Re: Trajan's column

From: tolgs001
Message: 21948
Date: 2003-05-16

>Nearly all these words occur in the highland dialects of Poland
>(including the Tatras). Most of them, however, belong to the
>technical vocabulary of shepherds, and their phonological makeup
>absolutely rules out a Proto-Slavic date of borrowing. They are
>Carpathian (and in some cases Balkan) "travelling loans"
>disseminated by Daco-Romanian-speaking shepherds during the
>Middle Ages.

Indeed. Especially by Transylvanian Romanians, e.g. in the
13th-16th centuries. Spreading chiefly in what's now Southern
Poland, Slovakia, Moravia (perhaps Bohemia as well). Some
of their voyvodes (e.g. of the Maramureshers) settled down
in medieval Poland and joined the Szlachta. These things
are documented pretty well (if the whole problem is accurately
presented in a standard book by Stefan Mete$, Romanian
emigrations betw. 13th-20th centuries; and which is based on
Polish, Czech etc. sources/works as well).

It is assumed that Pope John Paul II too has such a
Romanian ancestry; and that he is aware of it
(cf. South-Polish villages of the so-called "góral"s,
mountain people, most of whom have Romanian extraction
due to those earlier immigrations from Transylvania).
That's what was spread by connoisseurs in the Romanian
press years ago.

>Some of them (especially those with Albanian cognates) may
>ultimately derive from the Albanoid ("Dacian") substrate
>in Romanian, but they don't testify to the presence of
>Dacian-speakers in the northern Carpathian region.

That's right. The carriers of those lexical items
were the Romanians (aka Walachians/Vlachs) themselves in
quite recent times (the same applies to some of these
words that have entered the vocabularies of Hungarian,
Slovak and Czech languages). Thus, the Romanian word
"brânza" (cheese), that was mentioned in the list, is
known *in Hungary* as "brenze", but which is unknown to
Transylvanian Hungarians ***from within the Hungarian
language***; of course it is known from the surrounding
Romanian population, as "brânza". I asked Transylvanian
Hungarians who know well Transylvanian Hungarian
subdialects, and they confirmed that "brenze" was knew
for them, too.

The general (and pan-)Hungarian word for that is "turo"
['turo:].

>Piotr

George