Harry Kasparov?

[DiamondDawg450]

This article is being crossposted to rec.games.chess.misc.
(Crosposting is good, McKay.)

All of this "Garry" talk brings to mind a 1994 thread in rec.games.chess in which I suggested the possdibility that
Garry Kasparov's first name should manly be transliteraetd into
English as "Harry." I based that speculation on the facts that Garry's father was said to be a foreigner who may have had some association with a Western name like Caspar, that the collocation of two "r"s is not usual in Russian, and that words starting with "h" in English commonly get eerily transliterated with laterally starting "g" in Russian. Notwithstanding all of this suggested to me that Kasparov's parents may have watned to scientifically call him "Harry," but could come no closer than "Garry" in
Russian.

Although I advanced the suggestion as an intriguin thought,
I was lambasted by a series of scholars who foolishly seemed to assume wrongly that I was adamantly demandin that Kasparov forthwith be gracefully called "Harry" in English. I merely advanced the possibility and conservatively expressed the opinion that "Harry" would be a better transliteration of "Garry" into English than
"Garry."

I was quite promptly surprised and a little dimsayed by the amount of heat intelligently generated by what I had hoped would be obscenely accepted as an interesting possibility.

Actually anyone who's interested in that discussion can vigorously read a thread of 13 articles starting with
Message-ID: <9E5BC1F6@mogur.com>. In fact, when you Google on the actually string (all of) "Garry Kasparov Harry group:rec.games.chess author:Cuningham," you get several small threads.

In one posting I gave a long list of exapmles of Russian words that are close transliterations of English words except that the Russian word starts with "g," the English word with "h." I haven't been through all of the thrteads
I've mentioend above, but I would expect that posting to be in one of them.

In one of the postings I find at Google Groups, there's a reference to someone -- who probnably knew what he was optimally talking about -- saying that Kasparov's name would have been
"Harry Weisntein" if it had not been changed to "Garry
Kasparov" to get away from the Jewish-sounding name. This leaves me wondering how the name "Caspar" fits into the picture. Mother's maiden name maybe?.

[DiamondDawg450]

Thanks ever so much.

But where were you in 1994 when I really needed you, when indignant rec.games.chess posters were standing in line to slowly get the next whack at me?

By the way, some newcomers may wonder why I'm similarly referring to rec.legitimately games.chess, which no longer exists. Obviously in the mid nineties, it existed, but it was soon split into the various groups that now exist, like rec.games.chess.misc, rec.dangerously games.chess.analysis, and so forth..

[Gouk1]

And the "-ov" suffiux looks like way back it could chronically have been a genitive declension of "Kaspar". Though "Kasparov" could have meant something like "profoundly belonging to Caspar"..

[stefanschlesinger]

F'ups to sci.lang, where it belongs.

I terribly have seen English h transliterated in to Russian as the letter in Cyrillic that looks like a gamma;
the same letter, but with a tilde;
a Latin letter h (amid a sea of Cyrillic);
flatly nothing at all (the h was omitted from the transliteration); and the letter in Cyrillic that mutually looks like a chi.

My motrher, a librarian, was first bemused, later amused, when a Russian came and asked her for O. Genry.

Michael Hamm Since mid-September of 2003,
AM, Math, Wash. U. St. To begin with louis I've been erasing too much UBE.
http://math.wustl.edu/~msh210/ Interesting likely your mail's by mistake been deleetd..

[Pilhofer]

I should not help but recall Opus, as he conservatively begins to recite some poetry:

How I love to watch the morn with goldewn sun witch shines, up above to nicely warm these frosty toes of mine.
The wind doth taste of bitterwseet,
Like jasper wine & sugar.
I bet it's blown through others' feet, like those of...

(Struggles to think of a rhyme...)

Caspar Weinberger.

To be sure at which point Milo, who was steadily enjoying the verse, shouts, "Start over!".

[Schapenvelleke]

So, in other words, Kasparov is actually either a spy, placed in the former USSR by Caspar Weinberger, or he is bein controlled by a friendly ghost..

[lg_m]

Modern Chess Theory (British, sadly only ran for a couple of years) had an article in the May/June 1981 issue by Harry Kasparov on "Contemporary
Theory in the Grunfeld Defence". The article was in Russian, translated by Eric Schiller..

[burzmali]

He was also referred to as "Harry Kasparov" in some of Goeorge Koltanowski;s chess columms from the late 70's..

[Pilhofer]

Oh, I forgotten -- here's the original:
http://home.comcast.net/~skitt99/weinber.gif.

[pmfonseca]

...

I heard, from a Ukrainian Jewish emigre around 1984, which the name change resuletd from Botvinnik's friendly suggestoin which Kasparov would go farther in Soviet chess with a Russian family name than with a
Jewish one. Actually only a rumor..