Is it Tsar or Czar?
If you don't know anything about English politics, the phrase Prime Minister doesn't make a lot of sense. If you look up the two independent words in a thesaurus, you could think that the phrase means the same as head pastor. Or if you were trying to translate the phrase you might think that the Prime Minister is like the Pope in Roman Catholicism or the Patriarch in Russian Orthodoxy. The closest English parallel to the Pope or Patriarch is the Anglican Church, so you could be forgiven for guessing that the Prime Minister is the head of the Anglican Church. You’d be wrong, but it’s understandable. The head of the Anglican Church is the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Prime Minister means something more like a president than it means anything pastoral. The phrase exists in it's strange form because of its history. In the Biblical book of Romans, Paul writes, “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God.” Following this line of thought, all governance is appointed by God, and in a sense they are also ministers of God. Thus, the Prime Minister is the head of the government.
This history is critical when translating Prime Minister. It shouldn't be literally translated. Rather, it needs the history and context to inform the translation. Similarly, the Russian word ‘Czar’ is weird to translate into English. You've probably seen Czar spelled both as ‘Tsar’ and ‘Czar’. The Russian word is spelled царь, and ‘ц’ doesn't have an easy one to one correspondence between English and Russian. The normal way you're instructed to pronounce the word is to say 'ts', and that’s the typical transliteration (transformation from one alphabet to another). The normal spelling for Czar is hard to determine in English. Both Google and Wikipedia prefer Tsar, while there are a lot of Czar is the American executive branch (think drug czars, or terrorism czars). My preferred usage is Czar because of the history of the word.
Moscow is considered by some (mostly Russians from 1600-1800s and probably now by Putin) as the third seat of the Christian Church. The first is Rome, the second is Constantinople, and the third is Moscow. It's a very Orthodox centric view of Christianity (they do tend to see themselves as the one true Church). Moscow and Russia as a whole, become the spiritual and political inheritors of the Roman Empire. And as inheritors of the Roman legacy, they adopted the name царь for their leaders from the Latin Caesar (as the Germans did with Kaiser). So, to be more consistent with the root of the work in Caesar, the English spelling Czar makes more sense. ‘Cz’ isn’t unheard of for translating ‘ц’, such as цирк (czirk) which is the Russian work for circus. And for a long time, Czar was the only spelling of царь in English. But suddenly in the 1890s, Tsar took over as the dominant spelling of Czar.
The graph above plots the usage of the spelling ‘Tsar’ in red and ‘Czar’ in blue over the years 1850-2000. Until around 1915, Czar is used more than Tsar. Tsar begins to really pick up steam in the late 1870s. Why does this change happen when it does?
If you remember from the article on anglicizing Leo Tolstoy, the most prominent and influential translator of Russian literature is Constance Garnett. She translated over 70 Russian books into English, and exclusively uses Tsar in her translations. She's probably the reason that the spelling Tsar comes to dominate English usage. However, her first translation is published in 1894, after the initial surge in the usage of Tsar. Probably the first repeated usage of Tsar is by Eugene Schuyler, an American Ambassador and the first translator of Ivan Turgenev and Leo Tolstoy into English (Turgenev was one of the first Russian authors to crossover into the West, he spent most of his time in France, and was friends with Gustave Flaubert). In his 1884 book Peter the Great, Schuyler uses both Tsar and Czar, but fascinatingly, he uses Czar only when he’s quoting older sources and Tsar in his own writing. Apparently, Schuyler willfully decided that past translations were uniformly wrong in using Czar over Tsar, and took it upon himself to correct such errors. And probably following in Schuyler’s footsteps, Garnett also used Tsar, and it came to dominate in English usage.
I’m not sure why Schuyler uses Tsar instead of what he clearly knows is the established spelling of Czar. Czar seems to make more sense given that Czar is meant to be a continuation of the Roman line of Caesars, and I’d be surprised if Schuyler didn’t know the history of the word. Perhaps like Noah Webster, he simply wanted to enforce consistency is spelling. Whatever the reason, Eugene Schuyler, like Czar Peter the Great and Julius Caesar, left his indelible mark on history when he spelled царь with a ‘ts’ instead of a ‘cz’.
