I'm forwarding this on behalf of Jim Rader. -- PG
-------------------------------------------------
Piotr--
This message to Cybalist was bounced back to me after 72 hours of
failed delivery. I'm forwarding it directly to you in the hopes that you
could post it for me, since it seems I can't reach the list directly.
Thanks--Jim Rader
------- Forwarded message follows -------
From: Jim Rader <
jrader@...>
To:
cybalist@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [tied] Re: Vampire [was: Pagan, heathen ...]
Send reply to:
jrader@...
Date sent: Thu, 28 Aug 2003 17:47:08 -0400
Piotr presents an excellent summation of the history of *vo~-. My
apologies for not noticing the ~ marking nasality. I fired my query
off a little too rapidly. (The following may contain chunks of
extraneous coding--please bear with me--I'll resend if anyone is
interested.)
The historical background of <vampire> makes things not so easily
resolvable. The place and time that Serbian <vampir> entered
German (and hence learned Latin and other European languages) are
known with
a great deal of certainty. In 1725 and 1732, Austrian officials in
Serbia attended at the disinterment of several fluid-filled corpses
whom (which?) the local villagers claimed were behind a plague of
vampirism. Reports of the disinterments and the villagers' beliefs
diffused quickly in German intellectual circles and were the subject
of learned dissertations. The German text of the earlier report was
reproduced in Michael Ranfft's _De masticatione mortuorum in
tumulis_,
printed in Leipzig in 1728; the text is more readily available in an
article by Rudolf Grenz in _Zeitschrift für Ost-Forschung_, 16:2,
1967. The word was a novelty to the author(s) of the report:
"...…sintemahl aber bey dergleichen Personen (so sie Vampyri
nennen)
verschiedene Zeichen, als dessen Cörper unverweset, Haut, Haar,
Barth
und Nägel an ihm wachsend zu sehen seyn müsten, als haben sich die
Unterthanen einhellig resolvieret, das Grab des Peter Plogojowitz zu
eröffnen, und zu sehen, ob sich würklich obbemeldete Zeichen an ihm
befinden...." There are certainly earlier discussions of revenants in
Europe, but I know of no earlier use of the word <vampir>.
I don't believe Hungarian has any role in the westward transmission of
<vampir>. According to the multi-author _A Magyar Nyelv to"rte`neti-
etimolo`gai szo`ta`ra_ , the word is unattested in Hungarian before
1786, and first occurs in contexts that suggest a literary borrowing
from Western Europe.
If <vampir> is authentically Serbian, which is unquestionable, and was
only borrowed in the 18th century, the idea that <vam-> represents a
non-Slavic rendering of the Slavic nasal vowel is untenable--unless
the word was reborrowed by South Slavic from an adjacent non-Slavic
language that had borrowed the word at a much earlier date. Kenneth
Naylor actually proposed that the word was borrowed from Romanian
(_Southeastern Europe/L'Europe du Sud-Est_ 10:2, 1983), but could
not
supply any Romanian evidence. (Alex, George, and friends? By the
way, does
anyone know the earliest sense and etymology of <Nosferatu>?)
Others have tried to explain <vam-> within Serbian/Croatian.
André Vaillant, in an article published in _Slavia_ in 1931, proposed
that <*upir>, with the expected outcome of the back nasal vowel in
Serbian/Croatian, namely *u-, was altered to <vampir> by a two-stage
process (insertion of initial [v] and intrusive [m]) by analogy with
doublets such as <vazduh/uzduh>, “air,” and <dubrava/dumbrava>,
“grove.” However, a Serbian/Croatian form with initial <u-> is
attested only once, as <upirin> in a 17th-century poem written in
Dalmatia; in Serbia and Bosnia, all the other forms that I can find
have internal -m-. Taking a different tack, Trubachev has suggested
that Serbian <vampir> would be the outcome of *vUnUpirU, with
*vUnU-
being a variant of *o~-; this would accord with -a- as the regular
reflex of *U in Serbian/Croatian. (But isn't this the etymon of
Russian <von>, OCS <vUnU>, etc., which has no necessary
connection
with *vo~/vUn....?)
However, neither of these explanations of <vampir> can be
easily reconciled with all of the extant South Slavic data. Both
Trubachev (implicitly) and Vaillant assume that the word is, as
Vaillant puts it, “un serbisme” that has penetrated into Macedonia and
Bulgaria, but I would question why a word so closely associated with
local cultural attitudes toward the dead would have diffused from
(historical) northern Serbia and supplanted forms native to other
regions. To judge from the data presented by Tihomir Djordjevic
(“Vampir i druga bic`a u nas^em narodnom verovanju i predanju,” in
the
1953 volume of _Srpski etnografski zbornik_), and M. Racheva (“K
istoriko- e`timologic^eskomu izuc^eniju nazvanija vampira v
bolgarskom
i serboxorvatskom jazykax” in _Etimologija 1994-1996_, Moscow:
Nauka,
1997), the dominant form in Macedonia and Bulgaria is <vampir>,
extending from Kostur (Kastoria) in what is now northwestern Greece
(the southwesternmost corner of the South Slavic speech area)
eastward
to Balchik and Varna on the Bulgarian Black Sea coast. There are
many
interesting variants, including a number of occurrences of <vapir> and
<vapirin>, mainly in Pirin Macedonia, as well as isolated forms in
Macedonia such as <vUpir> (Kostur area), vUper (Valovishte), and
voper
(Ohrid). I am not sufficiently acquainted with Bulgarian and
Macedonian dialects to be able to say whether all these forms can be
derived from presumed *vUnUpirU/I and/or *o~pirU/I.
Comments/corrrections? --Jim Rader
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Jim Rader" <jrader@...> wrote:
>
> > Does *(v)o- really account for the mass of divergent outcomes this
> > prefix takes in the attested forms? I don't know about "leaves
> > nothing unexplained".... How do you explain u-, vam-, va-, vU-,
> > etc.?
>
>
> It's *(v)o~-, in fact ([o~] = nasal [o]). It derives from the PIE
> adverb/preposition *h1en 'in' > BSl. *en ~ *an. The Slavic forms can
> be derived from *an, which developed two different Proto-Slavic
> variants: "strong" *o~ found in compounds (with word-medial
> treatment of the final nasal) and "weak" *U(n) used as a preposition
> or preverb meaning 'in' (with word-final phonetics, the final *n
> being realised only before a vowel, like a/an in English).
>
> Any word-initial *U received an obligatory prothetic glide: *U > *vU
> (it survives now even if the vowel has been lost, hence <v> 'in' in
> so many Slavic languages). Initial *o~ could also receive such a
> prothesis, but not in all early Slavic dialects, hence the regional
> variation *o~/*vo~. The nasal vowel is still nasal in Polish, but it
> gives various other reflexes elsewhere, e.g. /u/ in Russian, hence
> Russ. upyr' (also locally in Polish dialects, hence <upiór>
> 'spectre, ghost' beside archaic <wa,pierz> with the normal
> development of *o~). It was still nasal in some South Slavic
> dialects at the time the now international form <vampir->/<vampyr->
> began to spread into non-Slavic languages (Hungarian, German, etc.).
> <am> is merely a Latinised orthographic rendering of the Slavic
> nasal vowel.
>
>
> Piotr
>
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