsula” are translated into Russian
16. David Marjanović says

    October 17, 2014 at 8:29 pm

    Kolmogory appears to be a russification of Finnish kalma, ‘dead’ (archaic) and kari, ‘rock’ or ‘skerry’ (the latter indicates a Germanic loan: skerry is Sw. ‘skär’). Seems like a dull place.

    Like Prague…? 🙂

    (Reportedly an etymologically dry place on top of a rock. That would make it similar to Dürnstein, which lies in the same landscape and is transparently a so-dry-it’s-withered stone.)
17. marie-lucie says

    October 17, 2014 at 10:01 pm

    Der kaukasische Kreidekreis

    No obvious relation to the above, but it happened to pop up among LH’s book titles in the right column. I only knew this title in French and English and so was not aware of the alliterative power of the German original, which is lost in the other languages.
18. uwe says

    October 17, 2014 at 10:30 pm

    salmi “peninsula”

    Salmi is “strait”. Peninsula is niemi – “наволок”. (Incidentally, in a village my mother is from “Салма” is a proper noun for one specific strait).
19. SFReader says

    October 17, 2014 at 10:57 pm

    Janne Saarikivi’s dissertation on Finno-Ugrian Substrate in Northern Russian Dialects says that about 200-300 words in Finnic and Saami don’t have any plausible etymology (either native or borrowings from historically attested languages like Baltic or Germanic).

    He (I think Janne is male name in Finland) believes that these words are Paleo-European substrate and its traces are found in toponymy of Finland and northern Russia.

    These words include mäki (hill), saari (island), suo (swamp), niemi (cape).
20. Dmitry Pruss (aka MOCKBA) says

    October 18, 2014 at 1:13 pm

    Sorry for the late-night “salmi” error 🙁
    My point, anyway, is that the geographical-category words in Finnic toponyms are almost universally translated into Russian – while the morphology of the resulting Russian toponyms remains recognizably Finnic with the category-word agglutinated. Instead of characteristically Russian constructs such as Переяславское озеро “lake of Pereyaslavl”, the toponyms of the North have no adjective suffix and no space between words: Выгозеро, Лекшмозеро etc. (or occasionally with a dash: Пур-Наволок).
    Inclusion of untranslated category-words is rare, and mostly limited places of the more recent Russian habitation (Кузонемь “Pine Point”) or wherever the word has been borrowed into the local Russian dialect (Масельга “Earthen Mound” with Russ. dial. сельга “forested hill separating swamps” <=Karelian selka “oblong hill”)
21. Dmitry Pruss (aka MOCKBA) says

    October 18, 2014 at 1:29 pm

    In this publication BTW, they argue that in the general Kolmogory area, many village names indicate Finnic-speaking founders (either personal names or sanctuary names or identifiers such as old/new), whereas “gora” (generally just “hill” in Russian) locally designates a village / a place of human habitation.
22. Dmitry Pruss (aka MOCKBA) says

    October 18, 2014 at 1:43 pm

    PS: in the same publication, I discovered that in Russian, occasionally, Finnic toponyms ended up folk-etymologized when the final part *sounded like* a geographical category name, e.g. Рандростров < *Rantasara ‘shore/brook’
23. languagehat says

    October 18, 2014 at 1:44 pm

    Very interesting!
24. John Cowan says

    October 18, 2014 at 2:35 pm

    Der kaukasische Kreidekreis

    m-l: You can see the traces of old alliteration in the English and French written forms “Caucasian Chalk Circle” and “Le cercle de craie caucasien”, but I agree that the spoken forms are not as effective.

    While looking this up, I noted in passing that Kreis, which is a native word, is thought to be cognate to Russian krai ‘province’.
25. John Cowan says

    October 18, 2014 at 2:38 pm

    By the way, Finnish ranta is a Germanic loan from something close to English strand ‘shore’.
26. David Marjanović says

    October 18, 2014 at 4:18 pm

    Indeed, the districts of Germany are called Kreis (pl. -e).
27. marie-lucie says

    October 18, 2014 at 6:45 pm

    JC: “Le cercle de craie caucasien”

    It had never occurred to me to take particular notice of the initial c’s, perhaps because when I read French I automatically think of the sounds. Even the sequence craie caucasien does not strike me, probably because the words do not make a phrase (since caucasien agrees with cercle not craie) and also because to my reading mind the initial sounds are not two [k]’s but [k] and [kR]. Similarly, in the English title, the initial consonants are not [k-k-k] but [k-č-s]. It is true that there is alliteration in Caucasian/caucasien, but it gets lost in the non-alliteration of the other consonants.
28. uwe says

    October 18, 2014 at 9:53 pm

    occasionally, Finnic toponyms ended up folk-etymologized when the final part *sounded like* a geographical category name

    Very interesting. The village I mentioned is called Нижмозеро, except that there’s actually no such a lake and the river the village is on is called Нижма. This just must be the case of such misinterpreted -sara.
29. SFReader says

    October 19, 2014 at 2:09 am

    Saarikivi also writes that in most villages in northern Russia, language shift was involved – locals simply switched to Russian at some point (sometime in 15-16 centuries).

