Nosferatu (word)

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This page is about the meaning and the origins of the word. For other uses see Nosferatu (disambiguation)

Nosferatu has been presented as a Romanian word being synonymous with "vampire" but seems to be largely a literary creation with an uncertain basis in Romanian folklore.

1 Origins of the name
2 Notes
3 References
4 Literature

[edit] Origins of the name

The original meaning of the word nosferatu is difficult to determine. There is no doubt that it achieved popular currency through Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula, and Stoker identified his source for the term as the 19th-century British author and speaker Emily Gerard. Gerard introduced the word into print in a magazine article (Gerard 1885) and in her travelogue the Land Beyond the Forest (Gerard 1888) ("land beyond the forest" is literally what Transylvania means in Latin). She merely refers to it as the Romanian word for vampire (Wolf 1997). Internal evidence in Dracula suggests that Stoker believed the term meant "not dead" in Romanian, and thus he may have intended the word undead to be a calque of it. ^[1] This idea is demonstrably false, since the word nosferatu in this form has no known meaning (aside from that introduced by the novel and the films) in any historical phase of Romanian (Skal 2004).

Peter Haining identifies an earlier source for nosferatu as "Roumanian Superstitions (1861)" by Heinrich von Wlislocki (Haining 2000). However, Wlislocki seems only to have written in German, and according to the Magyar Néprajzi Lexikon, Wlislocki was born in 1856 (d. 1907), which makes his authorship of an English-titled 1861 source doubtful. Certain details of Haining's citation also conflict with David J. Skal (Skal 2004), so this citation seems unreliable. Skal identifies a similar reference to the word "nosferat" in an article by Wlislocki dating from 1896 (Wlislocki 1896). Since this postdates Gerard and has a number of parallels to Gerard's work, Skal considers it likely that Wlislocki is derivative from Gerard.

A leading alternative etymology is that the term originally came from the Greek "nosophoros" (*νοσοφόρος), meaning disease-bearing (Stoker, Moliken 2006). This derivation could make sense when one considers that amongst Western European nations, vampires were regarded as the carriers of many diseases. F. W. Murnau's classic film Nosferatu strongly emphasizes this theme of disease, and Murnau's creative direction in the film may have been influenced by this etymology (or vice-versa) (Melton 1999).

Several difficulties with this explanation can be noted though. First, Gerard clearly identified the word as Romanian, and Romanian is a Romance language, though she did not speak a single word of the language and had to depend on local interpreters. While Romanian does have some words borrowed from Greek, as do most European languages, Greek is generally considered to be only a minor contributor to 'modern' Romanian vocabulary. Second, while *νοσοφόρος would be a regular compound according to the rules of Greek morphology, the word itself is not known in any historical phases of the Greek language. Third, the necessary sound changes between *νοσοφόρος and nosferatu are not consistent with the way Greek loanwords into Romanian were normally borrowed. The *νοσοφόρος derivation therefore requires that an otherwise unknown Greek word was borrowed into a Romance language at some unspecified time in history and then transformed by a unique phonological process into the form which Gerard encountered in the late 19th century. By modern standards of historical linguistics, this explanation is not really tenable without stronger supporting evidence. A single instance of a Greek word similar to *νοσοφόρος, νοσηφόρος ("nosēphoros"), is attested in fragments from a 2nd century CE work by Marcellus Sidetes on medicine (Liddell & Scott 1940), but the supporting evidence for a relationship between this word and nosferatu is still very weak.

In some versions of the "nosophoros" etymology, an intermediate form *nesufur-atu (Melton 1999) or sometimes *nosufur-atu is cited (Stoker, Moliken 2006), but both the original source for this and the justification for it are unclear. This form is often indicated to be "Slavonic" or "Slavic," but these terms do not correspond to the commonly recognized names for any language, and it is likely that either Old Church Slavonic or the protolanguage Proto-Slavic is intended. As with *νοσοφόρος, this word does not appear to be attested in primary sources.

Another common etymology suggests that the word meant "not breathing," which appears to be attempting to read a derivative of the Latin verb spirare ("to breathe") as a second morpheme in nosferatu. Skal notes that this is "without basis in lexicography," viewing all these etymological attempts with similar skepticism (Skal 2004).

A final possibility is that the form Gerard gave is a well-known Romanian term without the benefit of normalized spelling, or possibly a misintrepretation of the sounds of the word due to Gerard's limited familiarity with the language, or possibly a dialectical variant of the word. Two candidate words that have been put forth are necurat ("unclean", usually associated with the occult) (Buican 1991)(Dunn-Mascetti 1992) and nesuferit ("insufferable") (Skal 2004). The nominative masculine definite form of a Romanian noun in the declension to which both words belong takes the ending "-ul", so the definite forms necuratul and nesuferitul are commonly encountered (translatable as "the devil" and "the insufferable one", respectively).

[edit] Notes

^ "For all that die from the preying of the Un-dead become themselves Un-dead,and prey on their kind. And so the circle goes on ever widening, like as the ripples from a stone thrown in the water. Friend Arthur, if you had met that kiss which you know of before poor Lucy die, or again,last night when you open your arms to her, you would in time, when you had died, have become nosferatu, as they call it in Eastern europe, and would for all time make more of those Un-Deads that so have filled us with horror." (Stoker 1897). This seems to be the motivation for Leonard Wolf to gloss nosferatu as "not dead." (Stoker, Wolf 1975)

[edit] References

Buican, Denis (1991). Dracula et ses Avatars: de Vlad l'Empaleur à Staline et Ceausescu. Editions de l'Espace Européen, 96. ISBN 2-7388-0131-5. (As a native Romanian, Dr. Buican's opinion that nosferatu is a mishearing of necuratu carries particular weight.)

Dunn-Mascetti, Manuela (1992). Vampire: the Complete Guide to the World of the Undead. Penguin, 111. ISBN 0-14-023801-8.

Gerard, Emily (July 1885). "Transylvanian Superstitions". The Nineteeth Century: 128-144.

Gerard, Emily (1888). The Land Beyond the Forest: Facts, Figures, and Fancies from Transylvania. Harper & Brothers.

Haining, Peter (2000). A Dictionary of Vampires. Robert Hall, 184-185. ISBN 0-7090-6550-7.

Liddell, Henry George; Robert Scott, Henry Stuart Jones [1843] (1940). A Greek-English Lexicon, 9th ed., Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-864226-1.

Magyar néprajzi lexikon. Retrieved on 2007-02-22. ("Hungarian Ethnographic Lexicon")

Melton, J. Gordon (1999). the Vampire Book: The Encyclopedia of the Undead. Visible Ink Press, 496-497. ISBN 1-57859-071-X.

Skal, David J. [1990] (2004). Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web Of Dracula From Novel To Stage To Screen, Revised, Norton, 80-81. ISBN 0-571-21158-5. (Skal reprints a large quotation of the relevant Wlislocki material)

Stoker, Bram (1897). Dracula. Archibald Constable and Company.

Stoker, Bram [1897] (2006). in Paul Moliken: Dracula (Literary Touchstone Edition). Prestwick House, 349. ISBN 1-58049-382-3.

Stoker, Bram [1897] (1975). in Leonard Wolf: The Annotated Dracula. Crown, 193. ISBN 0517520176.

von Wlislocki, Heinrich (1896). "Quälgeister im Volksglauben der Rumänen". Am Ur-Quell 6: 108-109.

Wolf, Leonard (1997). Dracula: The Connoisseur's Guide. Random House. (The information relating to the "Nosferatu" from the article written by Mrs. Gerard in 1885 is reprinted in pp. 21-22).