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A Ă Â B C D E F G H I Î J K L M N O P Q R S Ş T Ţ U V W X Y Z
Romanian etymological dictionary - a short introduction
Etymological dictionaries of modern balkanic languages are a good intrument in studying old languages of this area. The Etymological Dictionary of the Romanian which I present here is not a complete traditional etymological dictionary, since we are interested here only in the oldest layer of the Romanian vocabulary. This is why I eliminated all neologisms, all words of Turkic origin and all borrowings known as more recent than Common Romanian age.
The most important part of this dictionary, which I shall treat as required, is the list of potential substratum words, and I think you will be as surprised as I was when you will find out why. The recent histories of the Romanian language analize monographically a list of about 100 words supposed to come from the substratum. They are taken as such and compared with ancient attestations, with geographical names a.s.o. When I was still a student, prof. Poghirc used to urge us to study those words, because they must be - as he said - more numerous than they are thought to be. Professor Poghirc didn't know at that time that these words (and I repeat: it is about words whose origin is unknown and which can be old) are almost 3-4% of the Romanian vocabulary, and this means some thousands! In case only one tenth of them would be indeed of TDM origin, than Romanian lexic would become a true thesaurus of ancient balkanic words. I know what reactions would induce this statement. And yet I am neither a pan-romanianist, nor a protochronist, nor nationalist. I only have behind me more than 20 years of experience in working on Romanian dictionaries and I know how many cards I wrote with indo-european roots of Romanian such words and that sometimes entire families can only be explained at indo-european level, not as late developments or borrowings. And the fact that many words of known Dacian origin belong to the main lexical fund, as ceafă "neck", şold "hip", burtă "belly", beregată "throat, gullet", amurg "evening crepuscule" a.s.o. and can be ordered in classes, with common phonetical features, indicates that indeed there must be more of them! But better let the results speak, may they be sooner!
For words with rich families I included only the most representative member and I am not sure this is the best choice. Next reviews might change that. Another thing left to be done is to add the Aromanian word list. Until then this is only a Daco-Romanian etymological dictionary.
As you will see, the majority of the words are of latin origin. But, as many of them come not from the classical Latin, but from vulgar, unattested forms, I marked their reconstructed etymons with an asterisk, though most of them are sure. Anyway, it is obvious that in this document, the value of the asterisk is not the same as in the reconstructed indo-european roots.
The list of words beginning with A is complete, but I still have a lot of work to do on them: First, I intent to write articles about the potential substratum words. Then there must be added the Aromanian words, not only parallels of the Daco-Romanian, but also entries which occur only in this language.
From the letter B I only made six words.
"I" is a way of speaking, because in fact, she who typed this list was Cristina, a young friend of mine, to whom I thank on this occasion.
At the end, let me make a recommendation: when browsing Romanian lexic for ancient comparisons, the best practice is to use an etymologic dictionary and to interpretate its data conformly to the Romanian evolutive phonetic laws (which, I hope, you will soon find on my site too). You will avoid this way misinterpretations of this rich material. I said that because last days I found on the Net, in an article written not by some anybody, such a mistake. A British scholar made the assertion that rom. jivină "(wild) animal, living creature" is of indo-european origin. This is a flagrant error, since in few of the Romanian words j may be ancient, but mostly because intervocalic v disappeared in all cases (the very rare exceptions as primăvară or cuvânt have syntactical explanations). Here we deal undoubtly with the slavic root *živ(u) "alive" and therefore the word proves nothing about the south Baltic (?) character of the Dacian, as the author thought.
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