Back off, I'm a linguist

[leahbobet]

I got a Russian version of the Nigerian Scam Spam today, purporting to be from a Mrs. Deborah Vladimir.

I almost replied to it to say: "Russian has gendered patronymics! There is no such thing as a Mrs. Vladimir! Asshole!"

Linguist raaaage: defending you from spam since 2008. ;D

Comments

[icedrake.livejournal.com]

Could it have been a (highly unusual) last name?
In some cases, last names don't get gender-modified suffixes.

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

I think the most likely explanation was it's Scam Spam from someone who's playing to a North American notion of Russianness by sticking "Vladimir", which North Americans will twig to as Russian, in there.

Is Deborah even a common name for Russian women?

[icedrake.livejournal.com]

Oh, I am sure it was totally bogus. The linguistic angle is what I was following up on, just because my interests lie (to a certain degree) in that area, too.

No, Deborah is not a common Russian name. Its Jewish variant (Dvora or Dvorah) is possible, though even that would be rather rare. But there, you run into the question of combining a distinctly Jewish first name with a distinctly Russian or Russian-seeming last name.

And just because this is a curious story, a possible explanation: Back in the late 19th century, the tsar at the time decided that Jewish communities stood out too much from the general population. Thus, by royal decree, each town's name was assigned to all the inhabitants as a new last name. Mine is in that category, by the way, from the Ukrainian/Polish border town of Zlotniki.

So it's highly unlikely but possible that our hypothetical Deborah has roots in the Jewish community of a 340-thousand-person city of Vladimir, about 200km north-east of Moscow.

(or she married a Russian. A rich one, if the email is anything to believe :)

As an aside, if Vladimir was the name of her father, then the patronymic would be "Vladimirovna" for her, or "Vladimirovich" for a male. There is a suffix modifier in either case, and your spammer lose at the internets, regardless.

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

...okay, that's fascinating, with the geographical-based names. I'm filing that for a story sometime. :)

[wordswoman.livejournal.com]

>>I almost replied to it to say: "Russian has gendered patronymics! There is no such thing as a Mrs. Vladimir! Asshole!"<<

LOL! I have a brain-crush on you now. :D

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

Hee! Yay!