>I don't know if there are any dialectal forms in
>Romanian different from the literary word. Marius?
>George?
<vampir> seems to be a quite recent (150-200 y)
neologism; via French & German, says the Romanian
dictionary. OTOH, I suppose there's no similar
fantastic character in the Romanian folklore, and
having a name similar to <vampir>.
>"Nosferatu" is Bram Stoker's invention, perhaps a
>garbled version of a genuine Romanian word (e.g.
><nesuferitul> 'the unbearable'?). Again, our
>Romanian friends are better qualified to judge.
I don't know. <nesuferitul> might be too... weak
for such a terrible character. Rather "Dracula"
would fit, considering that <dracul> "the devil"
in Romanian. <...feratu> indeed looks like a
Romanian perf. participle of a verb of the 1st
conjugation ("-are;" "-at, -atzi, -ata, -ate").
But in Romanian <nosferatu> has no meaning; it's
strange/foreign/exotic. (Perhaps the Greek
etymology is a better explanation.)
I suppose the Romanian connection is merely given
by this: Eastern Transylvania (towards Moldavia),
where Stoker's weird character, count Dracula,
dwells (in Stoker's imagination). However, at the
time of Stoker's story, Transylvania was ruled by
Hungarian voyvodes, who were underlings to the
Hapsburgs (Tr. was part of the Austrian empire).
The other idea, namely that Stoker's inspiration
was the prince Vlad "TzepeS" ("The Impaler") is not
convincing.
a.k.a. Vladislav Basarab. BTW, a cousin of king
Matthias Corvinus of Hungary, who held Vlad prisoner
North of Budapest, in a castle, for about 14 years,
and presented him to his guests as a... crazy
relative. The main Western sources for V's alleged
crazy cruelties were German pamphlets circulated
20 years after V's death, as well as some writings
of the contemporary German poet Martin Behaim.
Some scholars maintain that king Matthias also
had some responsibility for the spreading of
those stories.
However, all those leitmotifs have virtually
nothing in common with count Dracula, except for
the... nickname, Dracula, which in Vlad's case, as
well as of his father, another Vlad(islav), meant
that they were knights of the Order of the Dragon,
founded by king & emperor Sig(is)mund von Luxemburg.
In the German pamphlets of the 15th-16th c., this
nickname isn't spelled Dracula, but Dracole, in
the syntagm "Dracole wayde" (voyvod), "der schroecken-
liche (schreckliche) Wüterich".
>Piotr
George