>this is a nice information Brian, thank you. The Romanian word
>"hârciog" is given as loan from Hungarian when the phonetic aspect
>speaks
>for an old word due "â" after the sonant "r". I doubt the same word with
>the same phonetic aspect as heriçun could be loaned in OFr from
>Hungarian in the XIII century. It seems it is other way around and the
>Hungarian hörcsög is a loan from some neighbours (I let George to say it
>is not that way):-))
I don't know the origin of this pair. The statement /'hör-c^ög/ >
/hIr-'c^og/ is not mine, but that of the Romanian linguistic community.
I remarked that hedgehog strangely resembles them. And the information
OFr /heric^un/ only confirms my assumption that hörcsög/hârciog must
have some other origins. OTOH the heric^un thing show us that we already
have such a word in Romanian: ariciu (I spell it in the old-fashioned
way!).
Hârci + -og must be related to ariciu, but most probable not from WITHIN
the Romanian language, since it has a strong /h/ in it. Old Romance h-
words have lost their 'eytches.'
George
PS: As for your Smilie: pay both of you heed to the circumstance
that those generations of Romanian linguists who
say this and that word is of Hungarian or Turkic or other origin,
and you disagree with them, are the same people who created
that corpus of linguistic literature from which you, in your
generation, learned and picked up all the stuff regarding the substrate
assumptions and speculations. The very same people. In other words,
the interpretations and assumptions are by your "gurus", so-to-speak,
and not by God knows what mean malevolent bunch of foreigners.