Talk:Commissar

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Commissar is within the scope of the Russian History WikiProject, a collaborative effort to improve Wikipedia's coverage of Russian History. If you would like to participate, you can visit the project page, where you can join the project and see a list of open tasks.

[edit] Prior Military Use

Can someone provide a reference regarding the Russian usage's derivation from the French military position? Dictionaries I've checked give an etymology based on a German term, Kommissar, meaning "deputy". That's based on the medieval Latin "commissarius", from the Latin "commissus", or "entrusted". Per Etymonline.com, the term dates to 1362 as an ecclesiastic position, "one to whom special duty is entrusted by a higher power"; there's a military usage dating to 1489 which seems to indicate someone with a quartermaster function. I have no information on when the usage might have changed, and which military organizations used it. -- Epimetreus 15:23, 28 March 2006 (UTC)