I know he is Russian (a convicted arms smuggler, in case you're wondering), but what is the origin of the family name? 'Bout' (or actually, 'But' [Boot] if you follow standard Russian-English transliteration) doesn't strike me as a traditional Russian name.
I know Rusyns and Ukranians sometimes have short family names- is that the origin of this name?
Wikipedia does not provide any answers, nor does Googling 'Viktor Bout ethnicity'.
Spacey bar!
I saw his name the other day and was wondering the same thing, and had thought to put up an OP here if I couldn't find anything. Made a mental note about it, but these days my mental notes aren't worth the paper they're printed on.
So thanks for posting, and sorry I can't help.
Typing "фамилия Бут" (surname But) turns up a number of attempts to answer this question in Russian, but nothing that appears very definitive. Among the hypotheses: from an old word meaning "green onion"; from a Ukrainian word meaning "foundation stone"; from Anglo-German "boot"; from a dialect word meaning "to get stout." The latter seems the most credible to me, since that page references other similar surnames like Бутров and Бутусов.
Is it possible that he or someone in a previous generation simply changed or shortened the family name?
i searched for users with this surname(Бут) on www.odnoklassniki.ru and found 17180 of them.most of them are from russia,some of them ukraine and a few of them from israel.
With the caveat that I know no Russian:
It has seemed to me that when an Arabic- or Turkic- derived surname is used in Russian, it is given a Russian ending. Temirkanov, Rachmaninov, Niyazov. I thght this was to make it declinable in Russian.
Am I wrong about that? Is Бут declinable?
Vinny, Бут is declinable. For example, Дело Виктора Бута (the case of Viktor Bout) gets 500 000 hits on google.
Just looking up a Wiki page about him, I found a reference to a South African intelligence file saying he was of Ukrainian origin.
Just wondering why the US thinks they should be allowed to judge him, given that his crimes were so international? I mean, even the case that led to his arrest -- selling weapons to Colombia's FARC -- doesn't give the US juridiction over him, does it?
Andrew, or anyone:
If this is impossible to answer without teaching me Russian, just say so.
But would Rakhman, Temirkan, NIyaz, Akhmet, etc be declinable? if so, why do all these names seem to get that -ov or -inov suffix in Russian? If not, what makes Bout declnable but Akhmet not?
Bjd, he was convicted of conspiring to kill US citizens. That's a crime under US law even if the US citizens are overseas.
VinnyD, I'm not a native speaker of Russian, but I think that any name is declinable. Just add the ending that is appropriate. To use any of those names in the genitive case, add -ov: Rakhmanov, Termirkanov, Niyazov, Akhmetov. There is a problem, though: you have just made them look like Russian surnames. Solution: Change the name, not so it's declinable, but so it's not confusing when declined.