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BGerdemann (WMF) (talk) 19:27, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

Proposal to change the name of an article to a more accurate one

I recently noticed the revision history of List of Wars involving Peru https://en.wikipedia.org/search/?title=List_of_wars_involving_Peru&action=history and the fact that were eliminated Wars on pre-colonial Peru. Then the creation of the article List of wars involving the Inca Empire. Although I praise the initiative of that for a better understandment for Pre-Hispanic cultures that can't be considered "Peru" propperly (as there were a lot of indigenous nations that were different between them until Spaniards unificate them and was founded properly the contemporary Peruvian nation), I don't agree about naming that article as only "wars involving the Inca Empire", as the Inca Civilization was one of a lot of societies that were in Ancient Peru territory, there were a lot of Andean Civilisations and Amazonic Societies that can't be classified as Incas.

So, I have two propositions, or naming the article "List of wars on Ancient Peru/involving Pre-Hispanic Peruvians" (in the first, emphasizing that it's an article invaling pre-hispanic states with their headquarters in Peru and being based mostly in the territorial than ethnic realities, or in the second having a more generic title that it's more aproppiate for social realities) or mantaining the article, but moving the Non-Inca Wars after creating a new article named "List of wars on Ancient Peru in Pre-Inca Times". Sr L (talk) 04:44, 2 November 2024 (UTC)

Need help

Hi! I want to ask you to help with my new draft. Can you please correct grammatical mistakes and rephrase the text at certain points, as well as add English-language literature on this subject. I will be very grateful! Dushnilkin (talk) 14:53, 9 November 2024 (UTC)

Hey, I will take a look at it. NLeeuw (talk) 15:18, 9 November 2024 (UTC)

Thanks! Dushnilkin (talk) 15:53, 9 November 2024 (UTC)

Hello again, I have sent the draft for review, thank you so much for your help! Dushnilkin (talk) 17:26, 12 November 2024 (UTC)

You're welcome! In the meantime, I've done some improvements to main article Russo-Kazan Wars. I was surprised to find out just how important the role of dynastic politics was, more than I already thought. It seems that the Crimean Khanate treated the Khanate of Kazan as a sort of appanage, a fiefdom for junior princes of the Giray dynasty, and that Muscovy was happy to be the bridge between the two. NLeeuw (talk) 09:45, 13 November 2024 (UTC)

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Thank you so much! I greatly appreciate the trust the community has put in my contributions over the years. I shall strive to maintain this high level of quality, and never stop learning in order to expand and refine my skills. NLeeuw (talk) 11:53, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

User:Nederlandse Leeuw/Rus' land

I hope you do not mind me taking a look at this. I think this is an interesting topic but there are a few questions I have regarding this:

1. Rus' (region) used to exist as an article but was merged following a discussion quite some time ago since most of the editors participating in the discussion thought that it should be merged with Ruthenia. Is this a draft that you are working on for a standalone article?
2. I noticed that the Ukrainian «Руська» was translated as "Ruthenian" in the reference. Personally I think "Ruthenian" is fine but what is your approach here regarding the translation of such terms?
3. Ngram shows more results for "land of Rus". Any thoughts on what is a better title?

Thanks. Mellk (talk) 21:29, 27 November 2024 (UTC)

Hey @Mellk, sure, you can take a look. I'm mostly interested in creating an overview of the geographic identifications that modern scholars have deduced from medieval Rus' chronicles such as the PVL, NPL, KC, SC, GVC etc. Publishing it may well risk WP:SYNTH, so I might not publish it at all. I'm not even sure whether I am going to publish this as a stand-alone article, merge it into something existing, or just keep it as a note-to-self. For now, it's just a handy overview just like User:Nederlandse Leeuw/Old East Slavic manuscripts that I don't intend to publish either. Sometimes you just find an overwhelming amount of information and you need to store it somewhere online, preferably with links to articles that do exist, but you don't intend to publish the material itself. NLeeuw (talk) 21:38, 27 November 2024 (UTC)

PS: How to translate Ukrainian «Руська» depends very much on context, just like Russian «Русская». Both could be translated as either "Rus' ", "Ruthenian" or "Russian", depending on context. The rule of thumb is that anything before to 1300 is Rus', and anything after 1300 depends primarily on geography. Sometimes, cities or regions on the western edges of the current Russian Federation (Pskov, Novgorod, Votia, Smolensk, Bryansk, Kursk, are called "Ruthenian" (Rutheni, ruthenos, Rutia etc.) in medieval Latin sources, and sometimes the East Slavic adjective for these medieval places is also translated as Ruthenian into English. On the other hand, many medieval Latin sources used Russia, Rusia, Russiæ etc. for Rus' or parts of Rus', such as Galicia–Volhynia (Halych–Volyn'), or places in modern Belarus, which Slavonic sources of those areas would have called «Руська».

