It’s a Russianized form of jawhar, which is the Arabicized form of the original Persian word, gawhar, which means ‘jewel’ or ‘essence’. It’s used as a name for either boys or girls; the Persian language has no grammatical gender at all.
It derives from Middle Persian gōhr, from Old Persian gauθra or gavaθra, possibly from a root gav- meaning ‘increase’. When the word gawhar was borrowed from Persian into Arabic, because Arabic doesn’t have the /g/ consonant, they substituted j. Further, Russian doesn’t have the /h/ sound, so they substituted kh. Russian also doesn’t have a single letter for “j,” so they spell it with a combination of two Cyrillic letters: “dzh” (the “zh” is a single letter in Cyrillic). Meanwhile, the diphthong aw coalesced into the vowel /o/, which is how it’s pronounced in modern Persian spoken in Tehran. All these adaptations across languages make the original etymon pretty well unrecognizable any more.
There’s a photo here of Dzhokhar climbing out of the boat under his own power. I had assumed he was already shot in the neck and in critical condition by this point, but obviously not.
I wonder what can be done if there’s evidence that the older brother did get training in Russia? Would the Russians be asked to investigate?
Thats such a volatile region. Russia has battled the chechnyan rebels since the 1990’s. We sure don’t need to kick over that anthill. I hope theres no direct connection to them.
The Russian security service was already reported to be heavily, one might say enthusiastically, involved in identifying the Tsarnaevs. No need to ask them; they’re certainly working their side already.
Newest news reports on Boston.com are suggesting that Tamerland was captured mostly intact and was handcuffed, pinned under several officers, when Dzhokhar’s car came barreling towards him; the officers got out of the way, but Tamerland couldn’t, and he was dragged behind the SUV for some distance, suffering fatal wounds in the process.
I hear what you’re saying, and I think it’s too bad he didn’t kill himself, too, but maybe having to live with the realization that he killed his own brother might just drive home to him what a worthless piece of amphibian shit he really is.
The police are speculating that the brothers had a mutual suicide pact and that Tamerlan killed his brother knowing his brother would prefer to die rather than be captured.
I wasn’t really thinking of the Canadians or the Dutch, I think in most countries in the world Dzokhar would have been tortured to death by now. Think China or Cuba or the place they came from.
Highly doubtful, considering that Freedom House [pdf, at p. 4] ranks 90 of the world’s countries as Free, and 58 as Partly Free; only 47 are ranked as Not Free. That strongly suggests that in a majority of the countries of the world, someone accused of these types of crimes would receive some sort of trial and due process.
Respect for the rule of law and democratic institutions has been steadily increasing world-wide.