[Kreuzberger]

Lukaschenko, Лукашенко in Belarus. Suddendly, he's the feminine Lukaschenka per BBC. Why?

(Grace Schapps?)

[Cyclist]

A Ukrainian member of a cycling forum I frequent explained this the other day. Apparently, Belorus is unique among the Slavic languages for being the other way round. In Russia and Ukraine Lukashenka would be Lukashenko. But not in Belorus.

I'll have a look for his explanation tomorrow* and copy and paste his explanation.


*Not working again tomorrow, but this is more important than what I was going to do.

[Cyclist]

His name in Belarusian is Лукашэнка (Lukashenka), but often Russified as Лукашенко (Lukashenko). Guess which language is more often translated into English?

And in response to someone pointing out -ko is male and -ka is female:

Generally speaking, yes, but apparently Belarusian breaks that rule. (With my Ukrainian knowledge I can understand Belarusian fairly well, but have never studied it so not sure of the details).
Ukrainian has a few exceptions to the rule as well, e.g. Юра/Yura, usually Юрій/Yurij (George); and Олекса/Oleksa, usually Олексій/Oleksij (a form of Alexander).

[cycloon]

It's not entirely dissimilar to Russian/other Slavic things, as observed by the helpful Ukrainian. Lots of masculine nouns in Russian (including 'man') actually have what are normally feminine endings (-a, -я), and they decline thus, but the other words around them that decline as per the noun decline in the masculine (if I recall correctly). That's slightly different, I think, but it shows there are echoes.

[Kreuzberger]

What a fucking shot. If anything ushers out the old guard, it's the "on our own terms" generation.

It's only a matter of time...

[The Red Arrow]