On Wed, Sep 24, 2003, at 02:45 PM, Egijus wrote:
> TIRNAVA I have associated with Lithuanian word
> TYRAS, which means PURE.
Do associate it with <târn> [tIrn], sort of a shrub
(out of it, one makes - still today - kinda raw
brooms). So, associate Romanian Târnava with its
counterpart throughout... Slavia (T(...)rnovo,
Trnava; possibly also with Hungarian Tarna ['tOr-nO].
Târnava is the name of rivers in central
Transylvania: Târnava Mare, Târnava Micã. The
Hungarian names, Nagy Kükülõ, Kis Kükülõ, have
the same meaning: that kind of bushes <trn>.
(The Germans who settled down in the area around
1200 have used the Hungarian name, making of it
Grosskokel & Kleinkokel, i.e. they didn't trans-
late it.)
> CHIOJDENI was been added to the list,
-eni is a plural suffix; its singular is -ean; a
typical suffix for places (in onomastics it means
"of", "von", "van", suggesting that the bearer
comes from place X, or his/her ancestors came).
The main word here is Chiojd, which is an awkward
rendering of the Hungarian Kôsd [kö:Sd]. <kõ> "an
area rich in stones, boulders, rocks", and -d is
a suffix mainly having the same function as -eni
in Romanian. The Romanian correspondents of Kõsd
are Pietroasa, Pietrosul, Pietroasele. (These Chiojd
toponyms are scattered in the immediate vecinity of
the ethnic group of the Szeklers, who are part of
the Hungarian nation.) ([St] or [Sd] > Rum. [Zd]
is a typical phenomenon: for the average Romanian
native-speaker a [S] + [b, d, g] isn't a... natural
cluster, so, there occurs an assimilation [Zd]. The
most famous of this kind are István ['iSt-va:n], the
Hungarian variant of Stephen: Romanians tend to
pronounce it ['iZ-van]; then <Svab> "Suebian" (i.e.
Schwab(e)): most Romanians pronounce it [Zvab],
although it is spelled <Svab>. And, finally, the
rendering of the Umlaut-vowel <õ> with the diphtong
<io> [jo] is again typical for Romanian: in the
Romanian language there are no [ö], [ø], [ü] vowels,
so the average Romanian will say Miul&r and Chioln,
meaning Müller and Köln. Hence... Chiojd.)
> It is possible, that DUSMANI have come from Lithuanian
> word DUSTI
<duSmani> in Romanian means "enemies." <duSman, plur.
du$mani> is a loan from Turkish, <dü$man> (and there
from Persian, AFAIK)
OTOH, I don't exclude the possibility that, as a toponym,
initially there was another (phonetically similar) word,
and people later on made of it Du$mani, due to erroneous
etymology.
> What about other 500 place names?
This depends on the time of the scribbler (& on the
tolerance of the list members :-))
George