In short, there is no one size fits all. The difference between the adjectives emerged gradually and did not yet follow the post-1991 borders, as we also discussed in the recent rewrite of Ruthenian language. Just earlier today, I read that Hermann von Wartberge wrote in his Latin chronicle (around 1370) that in the year 1240, the Livonians imposed tribute upon the rutenos in Votia. I have no idea how to translate that, in part because I am considering the possibility that Wartberge is mistaken. The best option is probably "Rus' people"; it's way too early for "Russians", while "Ruthenians" would be completely out of place if we think of "Ruthenians" as simply a shorthand for "the East Slavic inhabitants of late medieval and early modern Belarus and Ukraine". But even then, I think very few Rus' people lived in Votia at the time. It was overwhelmingly Finnic-speaking and pagan; there us little evidence of direct and strong Novgorodian political control or socioeconomic or cultural-linguistic-religious influence on the Votians by 1240. Wartberge might be extrapolating the situation he was writing in (somewhere between 1350 and 1390) backwards in time, as if it had always been that way. In fact, there is very little evidence of Votia's subordination to Novgorod until the second half of the 13th century. I don't think there were many rutenos in 1240s Votia for the Livonians to tax. NLeeuw (talk) 00:37, 28 November 2024 (UTC)

From my understanding, the Latin church used Rutheni to refer to the inhabitants of Russia. But this is not limited to just the medieval period. Polish sources for example would refer to the terrae Lithuaniae et Russiae or dominium Russiae etc. I am sure that there are also sources where the inhabitants of Moscovia are called Rutheni (despite official terminology referring to the state as Moscovia and its people as Moschovitae). It looks like in Treatise on Two Sarmatias it says those inhabitants "Rutheni sunt et Ruthenicum loquuntur". But of course, there is a lot of political propaganda in such texts such as in De moribus tartarorum, lituanorum et moscorum: "Cum idioma Ruthenum alienum sit a nobis Lituanis, hoc est, Italianis, Italico sanguine oriundis". I also recall papal texts that use the term 'Ruthenia' to refer to later Russian tsars.

The name Rossiya also wasn't a name that only "Muscovites" adopted, it was also used by Ruthenians e.g. by Orthodox clergy in the 16th and 17th centuries before the name "Little Russia" was adopted, especially in the Cossack Hetmanate. The Ukrainian clergy also played an important role in the creation of the imperial identity. From what I can see in Lexicon Universale, it says Russia is also called Roxolania and Ruthenia. It also says: "omnes itaque populi, qui linguâ Sclavonicâ utuntur, atque ritum et fidem Christi, Graecorum more, sequuntur, communi vocabulô Russi, seu Rutheni appellantur". It also says that Black Russia belongs to Poland while White Russia belongs to Moscow. Then, of course, by the 18th and 19th centuries, it is all just called "Russia". Mellk (talk) 04:37, 28 November 2024 (UTC)

This is also probably not too dissimilar to Russian texts calling certain foreigners 'Germans'. The German Quarter was established in Moscow to house foreigners, not just Germans, but we do not use alternate translations. Mellk (talk) 04:39, 28 November 2024 (UTC)

Interesting, that's good to know! The differentiation between Ruthenian and Russian took quite a long time to play out, sometimes longer than I thought. It often seems that Rut(h)eni was used for people and Rus(s)ia for geography, just because -ia is the Latin standard for all countries and regions, while a plural noun ending in -i makes for easy declension that most medieval writers in Latin knew how to handle (-i, -orum, -is, -os, -is, -i). On the other hand, modern English is very comfortable with country names ending in -ia and making demonyms and ethnonyms out of that by adding -n for singular and -ns for plural. At the same time, it became desirable to make scholarly distinctions between the more Western and more eastern parts of the East Slavs and their regions. So that's why we ended up with Russia, Russian, Russians versus Ruthenia, Ruthenian, Ruthenians, even though Latin texts until very late used them interchangeably, and there would have been no substantial difference in meaning between «Руська» and «Русская» until somewhere at the border between early modern and modern times. On the other hand, writers in English still struggle with translating both as an adjective and as a demonym / ethnonym before 1300. Selart uses Rus' for geography, but continues to use Russian(s) for demography. Raffensperger seems to have settled on Rus, Rusian, Rusians, with one s and no apostrophe ('). Halperin has gone full Rus' for pretty much everything. Plokhy, Snyder and other historians focussed more on Ukraine tend to switch to Ruthenia(n)(s) as soon as possible for the southwest, and to avoid Russia(n)(s) as long for the northeastern, using Suzdalia(n)(s) and then Muscovy/Muscovite(s) until the 16th to 18th century before switching to Russia(n)(s). All of these are attempts at painting a clear picture, in places where history is simply muddy and complex.

