The surname Bondarenko is not so rare. In the old days, it was most common in Ukrainian lands and in the Kuban. However, in the last century, the territorial boundaries of surnames have blurred; the ability to move freely around the world has mixed peoples. Now the Bondarenko family can be found in any corner of our country and even abroad. What is the origin of this ancient surname?
History tour
Any surname is a kind of generic name, reflecting the activities of the family or some feature that the ancestor became famous for. In ancient times, a man, in addition to his own name, always had a nickname, by which people immediately understood what to expect from a new acquaintance. If the family owned some kind of craft, then all its members, regardless of their own name, were often called precisely by it.
The history of the name of Bondarenko is associated with a very respected profession in the old days - a cask thing. A cooper in Russia was called a master making wedding dishes.
East Ukrainian roots
A lot of barrels, tubs, and tubs were required in the peasant economy. So the business of the cooper and his sons has always been found. The master himself was usually called simply by profession. But the students and apprentices, and after and just the descendants, they called out with a changed word, to which was added a syllable indicating affinity. Depending on the dialect, this suffix sounded differently:
- In central Russia, s, s and s (for example, Bondarev).
- In the north of Ukraine, Chuk.
- In the lands that came under Polish rule, surnames ended in -sky (Zalessky, Kowalski, Bondarsky, etc.).
- In the former territories of the Pereyaslavl and Chernihiv principalities, the suffix -enko was used as an indication of affinity. Accordingly, the origin of the name Bondarenko is Eastern Ukrainian.
Surname Nationality
In the modern world there are no “pure” languages. Each has a sea of borrowings, many of which have entered everyday speech for so long that they are no longer perceived as foreign. Such words are no longer used in their original meaning, but are rooted in other terms. It happened with the name of Bondarenko. Its origin and significance are rooted in such deep layers of history, where Russia did not even exist in modern borders. Therefore, an attempt to understand the etymology of the word turns into a real linguistic study.
It would seem that everything is clear with the origin of the name Bondarenko. But the question arises: why precisely a “cooper”, if according to the rules of the Slavic languages it would be more correct to call such a master a “barrel maker”? By the way, such a profession did exist in Russia, but its emergence, or rather, isolation, dates back to a much later period. Unlike the barrel maker, the cooper made not only barrels, but also other wooden utensils with hoops or braid.
This is where the tip is hiding. In German, there is the word binden, meaning "knit." Accordingly, a binder is a person knitting something. The same root can be seen in the name of the fishing net - “bindyuga”. So a cooper is a master who makes wicker or hoop-tied dishes. For centuries, the ancient Slavs lived next to the Germanic peoples, and many tribes, such as the Bodrichs, Lutichs and Prussians, fell under the power of their western neighbors and were gradually “Germanized”. It is in these lands, as some researchers believe, the word "cooper" appeared.
In the wake of an ancient language
It turns out that the origin of the name Bondarenko is German? Not so simple! As has long been proved by linguists, all languages of the Indo-European group, including Russian, English, French, German and others, have a common root. All of them are descended from Sanskrit and are related. In the 60s, the famous Indian linguist Durga Prasadu Shastri visited the Soviet Union.
He was shocked that he understood most of the words (more precisely, all originally Russian, not borrowed words) without translation. He claimed that the Russians speak an archaic and somewhat distorted version of Sanskrit.
If I were asked which two languages of the world are most similar to each other, I would answer without any hesitation: Russian and Sanskrit. And not because some words in both languages are similar, as is the case with many languages belonging to the same family. For example, common words can be found in Latin, German, Sanskrit, Persian and Russian languages belonging to the Indo-European group. What is surprising is that in our two languages the structure of the word, style, syntax and grammar rules are similar.
Thus, we can say that the origin of the name Bondarenko is Indo-European. And the age of this surname is calculated not for centuries, as was commonly believed, but for millennia.
