alex_lycos wrote:
>In this space, I mean in Thracian space the name "Albo" for cities is
>very good conserved. The new comers, the Slavs and Magyars preserved
>in their languages the old meaning of "white".(See Belgrad/Beograd),
>Gyula Ferehvar (upps, I am not sure if this is the right name in
>Hungarian for Alba Iulia)
Gyulafehérvár
>Cetatea Alba It seems that the adjective "white" for cities in
>Balkans was pretty usual,
Or rather that those "newcomers" brought along their custom
to call - esp. in their Turkic idioms - independent places/regions
(and/or of noble clans) as "white" ("ak") and dependent ones as
"black" ("kara"). Hence B&lgrad=Gyulafehérvár=Alba Iulia (the
old capital of Transylvania, the see of the "gyula" or "djilas"
1000 years ago, that later became the see of the "vayvode" of
Transilvania); Akkerman=Cetatea Alba=Bielgorod Dnestrovski
(see the river of Dnestr & the Black Sea); Beograd=Nándorfehér-
vár=Beograd (Belgrade); Székesfehérvár=Stuhlweissenburg
(an
old capital of Hungary).
BTW: the ethnonym Albocensi in Ptolemy, III, 8, 3, from a locality
called Alboca. It is only a hypothesis that the root of the
toponym and of the ethnonym was a reflex of IE *albho-. Cf.
Ae. Walde/J. Pokorny, Vergleichendes Woerterbuch der i.-g.
Sprachen, Berlin, 1927-38 -> I, pp. 92-94 / and Willi Tomaschek,
Die alten Thraker. Eine ethnol. Untersuchung, 1893-94 -> II,
2, p. 55.
Also an hypothesis is that Alburnus Maior might have had the same
root. CIL, III, pp. 924-25, 933, 944-49, 954. Around Alburnus
Maior (in the mountains in Western Transylvania), the Romans
exploited gold. Today, the locality is called Rosia Montana
/'ro$ia mon'tan&/, and a joint-venture has a big Au, Ag etc.
project (cf.
http://www.gabrielresources.com/s/NewsReleases.asp)
that seems to jeopardize some archeologic sites...
So, the... evidence that those anonymous ancient Albocensi were
decisive for the adjective "alb-" being included into the
vocabulary of the Romanian language is quite slim. I'd rather
accept what's anyway striking to anybody: alb < Lat. albus,
alba, album. (How about its opposite... negru & neagra? Does,
say, "poarta neagra" sound/look like "substrate" words or
rather like Romance ones? :-)
George