At any rate, that is much later than the period I intend to cover here, namely that of the PVL to the GVC, i.e. c. 850 to 1300. In translatio imperii and elsewhere, I have previously written about ongoing discussions about when (14thor 15th century?) the phrase russkaya zemlya was first applied to Suzdalia / Muscovy, and very rarely also to Tver'. (Halperin is really the expert here, having devoted decades of publications on what he originally called the "concept" and later the "myth of the Rus' Land", serving more ideological than descriptive purposes.) A similar translatio may have occurred in the GVC and other southwestern writings from the mid-13th century onwards, in which Galicia (Halychyna) and Volhynia (Volyn'), which in previous decades were considered outside the Rus' land proper, were included as part of Rus' later, as Daniel of Galicia (Danylo of Halych, Danylo Romanovych) increased in prominence in what are now Western and Central Ukraine, Eastern Poland and Southern Belarus. And this list of chronicle passages may help show when and how that approximately happened. NLeeuw (talk) 05:43, 28 November 2024 (UTC)

PS: One reason why land of Rus' may be so popular at Ngrams may well have to do with the fact that the prominent Cross & Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953 English translation of the PVL uses it almost exclusively, while never ever writing anything like Rus', Rus'ian, Rusian, Russian, or Ruthenian land. It's all land of Rus' in Cross&SW. But, and I may be pedantic here, I expect the East Slavic equivalent of land of Rus' to be земля Русі and земля Руси, respectively. And technically those are genitive nouns rather than adjectives, although they may serve very similar purposes in practice. Incidentally, I've already done a brief scan of Cross&SW for some useful passages of land of Rus' that may help geographical identification, but I found it rather unhelpful. Almost all passages of land of Rus' in the PVL are in devotional / religious passages, or patriotic / political passages, that appear at first glance to encompass all of what we now call Kievan Rus'. There is never a practical application, casually mentioning that so-and-so went to the Rus' land, or went from Rus' to Smolensk. That might be the reason why Henryk Paszkiewicz didn't use the PVL in his 1954 forty examples list. NLeeuw (talk) 06:12, 28 November 2024 (UTC)

I have also noticed that "land of the Rus" is also quite popular, but I am not sure if this is from a specific translation. Mellk (talk) 20:03, 28 November 2024 (UTC)

@Mellk Well, the advantage of using the genitive noun Рѹси ("of Rus' ") instead of the adjective Рѹсьскаѧ ("Rus'/Rus'ian/Rusian" etc.) is once again that confusion with modern Russia and Russians can be avoided. To name one example, there is a Dutch Misplaced Pages page called nl:Land van de Roes, which is literally land of the Rus', although it claims to be a translation of Рѹсь or Рѹсьскаѧ землѧ. It's a bit of a dubious translation, perhaps borne out of the very same problem of translating the adjective Рѹсьскаѧ to something that makes grammatical sense in Dutch, but is not the same as Russisch ("Russian", meaning the language, or pertaining to the country) or een Rus ("a Russian"). Dutch has a minor advantage in that the double vowel oe can be used to transcribe the Cyrillic У, while an inhabitant of modern Russia, een Rus, can be written with a Latin u; English cannot do that, and uses the Latin u for both.

I've been reading the first modern Dutch translation of the Primary Chronicle by Hans Thuis (2015), who notes this same problem in his Appendix, and explains at length that in the end, he is just admittedly arbitrarily using variations on Roes, Roes', Roesen, Roesisch, Rus, Russen, Russisch etc.:

A special problem was presented by the Old Rus' words царь (tsar' – keizer), бояринь (bojarin' – bojaar), Русь (Roes' – land or people of Roes), Русин (Roesin – onderdaan van Roes), and Рускыи (Roeskyi – 'Roesisch'). (...) Русь I translate as '(de) Roes'; but Русин and Рускыи often as 'Rus' and 'Russisch', although with this last choice, I am guilty of an anachronism.

I hope that makes sense, as I need to translate this from Dutch to English while Hans Thuis is translating this partially from Old East Slavic to Dutch haha. In any case, a lot of these choices seem to be driven by practical needs and convenience rather than linguistic accuracy, while other choices are precisely driven by linguistic accuracy at the cost of convenience. E.g. I don't think one can justify translating Русь as land of the Roes / Rus', because that is just adding elements that are not there. Русь is a nominative noun, not genitive (Руси / Русі), and where does "land" come from if there is no земля in the Slavic original? But does it circumvent having to coin new words like Rus'ian or Roesisch that are arguably quite ugly, that will still confuse people and might not see wide adoption anyway? Yes. And so I understand why some translators choose to add elements that are just not there for the sake of convenience. NLeeuw (talk) 20:54, 28 November 2024 (UTC)

The problem here is that Russia (like Ruthenia, Rutenia etc.) and its variants were used in contemporary sources and they were all used to refer to the same thing. At first, the Rhos were a group of Varangians who came from Scandinavia, and the area they settled was called Rhosia, while the Slavic tribes were known by other names. Then it came to denote a state that was predominately Eastern Slavic, and so on. There is no clear dividing line and the identity continually evolved, so whether to use Rus, Russian or Ruthenian ultimately comes down to a matter of preference; sometimes it is just arbitrary. As a result, I do not think that there is a common approach in the literature. But at least with WP:V we can just stick to the source whenever possible and leave this to the author to worry about.

