>that in the 14th and 15th c. the main meanings of the
>word in Moldavia were "kurgan" and "hill", but it
In Romanian, "kurgan" is "gorgan" [gor-gán], and refers
only to... kurgans, i.e. those tumuli of the Scythian and
Celtic kind. movila (subdialectal also moghila) means all
kind of heaps up to hillocks/hills. (There was also a Rum.
princiary family, Movila, among whom one was AFAIK
metropolit in Kiev and had some important eccl.-theol.
writings.)
Anyway, let's note that Romanian has two maybe
related words, magura and movila, that, in certain
contexts, in the figurative sense, can be synonyms.
I suppose that the Romanian family names (seemingly
of South-Romanian or even Aromanian origin) Moga and
Mogo$ are also to be put in relationship with these
words. [the latter not to be mixed up with the Hungarian
words magas [mOgOS] "tall" and mag [mOg] "seed"]
---
BTW, re. Rum. <mare> and Hung. <kan>: a Hungarian native-
speaker from Transylvania, who knows the Some$/Szamos
region, told me yesterday he's not aware of kan in the sense
of big without combining the word with nagy "big; large; great"
(nagy is the pan-Hungarian word for that), e.g. "kan-nagy",
"marha-nagy" (marha means "cattle, Rindvieh"; and this is
very frequently used, along with -->) "állati nagy" (állati
"animal-like, tierisch"), as an... amplifier: awfully/extremely
big; or, depending on the context, it is as in British English
"bloody-". To say simply "kan" meaning "big," will prompt the
listener to understand: "pig"/"hog" (a possible insult ;-). He
also said he'd ask himself some Hungarian linguists on this.
George