    There are other villages, however, which clearly have been founded by ethnic Russian migrants from the south. They tend to have purely Russian names.

    I think it is very likely that those translated placenames originate in Finnic speakers switching to Russian.

    New arrivals obviously didn’t know Finnic and simply used whatever name they’ve heard from locals without any knowledge of its meaning.
30. Stefan Holm says

    October 20, 2014 at 8:55 am

    SFReader: I think Janne is male name in Finland.

    It is – and a Swedish nickname (for Jan). In Finland boys are baptized as Pelle, Nisse, Olle, Kalle, Lasse etc. (in Sweden proper they are just nicknames for Per, Nils, Olof, Karl, Lars). A similar phenomenon occurred in Sweden after WWII and throughout the 50:s when a lot of boys were named Benny, Tommy, Conny, Billy, Johnny, Ronny etc. I suppose that at least back then those were all American nicknames (for Benjamin, Thomas and so on).
31. languagehat says

    October 20, 2014 at 9:29 am

    I believe the corresponding Finnish nickname is Jukka.
32. John Cowan says

    October 20, 2014 at 11:57 am

    those were all American nicknames

    They began so, but now often function as ordinary first names. James Earl Carter Jr. had to go to court to get himself on the ballot as Jimmy Carter, the preferred (but not official) form of his name, or nobody would have voted for him for President.
33. Stefan Holm says

    October 20, 2014 at 1:54 pm

    John: Finnish ranta is very much so their borrowing of Gmc strand, being impossible for them to have initial consonant clusters: school is koulu, Stockholm is Tukholma etc.

    When an old merchant place in southern Karelia got city status in 1721 it was by the then ruling Swedes called Villmanstrand. Modern Swedes sometimes ask ’who was this Villman’? Those who know are often unwilling to explain that the origin actually is ’wild man’, in this context a Saami (a Lapp). The Finnish calque, i.e. the modern name of the town, is however crystal clear: Lappeenranta.

    Dimitry: (Масельга “Earthen Mound” with Russ. dial. сельга “forested hill separating swamps” <=Karelian selka “oblong hill”).

    You could add that the intial ‘Ma-‘ looks suspiciously like Finnish maa, ‘land’, ‘earth’. So more or less: ‘Ridgeland’.
34. Alexei K. says

    October 20, 2014 at 3:45 pm

    Illegitimacy was more of a legal than a moral problem, it seems. Zhukovsky was the son of a wealthy landowner called Bunin and a captive Turkish beauty. The boy was formally recognized or adopted by his father’s poor but noble client. The composer and chemist Borodin was born of a Georgian prince and a petty-bourgeois Muscovite and legitimized as a child of his father’s serf, who was immediately freed. Borodin regained hereditary nobility through academic achievement. The poet Fet’s life was almost ruined by this fight to regain his father’s name and family membership.

    But technically, in the eyes of the law, none of the three was illegitimate. In contrast, Korney Chukovsky was just that.
35. languagehat says

    November 11, 2019 at 5:13 pm

    Steve Shaviro’s post on ‘Blindsight’ is excellent, though you won’t want to read it till you’re finished

    Five years later: I finally read it, and yes it is, so thanks!
36. John Cowan says

    November 11, 2019 at 5:52 pm

    General Konstaninov, inventor and founder of Russian rocketry

    In the West at least that is believed to be Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. But perhaps “rocketry” is used in a different sense here?
37. languagehat says

    November 11, 2019 at 6:15 pm

    Konstantinov’s work:

    In 1849, another artillery engineer — Konstantin Konstantinov — took charge of the St. Petersburg-based “Rocket Enterprise” founded along with several similar European organizations in 1820s. In 1847, Konstantinov built a “ballistic pendulum,” which he used to determine the influence of a rocket’s shape and design on its flying characteristics. After 1850, Konstantinov continuously tested battlefield missiles with the goal of improving their capabilities. Konstantinov studied different stabilization methods and detachable warheads. He also worked on improving production and assembly techniques used in rocketry.