The identities will continue to evolve anyway. I do not think that when someone uses Russian, they are suggesting that this is the same as present-day Russia. The Soviet Union was/is also often called Russia, even though this was an atheistic socialist state that tried to redefine everything through Marxist-Leninist ideology. Similarly, when someone uses Ukraine, for say the 16th century, I do not think that they are trying to say that this is the same as present-day Ukraine. The borders are different now, and may continue to change. But perhaps I am wrong and people see such terms purely through modern political lenses.

I also think that "land of the Rus" might be used usually in reference to the Rus (Varangians), perhaps in a similar way as "land of the Franks", which is sometimes given as a translation for Francia etc. Mellk (talk) 03:03, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

Perhaps. I agree with most of what you say. But as you say, it comes down to WP:V. For the overview I'm writing now, spanning the 11th to 13th century, with a heavy focus on the 12th, I think Rus' and Rus' land are the best translations. In that sense, I am following Halperin rather than Raffensperger, Ostrowski, etc. But so far, I do try to keep quotations intact, which means that when I quote Lisa Lynn Heinrich's 1977 English translation of the Kievan Chronicle, it might be Russian land. And when I quote Raffensperger & Ostrowski 2023, it might be Rus land without apostrophe etc. This might become a big mess, also when transcribing names like Iurii / Yuri / Yury / Yuriy / or even Gyurgyi, as the Laurentian Codex calls Yury Dolgorukiy. But I need to follow the WP:principle of minimal change, and that means keeping quotations intact. NLeeuw (talk) 09:07, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

Reichskommissariat Moskowien Unsourced Information Deletion

Hi Nederlandse Leeuw, I saw that you deleted the information on Reichskommissariat Moskowien's territorial extent and much of the information in general. If it's not too much of a hassle I would like to ask why this was considered unsourced. I would like to propose rewriting or undoing the deleted information as another source used in the article Dallin, Alexander (1981). German rule in Russia, 1941-1945 contains information on the border of Moskowien with Ostland and minor details on the border with Ukraine. I also feel that the information on the border at the A-A line should be readded as considering it was the extent of Operation Barbarossa there has to be at least one source that could back it up. Just in case you need page numbers the information on the Ostland border is on pages 185 and 200-203. I just think that it's useful to have accurate borders of the Reichskommissaiats listed.

ARealHumanPersonGuy (talk) 13:48, 6 December 2024 (UTC)

1240-1242 Livonia sources

Hello Leeuw, I usually work on french wikipedia. I have seen that you did a lot of changes on the article Livonian campaign against Rus'. I am working on the french page. Where can I find online the book you use? For example, I would like to find ''Livonia, Rus' and the Baltic Crusades in the thirteenth century'' of Anti Selart.

Thanks in advance, Resikas (talk) 09:57, 7 December 2024 (UTC)

Hello Resikas, I was sent this chapter by another Wikipedian. If you send me an email, I could forward it to you. As long as you only use it privately for Misplaced Pages, it should be fine. It is quite an important scholarly contribution to studies of this period, and I couldn't have corrected a lot of misconceptions and refuted ideas from previous eras without it. NLeeuw (talk) 10:54, 7 December 2024 (UTC)

Thank you!

Hello! Regarding Olga of Kiev: It seems that when I translate the whole title (Святая великая княгиня Ольга), княгиня appears as "duchess" which is why I had made the mistake (and I apologize for doing so). Thank you very much for taking the time to explain why I was wrong; I understand now and will make sure to be more mindful when reverting good-faith edits. Cheers! xRozuRozu • _cups 21:44, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Barnstar of Diligence
	For your extensive work pertaining to reliable sourcing of 1240 Izborsk and Pskov campaign and Battle on the Ice. 3family6 (Talk to me | See what I have done) 17:22, 13 December 2024 (UTC)

@3family6 Thanks so much, I greatly appreciate it! NLeeuw (talk) 17:43, 13 December 2024 (UTC)

You're welcome! Your months of work should be recognized.--3family6 (Talk to me | See what I have done) 17:48, 13 December 2024 (UTC)