Re: RE: (MRQ2) - Magia divina y sacrificio de PER

Write haof XML files: Alejandro Javier <alejandro.hart_at_...>
Fecha: Wed, 22 Dec 2010 21:43:32 +0000


2010/12/22 Emilio Moskowich Burgo <emosbur_at_...>

> Yo creo que no-muerto es correcto... ¿no es el significado de nosferatu?
>
> Goblin
>
>

Wikipedia for the win:

The name *Nosferatu* has been presented as a

Romanian<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romania>
 word, synonymous <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synonym> with
"vampire<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampire>".
However, it seems to be largely a literary creation and its basis in Romanian folklore <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_folklore> is uncertain.

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<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bram_Stoker>'s 1897 novel *Dracula <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dracula>,* and Stoker identified his source for the term as the 19th-century British<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_people> author and speaker Emily Gerard <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Gerard>. Gerard introduced the word into print in a magazine article[1]<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosferatu_(word)#cite_note-0> and
in her travelogue *The Land Beyond the
Forest*;[2]<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosferatu_(word)#cite_note-1> ("Land
beyond the forest" is literally what
Transylvania<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transylvania> means in Latin <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin>). She merely refers to it as the Romanian <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_language> word for vampire <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampire>: "More decidedly evil is the *nosferatu,* or vampire, in which every
Roumanian<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_people> peasant believes as firmly as he does in Heaven or Hell."[3]<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosferatu_(word)#cite_note-2> However,
the word *nosferatu* does not correspond to any readily identifiable existing word in the Romanian language in any historical phase (aside from that introduced by the novel and the
films).[4]<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosferatu_(word)#cite_note-skal04-3> Internal
evidence in *Dracula* suggests that Stoker believed the term meant "not dead" in Romanian <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_language>, and thus he may have intended the word *undead <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undead>*to be a calque <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calque> of it. [5]<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosferatu_(word)#cite_note-4>

Peter Haining <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Haining> identifies an earlier source for *nosferatu* as "*Roumanian Superstitions* (1861)" by Heinrich von Wlislocki.[6]<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosferatu_(word)#cite_note-5> However,
Wlislocki seems only to have written in
German<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_language>, and according to the*Magyar Néprajzi Lexikon*, Wlislocki was born in 1856 (d. 1907), which makes his authorship of an English<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language>-titled 1861 source doubtful. Certain details of Haining's citation also conflict with David J. Skal
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_J._Skal>[4]<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosferatu_(word)#cite_note-skal04-3>, so this citation seems unreliable. Skal identifies a similar reference to the word "nosferat" in an article by Wlislocki dating from 1896.[7]<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosferatu_(word)#cite_note-6> 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 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymology> is that the term originally came from the
Greek<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_language> "nosophoros" (*νοσοφόρος), meaning
*disease-bearing*.[8]<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosferatu_(word)#cite_note-moliken-7>  F. W. Murnau <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Wilhelm_Murnau>'s classic film *Nosferatu <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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*).[9]<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosferatu_(word)#cite_note-melton-8>

However, several difficulties with this explanation should be noted. Gerard clearly identified the word as Romanian and proponents of the "nosophoros" etymology (as well as most other commentators) seem to have little doubt that this is correct, even though Gerard's limited familiarity with the language gives her little authority on that point. If this Romanian identification is taken to be correct, the first objection to the "nosophoros" etymology is that Romanian is a Romance language<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_language>. While Romanian does have some words borrowed from Greek<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_language>, as do most European languages, Greek is generally considered to be only a minor contributor to the Romanian vocabulary—absent any other information, any given Romanian word is much more likely to be of Latin origin than Greek. Second, while *νοσοφόρος would be a regular compound according to the conventions of Greek morphology, the word itself is not known in any historical phases of the Greek language. That is to say, the word *νοσοφόρος simply is not known to have ever existed in Greek, which would seem to make the burden of proof rather high for proposing it to have been the original form of another word in an entirely different language. A single instance of a Greek word similar to *νοσοφόρος, νοσηφόρος ("nosēphoros"), is attested in fragments from a 2nd century AD work by Marcellus Sidetes<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcellus_of_Side> on medicine[10] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosferatu_(word)#cite_note-9>, but the supporting evidence for a relationship between this apparently very rare medical term and *nosferatu* is still very weak.

Of course, it is also possible that Gerard's *nosferatu* was not Romanian at all, but it becomes even more difficult to justify the etymology of a word if its language is not even known. In either case, the glaring difficulty with the *νοσοφόρος etymology is that no source has ever presented an argument for it any more substantial than that the two words, one of which may not have even existed, are vaguely similar in sound and meaning. No derivation has been proposed that would accord with a regular derivational process, and no citations of any intermediate forms in primary sources have ever been presented.

In some versions of the "nosophoros" etymology, an intermediate form * *nesufur-atu*[9]<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosferatu_(word)#cite_note-melton-8> or
sometimes **nosufur-atu* is
presented[8]<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosferatu_(word)#cite_note-moliken-7>, but both the original source for this and the justification for it are unclear. This form is often indicated to be Slavonic<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavic_languages> 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<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Church_Slavonic> or the protolanguage Proto-Slavic <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Slavic> is intended. As with *νοσοφόρος, this supposed Slavonic word does not appear to be attested in primary sources, which severely undermines the credibility of the argument.

Another common etymology suggests that the word meant "not breathing", which appears to be attempting to read a derivative of the Latin<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin>  verb *spirare* ("to breathe") as a second morpheme in*nosferatu*. Skal notes that this is "without basis in
lexicography<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexicography>", viewing all these etymological attempts with similar skepticism.[4]<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosferatu_(word)#cite_note-skal04-3>

When looking at the individual sylablles from a Latin<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin> standpoint, the three syllables loosely translate to "we" (nos) or "our" (noster), wild beast/animal/wild animal/sea monster/beast of prey (fera), you (tu). When translating the following "you are our wild beast" into Latin<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin>, you will get "nos/noster tu fera," and with simple truncation and rearangement, it becomes "nosferatu."

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 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occult>) [ 11] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosferatu_(word)#cite_note-10>[12]<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosferatu_(word)#cite_note-11>  and *nesuferit*("the
insuferrable").[4]<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosferatu_(word)#cite_note-skal04-3> The
nominative masculine definite form of a Romanian noun<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun> in the declension <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declension> to which both words belong takes the ending "-ul", so the definite forms *necuratul* and * nesuferitul* are commonly encountered (translatable as "the devil<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil>" and "the insufferable one", respectively).

-- 
Saludos,
Alejandro

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