Talk:Nosferatu (word)

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You dismiss the Greek origin of the word and maintain that there is no Greek word like nosophoros. I have different information, though I must admit that the time of adoption is not the last century, but some centuries back, when the influence of the Greek language on Romanian was pretty strong - via the language of the Orthodox Church. If you check an etymological dictionary, you will see that the influence of medieval Greek was very strong. Nevertheless, there seems to be not a single synonym word for vampire sounding like nosferatu or the like. None of the experts on Romanian vampire lore knows anything like it. Perhaps you have a look at the German Wikipedia s. v. "Nosferatu (Volksglaube)". (Peter Kremer)

Addendum: You claim that the word "nosophoros" is virtually unknown to the Greek language of all ages. I do not know whether you really bothered to check this in a scholarly (!) dictionary. Of course, you do not find it in the "Tourist's Concise Guide to Everyday Greek". Why not stroll to the nearest university library and have a look at Stephani's Thesaurus linguae Graeca (1844), p. 1570, or Fr. Passow, Handwörterbuch der Griechischen Sprache, Leipzig 1852, vol. II.2, p. 363 (2nd col, 1st line), or - something British for a change - H. G. Liddell & R. Scott, Greek-English Lexicon. Oxford 1996, p. 1181, 2 col., l 36. You will find - provided you can read Greek letters - both "nosophoros" and "nosephoros", both meaning "bringing the plague". By the way, could you please let me know where you picked up the information about the rules of phonological changes from Greek into Romanian? I failed to find a reference work on this topic at the "Department of Romance Studies" at the University of Cologne. (Peter Kremer, Dec 28th 2006, before midnight)

Liddell and Scott is the first place I looked, since it's kind of the standard reference - in fact there is no such word as νοσοφορος in it, but I am glad that you managed to find νοσηφορος, since I guess I hadn't checked all the possible ways that it could have been misspelled in the various vampire encyclopedias that have repeated this etymology over the years. There is a problem with it though - it's only attested in one fragmentary source (Marcellus Sidetes), and it's always hard to build a credible etymology on a "one-fragment wonder." (BTW, if you want to save yourself a walk to the library, you can search Liddell-Scott on line at perseus.org ( http://www.perseus.org/cgi-bin/ptext?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0057%3Aentry%3D%2371050")

The problem I have with this etymology is twofold. The first "fold" is simply that there is no evidence for it beyond the internal phonology and that a number of popular vampire books have repeated it as a fact, but without sourcing it. Since we do know for sure that Gerard introduced the word "nosferatu" and none of her extant works mention anything about this etymology, it was probably a hypothesis developed by a later commentator. In other words, it was just somebody's guess that was elevated to the status of fact by several decades of repetition. My guess is that it was a very early guess because it is so widespread and it _may_ have influenced Murnau, but without some kind of argument or citations, it's nothing more than a loose factoid. This would not be such a big problem though, if the phonology were convincing.

But, if you just look at the putative Greek original and the quasi-Anglo-Romanian modern form

no se^ phor os

no s fer at u

you can't help but notice that only 1 of the 4 vowels is the same, and in fact the modern form is missing that s-f vowel, so we have to account for an /s[e^]f/ elision somewhere too. If you want to propose a plausible mechanism by which omicron is reflected as /o/ /e/ and /a/ (and maybe /u/ too) in the same word, I'd like to hear it, because that would be, to put it mildly, a very unusual phonetic development in a Romance language. Or really almost any language. Of course you also have the problem that Romanian words don't commonly end with /-u/, but we can probably pass that off as a garbling of the enclitic article /-ul/. It's very tempting to see /-tu[l]/ as reflecting the morphology of a definite substantive past participle, which is why several authors have independently suggested necuratul and nesuferitul, but it's hard to advance that line beyond speculation since the phonological connection is still pretty wonky.

Then, you also might notice that the modern form has somewhere picked up a /t/. I challenge you to find any regular process from Greek to Romanian that sticks a /t/ on the end of the morpheme. You quipped about a "rulebook" for phonetic transformation - well, those actually do exist for some derivational processes (cf. Grimm's and Werner's Laws) after a fashion. It is unlikely though that anyone has done it with Greek-to-Romanian since that's not a very significant process in the formation of Romanian, but the accepted methodology is to compare other Greek loanwords and see what patterns the sound transformations follow. If you do this, you won't find anything that even remotely justifies those huge phonetic leaps that have to be made to make this etymology work.

On top of that, you have this problem that "nosephoros" was such a rare word that the only attestation Liddell-Scott could find was one occurrence in a 2nd century fragment. For all we know, the reading might not even be correct, which is something you always have to consider when you find references to unique vocabulary items in unique manuscripts. Maybe you scoff, but this honestly would not be the first time that I've had that happen.

So I stand by what I said - the authority for this nosophoros/nose^phoros derivation is nothing more than unsourced hearsay, the phonological connection is tenuous at best, the cultural context of the proposed loaning doesn't make much sense, and the supposed source word was exceptionally rare if it ever existed at all. Unsupported x improbable x questionable x rare = bogus. I left the etymology in the article because it is repeated often enough that it has to be mentioned, but it's so blatantly improbable that I can't see how we could repeat it without pointing out how and why it's so suspect, especially when more probable explanations are available (i.e. Gerard just hopelessly garbled some fairly common Romanian word) Tarchon 05:21, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

And in case anybody really desperately needs to know, David J. Skal is the earliest printed source for the "nesuferit[ul]" idea that I know of, and Manuela Dunn-Mascetti is the one for "necuratul." The reason I haven't put it in the references (aside from the fact that it's kind of a low priority) is that I haven't personally been able to check them, but those are the earliest that have been pointed out to me or that I've found in various web-based sources. Additionally I've had a couple Romanians independently suggest "necurat[ul]" but I have no idea what the Wiki stance is on "private communication" references. Also, for what it's worth, I'd independently noticed the resemblance to "nesuferitul" before I'd encountered Skal's suggestion. Most Romanian speakers I've talked to seem to be a little more dubious about "nesuferitul" though, mostly because the semantic connection isn't as obvious as with "necuratul." I understand that this is very weak sourcing, which hopefully will improve, but one has to consider that this is a subject in which there are virtually no academic-quality sources. Only the primary and secondary sources, Gerard and Stoker, carry much weight, and they are cited. The position I've taken with my contributions is that none of the suggestions about the etymology that have appeared over the years are anything more than unproven and probably unprovable speculations, and the key problem discussing it is not to prove the truth of the speculations but to show that some of the oft-repeated speculations which have been claimed to be fact are highly unlikely when you take some entirely verifiable facts about linguistics into account. Tarchon 00:59, 22 February 2007 (UTC)