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Comment by huhtenberg | Hacker News Reader

In brief -

There's a very large park in Moscow called Лосиный остров ("Moose Island"), more of a forest really. On Sep 21st he went out for a walk in this park and around midnight called his relatives and told them he got lost. They called the police and the emergency services. Tried calling him back as well, but he didn't answer. On Sep 23rd his body was spotted from a helicopter that was involved in a search and it was ID'd by the relatives.

The rest of the article is fluff.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Losiny_Ostrov_National_Park

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Лосиный means elk?

Moose is американский лось

I've been working on a Russian language app. It's kind of important that I understand the nuances.

I don't know Russian, but if this is any similar to Polish, then Лосиный will be an adjective form of the noun лось. американский just means "American".

There's no real differentiation between moose and elk in Russian, since elk is the only one of the two indigenous to Russia and moose is a North American thing, so there's no real need to "split hairs" so to speak if you're talking to someone who grew up in the Russian language. They'll assume you're talking about elk.

You could theoretically call both лось and have it sound ok to a Russian speaker. It's not something you'd pick up from the language as much as from knowing Russian culture/flora/fauna.

I've got several iOS language apps so I need to "split hairs". http://appstore.com/h4labs. Even getting the nouns right in many languages was harder than I thought it would be.

In that case, it sounds like you should probably hire a native Russian (and Spanish, etc.) speaker to vet your dictionary.

Each translation was done and verified by at least two native speakers.

Every Spanish speaking country has linguistic differences, Russia's so huge maybe they do too?

"American Elk Island" probably wouldn't fly too well as a place name, in any case.

It is a naming confusion (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elk#Naming_and_etymology). Russian word "лось" refers to what North Americans call "moose" and in British call "elk" (Alces alces species). The animals of species "Cervus Canadensis", which in North America is called "elk" is called "Вапити" in Russian (i.e. "wapiti"). Russians never use "Американский лось" to name an animal, because it is the same species in North America and Eurasia.

> called "Вапити" in Russian

I'm a native speaker and I've never even heard this word before. I'd use "олень", but I'm no biologist. They all are either олень or лось to me :)

Well, wapiti _is_ a species of deer, but it is called that to distinguish it from European species of red deer (Cervus Elaphus - благородный олень) which is what Russians usually mean by "deer".

Лось is either. "Aмериканский лось" is something that you may hear on Animal Planet in a show about elks and moose.

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