From: Abdullah Konushevci
Message: 22939
Date: 2003-06-09
> But let's also take this into consideration: in Hungarian************
> "néni" ['ne:ni] means the femaie counterpart of the
> Romanian male "nene" (def. articled "nenea"). Except for
> the fact that the Hungarian néni is esp. an *aunt* and in
> general an older woman, whereas the Romanian "nene" can
> also be an elder brother, not only an uncle and an elder/
> older guy around. I don't know the etymology of the
> Hungarian néni, but I know that né-/nö- roots have
> family of words pertaining to "woman/women, feminine,
> female," "growth" and "Geschlecht", both in the sense
> of "gender" and "gens" (NB: noble = nemeS). I don't
> know whether "néni" is a derivation thereof or a mere
> phonetic-cum-semantic coincidence.
>
> BTW: the néni's Hungarian male is... bácsi ['ba:tSi]
> - just another... puzzling buzzword, with the meaning,
> in Romanian, of both nene and mo$, and which of course
> must be akin to Romanian baci [batS] (a certain kind of
> elder man). The other meaning of the Romanian nene, namely
> elder brother, is rendered in Hungarian by bátya
> ['ba:-k^O], that has corresponding lexems in Romanian:
> bade, b&die, b&diT& (the connotations being
> almost the same in most cases); and IIRC in some Slavic
> idioms.