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A Romanian word attested in the X^th century: cuvânt "Word, Council, Speech"

(Abstract)

Analysing the gloss κομέ ντον quoted by Leon Diakonos in his "Histories" ”(XI, 7) as a "russian" synonym of the greek βουλή “council, gathering”, the author notices, with good reasons, that such a word is not to be found in any slavic language but, on the contrary, it corresponds perfectly to the latin conventus with the same meaning. Supposing that we have to deal here with an inadvertence owing either to the greek historian himself or to the later copysts, he considers that this term might belong to the roumanian language and that it should be an approximate greek transcription of *couentu, a reconstructed stage in the evolution of the latin conventus towards the modern roumanian cuvânt “word, speech, assembly”.