Re: just a story

From: m_iacomi
Message: 15660
Date: 2002-09-21

--- In cybalist@..., alexmoeller@... wrote:

> One hundert years ago ( more or less),

More.

> the gouvernment of
> Romania decided to give to every person a card of identity
> like in every civilizated state. There, they found out, is was
> a big problem with a lot of citisiens . Because they have had
> not a "family name". Because there was "a must" to have a
> family name, the people gave themselfs family names from the
> name of their parents. So, the son of Petre became "Ofpetre"
> , the son of Maria became "Ofmaria".

No. In fact, the patronymics were simply formed by adding the
suffix -escu or -eanu to the name or occupation of the father.
For instance, one of my ancestors was a priest, "popa Avram",
and some of his children were given the name "Popescu" and
others were called "Avramescu", even being natural brothers
and sisters. This explains why most Romanian names end with
-escu (or, to a lesser extent, -ean(u)).
The prefix A- (or Alu- < A(l) lui -- "of") was used mainly for
creating ad-hoc last names for the offspring of single women
(of course, "pater semper incertus est"...), added basically to
their first name. Romanians being generally traditional :-),
these cases were quite rare and the names of the type "Aanei",
"Aelenei", "Ailincai" are a small percent. For feminine names
(of the mothers), "Alu-" should normally not be used.
Even smaller is the proportion of patronymics formed by adding
Alu- to masculine names as "Petre" or "Marin". It just sounds bad
in Romanian and only very rare cases of this type exist actually;
I never met someone whose name begins with "Alu-", maybe one can
find some by consulting the phonebook... :-)
The first method was *overwhelmigly* preferred.

> Maybe you dear cybalisters, will ask yourself why I considered
> necesary to tell you this story...hmmm.. what can I say...It
> is just that I re-seen my list with thracian names and I allow
> myself to give you now, just a few examples from it:
> Aulubeista, Aulucentus, Auluporis, Auluzenis, Aulusanus, etc.
> The people who studied the thracians, they say this "aulu" is
> a part , a prefix, and it is to find in composite names.."
> This is what say the people who studied the thracians name,
> and they found a PIE radical for "aulu" , the radical beeing
> *au-l = to like, to love....
>
> I am far away from these people, I did not studied the
> thracians like they did.. I just remembered the story with the
> family name, and I just seen the similarity of this way " to
> make names"... There are maybe so much coincidences between
> sky and earth............., isn't it?

There is just a coincidence. Both parts from "al lui" come from
Latin, 'ad + illo' > 'al' and 'illui' > 'lui', as well as in
French, Italian and Occitan. The demonstrative 'illui' is even a
late vernacular Latin form which could not be related even in
dreams with any Thracian suffix.

Cheers,
Marius Iacomi