>I am lost here. I am not aware of any meaning of "Dracula" in
>Rom. beside the one of the new times regarding the vampire
>represented by it. Why should one have understood the Slavic
>genitival "-a" as Rom. speaker?
You misunderstood what I had written. I meant, a native-
speaker is not aware of the significance of that <-a>
in such names, unless s/he reads an explanation by a
linguist. So, the average Romanian native-speaker knows
fully well that "dracul" means "the devil" (and is not
quite aware of the fact that the word initially means
"dragon"). But the same native-speaker doesn't know how
to perceive the "-a" ending attached to it in prince
Vlad's nickname. Moreover, an -a ending, from the Romanian
point of view, is usually perceived as a definite
article for feminine nouns and names - exceptions to
this rule being very few, e.g. tata (the father), popa
(the priest), Papa (the Pope). So, Dracula seems to
be weird to an average native-speaker, because it
contains the masc. article -u-l and the fem. article
attached to it - which is a nonsense. Hence the
explanations: either -a is the Church Slavic ending, or
it is a misspelling of the Romanian suffix -ea [diphtong].
>the "dracula" here seems to do not belong to the
>ancient formations which ends in "lã" which are
>masculine names as Lungilã, Fomilã, Setilã, Gerilã
>(see I. Creangã) etc.
If "dracul-" is to be read in Romanian, then "-u-l"
is the Romanian definite article (masculin & neuter,
singular) with its typical "legatto" vowel [u].
Whereas in your examples you've got the suffix "-ilã".
This suffix can get a magnifying or derogatory con-
notation in Romanian. And it seems to correspond to
-il(l)a suffixes in some IE languages (and I assume
in Turkic languages too).
>Alex
George