Comment by rdudek
3 years ago
Awesome! I had to look the word "voivodship" up. I am Polish, so I knew what województwo meant. But I didn't know there was an English equivalent of that word other than governing state. An interesting read on Wikipedia:
I think the best shot a modern Anglophone has at knowing the word is that it was used in Dracula for the title of Vlad the Impaler. [Voivode, that is, not voivodeship. But if you know the title voivode, the meaning of voivodeship is obvious.]
It is not immediately obvious why the word would have been adopted into English in more or less the native form as opposed to being translated into an equivalent title, the way we talk about German "dukes" and "duchies".
Knowing polish, russian, lithuanian and bits of other related languages, I find it interesting how the word directly assumes military leadership, the medieval feudal kind of way. It can be roughly translated as "led by a voivoda", with "voivoda" here meaning "military leader".
Probably comes from the original Commonwealth times..?