    Rockets developed by Konstantinov had a range of 4-5 kilometers. Konstantinov also proposed to use rockets to shoot the harpoons used in whaling. Konstantinov spent 1857 and 1858 in Europe, studying rocketry. During 1859-1861, back in Russia, Konstantinov delivered lectures on rocketry to military officers. After 1861, Konstantinov led the foundation of the Nikolaev rocket-production plant, which became operational in 1867.
38. nemanja says

    November 11, 2019 at 6:52 pm

    Tsiolkovsky is known for extending the principles of rocketry to motion beyond the earth’s atmosphere (ie astronautics). But John is right that “rocketry” is often conflated with “space travel” in the public mind.
39. John Cowan says

    November 11, 2019 at 10:34 pm

    I’ve always loved the wonderful understatement of Goddard’s paper, “A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes”.

    A little preliminary poking about suggests that William Congreve the rocketeer was the great-greatnephew of William Congreve the playwright.
40. January First-of-May says

    November 11, 2019 at 10:43 pm

    Russian krai ‘province’

    …Isn’t that just “edge, boundary”?
    (Compare – from a different root – English march and margin, apparently also cognate to mark and to the military meaning of march.)

    My favorite factoid about Kolmogorov is that, as a child, he repeated the famous number-summing achievement of Gauss; however, unlike Gauss, about whom there is still some dispute whether he actually did that, Kolmogorov managed to get his result immortalized in contemporary newspapers, so there is today no doubt that he actually did figure it out (which, ironically enough, makes it more plausible that so did Gauss).
41. Brett says

    November 11, 2019 at 11:35 pm

    The method for summing arithmetic series is not that hard to figure out. I came up with it when I was eight. If Gauss did figure it out, it cannot have happened the way the story is usually told, however (since the canonical version of the story has the teacher knowing that 5050 is the right answer, but not knowing that there is a simple formula to get that answer).
42. Hans says

    November 11, 2019 at 11:38 pm

    On kraj: Yes, and developments from “edge, boundary” > “territory, land, country” are not unusual. I also don’t know how the German Kreis and kraj would be related as mentioned above; kraj is a common Slavic word, not a loan from German, and Germanic /k/ doesn’t correspond to Slavic /k/.
43. January First-of-May says

    November 12, 2019 at 1:32 am

    since the canonical version of the story has the teacher knowing that 5050 is the right answer, but not knowing that there is a simple formula to get that answer

    I… don’t really see why this would not have been possible? Perhaps the teacher originally received the question together with the (formula-generated) answer, and didn’t care that much about how the answer was found.
    Or perhaps they just did the manual addition themselves at some point; it must have been a much more practiced skill back in those days (especially since they clearly expected the kids to be capable of doing said manual addition – just not that quickly).

    For what it’s worth, IIRC, some variants of the canonical version have the sum only go up to 40 instead of 100, in which case it would surely have been doable manually.
44. Lars Mathiesen says

    November 12, 2019 at 3:19 am

    If you group the numbers ten at a time and treat each digit position separately (which is how you did things anyway), you quickly get something like 10 x 45 + 4500 + 100 = 5050 — but this can only be adapted for summing up to a multiple of ten and the n(n+1)/2 formula is not so easy to see.

    That’s not to say that the teacher didn’t expect the kids to do the addition one number at a time, or that he hadn’t done it himself at some point.
45. D.O. says

    November 12, 2019 at 10:33 am

    If you group the numbers ten at a time and treat each digit position separately

    Fractals! in 18th century! in elementary school!
46. John Cowan says

    November 12, 2019 at 12:57 pm

    My understanding is that Gauss was asked to add up the numbers from 1 to 100 to keep him busy, because he was so bored in class. So it’s quite irrelevant whether the teacher knew there was a formula or not; indeed, the teacher might have checked it afterwards, the hard way.
47. Dmitry Pruss says

    November 12, 2019 at 2:34 pm

    Formula? You just add first and last numbers, and so on with every pair which follows as you move inwards?
48. John Cowan says

    November 12, 2019 at 3:07 pm

    Probably that’s what Gauss did.
49. J Pystynen says

    November 12, 2019 at 6:33 pm

    I believe the corresponding Finnish nickname is Jukka.

    Long since entirely neutral (as also other varieties like Juho, Juha), the version that still retains some nicknameness is Jussi.

    The Finnish calque, i.e. the modern name of the town, is however crystal clear: Lappeenranta.

    Not a calque: the crystal clear meaning of this is ‘shore of the flat side’ and not ‘shore of wildmen’. In turn this is itself an assimilation/folk etymology from older Lapveen-, eastern dialectal genitive of Lapvesi ‘borderland water’, the old name of the southern parts of Lake Saimaa. The first component lappi : lappe- ‘borderland’ is still one proposed etymology of the term Lapp though, but that’s as close as we get.