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Comment by shpx | Hacker News Reader

A woman should be called a Tsaritsa (Царица). A Czar/Tsar is a man.

Wouldn't it be "Tsarina" when Anglicized?

For that matter, why does the gender need to be baked into a title unrelated to gender? We don't have separate occupational titles for female engineers, taxi drivers, or astronauts, so why for tsars? Not trying to push any agendas here, just posing a question.

FYI: You borrow word from a language that has gender information baked in almost every word - that is why there is separate word. Ignoring this is pushing an agenda - conscious or not.

Both ways are mentioned on Wikipedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsarina but Tsarina is clearly more common https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=Tsarina,Ts.... Mine's true to the original, it's the same letter that's Anglicised as "ts" in the beginning, Ц.

English also has "Empress" ("императрица" is what they were called formally) and it would be derogatory to call her King Elizabeth.

I would assume it’s because the word has been taken from a gendered language, where most words have gender baked in.

Any idea why powerful bureaucrats are called Czars? Why not Dukes, for example? Drug Duke..

Czar meas emperor, so the highest authority. Not sure why czar and not emperor though.

It comes, via a long path that includes “kaiser”, from Caesar. One of the early Ivans started using it, it stuck, and even when they tried changing to imperator people kept using tsar/czar. In English it seems to be used informally to describe the person in charge even if the are more of a figurehead than a locus of actual authority.

czar has an connotation of tyranny while emperor has varying levels of control. Contemporary to russian czar we have the much less powerful hre emperor and the japanese emperor controlled by the shogun.

Maybe to skew the interpretation? Maybe to plant a seed of doubt on how pernitious their role is?

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