Background of an 'Alian Romanov'

[ashen_key]

Hey guys! Long time lurker, first time poster. If I get anything wrong, sorry!

SETTING: Turn of the century Russian Empire
SEARCH TERMS: Alian name meaning ; Alian name origin ; Alian Russian name ; Alian Jewish ; Alianovna [which brought me back to the character I'm trying to research FOR, oops] ; variations of all of the above

Comments

[leo_nafigator]

From the name and place Alian Romanov may belong to some smaller nationalities behind the Volga river. They are usually muslim and may be both of european/caucasian race (like tatar) or asiatic/mongolian (like bashkir). The "russian" name "Romanov" should not confuse you. Family names were not common for that nationals and adopted in the late 19th century. As a family name were taken father's name, name of his sovereign of birth place. The most common basic for family name was name of the oldest known family ancestor (they were obliged to know all of them at least until the 5. generation backwards.

Another confusion may occur from the similarity with the name of the last russian emperors. Nice version for the fiction, but in the reality they all were killed.

[ashen_key]

Yeah, I figured that Natasha had no actual ties to the imperial family, otherwise....yeah, not looking good for their survival there. Would you find it semi-plausible that her father's family adopted the surname anyway? (For....whatever reasons, although I've found other Russian people who have that surname, so it doesn't seeeeem to be only House Romanov. But I could be mistaken!)

And thank you for answering!

[leo_nafigator]

Well, there are some ways. Remember that question about the surname could sound like "who's are You?" in old Russia

[ashen_key]

Oh thank you! I was mentally thinking that those would be believable ways, I just wanted to check before I solidified.

You've been really helpful :D

[leo_nafigator]

As for the family name - there are many diminuitive forms of names in Russia often substituting i's for y's and vice versa. With that in mind, there is actually a human origins world heritage site nown as Sikachi-Alyan which is located in the very far east of Russia on the bank of the Amur river approximately 75 km north of Khabarovsk. I wonder if its possible that naming her family name was taken from a shortening of this place, and therefore possibly Russian?

As it is her patrynomic name based on her fathers name of Alian, is a jewish name. With the alternate spelling of Alyan, it becomes a common islamic first name. Or perhaps it was just a mistranslation (or changed to be more auditorily pleasing to the english speakers ear) of Ulyan which albeit a bit outdated now would have been popular in the early 19th century when she was born in the comics (although those details arent extremely clear in canon)

Maybe the writers were doing a word play off of the english word alias as she is a spy?

[leo_nafigator]

Well, it's hard to discuss russian spelling using englisch transliteration because of it's completely different phonetic
system.

We should not forget, Russia consists not only from russians, there are somewhere between 200 and 2.000 ethnical groups, depending on what we take as a term for it.

Sikachi-Alyan is too far away from Stalingrad where she was born to have anything in common. 8.000 km. = 5.000 miles! = NY - LA and back! Twice the USA! About impossible for normal migration in early 20th Century. And - there are some 100 of ethnicities and quite a lot of languages between.
I think, this are omonims: same sound but nothing in common.