- published: 22 Apr 2014
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Originally, the name Rus (Русь, Rus’) referred to the people, the region, and the medieval states (9th to 12th centuries) of the Rus' Khaganate and Kievan Rus' polities. The territories of the latter are today distributed among Belarus, Ukraine, and a part of the European section of Russia.
One of the earliest written sources mentioning the people called Rus (as Rhos) dates back to year 839 AD in a Royal Frankish chronicle Annales Bertiniani; the Frankish authorities identified them as a Germanic tribe called Swedes. According to the Kievan Rus' Primary Chronicle, compiled in about 1113 AD, the Rus were a group of Varangians, Norsemen who had relocated somewhere from the Baltic region (literally "from beyond the sea"), first to Northeastern Europe, then to the south where they created the medieval Kievan state.
The modern name of Russia (Rossiya), which came into use in the 17th century, is derived from the Greek Ρωσσία (nowadays spelled Ρωσία) which in turn derives from Ρως, an early Greek name for the people of Rus'. "Rus'" as a state had no proper name; by its inhabitants it was called "rusĭska zemlya".(русьска(я) земля) (with rusĭska alternatively spelled russka, rus'ka, and most often ruska), which might be translated as "Land of the Rus". The word "rusĭska" is an adjective: the morpheme -ĭsk- is used to form adjectives in Slavic; -a is a grammatical ending for feminine adjectives (namely, zemlya, "land", is grammatically feminine in Slavic). In similar fashion, Poland is called Polska by its inhabitants, that is, Pol-sk-a, originally being the adjective Polish (land).
Rus or RUS may refer to:
A name is a word or term used for identification. Names can identify a class or category of things, or a single thing, either uniquely, or within a given context. A personal name identifies a specific unique and identifiable individual person, and may or may not include a middle name. The name of a specific entity is sometimes called a proper name (although that term has a philosophical meaning also) and is a proper noun. Other nouns are sometimes, more loosely, called names; an older term for them, now obsolete, is "general names".
The use of personal names is not unique to humans. Dolphins also use symbolic names, as has been shown by recent research. Individual dolphins have distinctive whistles, to which they will respond even when there is no other information to clarify which dolphin is being referred to.
Caution must be exercised when translating, for there are ways that one language may prefer one type of name over another. A feudal naming habit is used sometimes in other languages: the French sometimes refer to Aristotle as "le Stagirite" from one spelling of his place of birth, and English speakers often refer to Shakespeare as "The Bard", recognizing him as a paragon writer of the language. Finally, claims to preference or authority can be refuted: the British did not refer to Louis-Napoleon as Napoleon III during his rule.