gulag?

[mkenuk]

A bit surprised to see gulag included as a common word (in yesterday's tautology 7-by many), not least because I'd always seen it capitalized.

Apparently the word is a Russian acronym meaning 'Chief Administration for Collective Labo(u)r Camps' 
Certainly sounds as though it should   be capitalized



 

[rogue_mother]

Gulag (capitalized here only because it it the first word of the sentence) has appeared several times in the thirteen years that I have been playing Chihuahua. It never occurred to me that it might be capitalized at all, except as part of the title The Gulag Archipelago, the famous work by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. I did a word search on gulag in the Washington Post (our local newspaper), the results of which showed gulag overwhelmingly not capitalized. Most capitalized references were either to Solzhenitsyn's book or to the video game "Call of Duty: Warzone". Otherwise there are few (but not zero) occurrences where Gulag is written rather than gulag. Granted it's only one source, but I believe it is representative. There were five hundred ninety-nine articles dating from 1992 to the present day.

[mkenuk]

That's not what the Google Ngram Viewer says, however.
It consistently shows Gulag (with a capital) to be more common than gulag (no capital) in both British and American English.

Wikipedia has this in its page on Gulag:
  'Although the term Gulag originally referred to a government agency, in English and many other languages the acronym acquired the qualities of a common noun, denoting the Soviet system of prison-based, unfree labor'.

However in both this article and in its article on Solzhenitsyn's 'The Gulag Archipelago'  the word is used either in its capitalized form (Gulag) or in its fully-capitalized form (GULAG) throughout .

[Tom44]

There is such a thing as a gulag.  No reason for it to be rejected.

[mkenuk]

I'm not saying the word should be rejected, simply that, as Gulag is more common than gulag (the evidence for this is on Google Ngram Viewer) its status should be at best 'uncommon'.

It would appear that the word gulag has, for some users, become a countable noun meaning 'forced labour camp' in which case it would be written in lower-case; I'm still not convinced, however, that the word should be common, especially as most of these horrific places have, hopefully, ceased to exist,

[Jacki]

Well whether something exists anymore is not a reason for it to be a rare word.

[Scouser1952]

Mike,
It appears that China has built many such establishments in which to re-educate the Uighurs.
Though they do not name them as gulags.

Tony

[rogue_mother]

I'm not saying the word should be rejected, simply that, as Gulag is more common than gulag (the evidence for this is on Google Ngram Viewer) its status should be at best 'uncommon'.

It would appear that the word gulag has, for some users, become a countable noun meaning 'forced labour camp' in which case it would be written in lower-case; I'm still not convinced, however, that the word should be common, especially as most of these horrific places have, hopefully, ceased to exist,

If gulag was universally, or near universally capitalized, perhaps it wouldn't even be considered for inclusion in the Chihuahua lexicon. Although the Google ngram viewer shows that it is more frequently capitalized, the large proportion of uncapitalized occurrences at least indicates the propriety of inclusion. The Google ngram viewer is not the whole story, of course, since it only covers books. I previously cited my search of the available online Washington Post archives, which showed an overwhelming occurrence of the uncapitalized version. Searches of the Corpus of Contemporary American English had similar results, with 711 hits. The British National Corpus, available at Brigham Young University, shows an overwhelming slant toward the capitalized version, with 27 hits. The Corpus of Canadian English (Strathy), also available at Brigham Young University, shows a much more even mix, with gulag/Gulag occurring 26 times.

 It is no wonder that the Wikipedia article Mike referred to has universal capitalization, since it deals specifically with the historical Soviet forced labor camp system. The dictionary links provided on the Chihuahua main page, including Wiktionary, plus one that used to be there but no longer is (thefreedictionary.com), all show the uncapitalized version, with some also indicating that it can be capitalized.  They all point to the increasing use of gulag as a concept rather than a historical entity.

To me, the question of whether gulag should be classified as common or less common hinges on whether or not reasonably well read speakers of English would know the word.