Re: etyma for Craciun...

If (after a vacation) I may return to a well-beaten dead horse--how
much of the core Christian vocabulary in Romanian indisputably dates
back to earliest Balkan Romance? I can only think of <biserica~> (L.
basilica), <preot>, <a~nger> OTOH.... I would assume that most later
vocabulary is Greco-Slavic, given the history of Romanian orthodoxy.
How old is <PaSti>, "Easter"? Are there any other church feast names
of Balkan Romance origin? The history of Romanian Christianity
would seem to have a bearing on the <Cra~ciun> question.

Jim Rader

>
> For a word _not_ linked with `Christmas` and `feast`, yes, the
> Proto-Slavic form you & your source of inspiration gave explains
> the phonetical shape. You still conveniently forget about actual
> meaning which has very little to do with your proto-word. I can
> perfecly explain that by contamination _in Russian_ between a
> Slavic original word having nothing to do with `Christmas` or
> `(winter) feast` and an early (Balkan-)Romance loanword meaning
> `Christmas` for Romance population and `(winter) feast` for those
> Slavs getting it. The distribution of meanings points to that as clear
> as Via Appia, Via Salaria and Via Ostiense point to Rome.
>
> Marius Iacomi
>