I was exploring the hotels of Saint Petersburg on the web and found one called Brothers Karamazov. It opened in 2004 and has 28 rooms with all the modern amenities, including internet access. The hotel boasts four special rooms with 19th-century decor, each named after a female character in a Dostoevsky novel. (I don’t imagine they have a “Stinking Lizaveta Suite.”)
I also learned that the Russian word for “making a reservation” is the same as the word for “adding armor to”—бронирование [bronirovaniye]. I guess it means you’re protecting your room from anyone else using it. It sure looks odd, though. You can do the same with airline tickets.
But hey, why guess? One Russian-English/English-Russian dictionary (Kenneth Katzner’s, published by Wiley) has separate entries for the two senses (armoring/reserving), with the stress in different places.* The online version of the Ushakov Russian dictionary, on the other hand, provides the two senses under one entry and gives no guidance on stress (but seems to imply the stress is the same). The second definition given is: Особым распоряжением выделить (выделять) что-н. (какие-н. предметы общего пользования) для какой-н. цели, делая неприкосновенным (нов.) [Set something (or some objects of general use) apart by special arrangement for a certain purpose, making it inviolable]. (Inviolable? That’s what the dictionaries say, but I’d go with the root [not touchable] and say inaccessible). The tag “нов.” implies this usage is recent, but it’s strange: Wiley’s dictionary was published in 1984 and has it; the electronic dictionary I have installed on my computer (and paid good money for a few years ago) doesn’t.
Not that I’m going to be making a reservation at the Hotel Brothers Karamazov any time soon. Online daydreaming—that’s all it is.
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*The Wiley dictionary seems to say we’re dealing with two different words, and that got me thinking that the true root of the word meaning “make a reservation” might come from a foreign language. This happens a lot in Russian: кокетничать from coquette, импровизировать from improvise, etc. But I couldn’t find anything in French or German that would fit the bill.
A similar English expression might be “securing” something.
You’re right—one can “secure a room,” just as one can secure a dirigible or a canoe. There’s a sense of preventing something from floating away. True, “secure” also implies “security,” which implies “safety,” which implies “protection” (as does “armor”). But it’s all so airy compared to the Russian, which gives a very tangible sense of armor plating (although native Russians probably “hear right past it”). The battleship Potemkin was a броненосец—literally an “armor-bearer.”
How does one “make a reservation” (or “secure a room”) in German?
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Thomas Nephew is absolutely right when comparing бронирование with security. It’s funny, but for a not-native speaker airy word-formation relations seem to be really tangibile. Even when they are just ethimological. And I mean my own English, not your Russian!
I am sorry, i have a bit mistaken about the origins of брОня (also бронь) & бронЯ. Actually, the modern-conscience origin of the two words is different, although ethimologically both of them came from the ancient German into the ancient Slavic. Probably they relate to “die Brust”, “Brustwer” (cf. breast). The word брОня is an obsolete one to my taste, бронь sounds better. It means reservation-made (‘result’), the word is a back-formation of the processing бронирование 1 (“cut-off the suffixes”). The other word бронЯ truhly means ‘armor’, as in the song “БронЯ крепкА и тАнки нАши бЫстры”. The Polish word of the same origin is bron’. импровизировать is improviziren in German, the Russian suffix -ировать has German origin. The Russian language behaves similar to English in this respect: both are not afraid to borrow. You can also say резервировать, if you want to! Although not резервация; this word was reserved to name American-Indian lands:)
Cheers
Thanks, Margarita! I’m delighted you took the time to comment. It’s always a pleasure to have one’s idle speculation replaced with factual information. And, I must say, the intersection of ancient Russian and ancient German is well beyond my range of mental wandering!
I had a feeling I could say резервировать in St. Petersburg and be perfectly understood, but it will be much more fun to armor my hotel reservation, when the time comes.