450 Italienisch, Rumänisch, Rätoromanisch
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- onomastics (2)
- German and Romanian surnames in Transylvania (1)
- Romanian-German interculturality in Transilvania (1)
- Romansh (1)
- Sursilvan (1)
- Tresa Rűther-Seeli Sursilvan contemporary lyrics (1)
- an explanation of the Transylvanian toponyms (1)
- autochthonous Transylvanian family names (1)
- ethnonyms (1)
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The aim of the present paper is to analyse the trilingual Transylvanian toponyms (German, Hungarian an d Romanian) from the Terra ante Silvanum (The Realm Beneath the Forest) and to reconstruct and explain them. When the Saxons arrived in Transylvania, in the 12th Century, they met Szekler, Hungarian and Romanian ethnic groups. The Realm Beneath the Forest represents, from a historical point of view, the Western border of the Transylvanian territory inhabited by the Saxons, which was not a compact area and which was divided into three districts (Sibiu, Brașov, and Bistrița) and two ‘seats’ (Mediaș and Șeica). The Realm Beneath the Forest included three ‘seats’ (Lat. sedes, judicial and administrative forums): Orăștie, Sebeș and Miercurea Sibiului. All the areas of the Realm Beneath the Forest, both those inhabited by German and/or Hungarian and Romanian populations and those inhabited only by Romanian people, have corresponding toponyms in all three languages. The toponyms Orăștie, Romos, Aurel Vlaicu, Pianul de Jos, Petrești, Sebeș, Câlnic, Reciu, Gârbova, Dobârca, Miercurea Sibiului, Apoldu de Sus, Amnaș that are analysed in the paper can be classified according to the following criteria: according to their founder, to the river that flows through the area, to the local toponyms, to their origin and their way of formation. A series of toponyms contributed to the apparition of some autochthonous family names such as Broser, Hamlescher, Kellinger, Mühlbächer, Polder, Rätscher, Urbiger.
The family name Fleşer and its viariations come from the German family name and from the common noun with the same form Fleischer (Rom. „măcelar” – butcher) which is prevalent in East and Northeast of Germany today, and which in its turn appeard as the aftermath of a contraction of the compound noun Fleischhauer (Lat. macellator), initially spread in the centre and North of Germany.
The monophthongal noun Fleşer and its variant forms Fleşeru, Fleşeriu, Fleşieru and Fleşariu, formed with the suffix of German origin determining the agent -er (< lat. -arius) or with that/those of Romanian origin -ar(iu), (< lat. -arius) are concentrated mainly in Transilvania today, especially in the neighbouring counties of Alba and Sibiu.
Hence, the family name Fleşer and its variations turn out to be compelling examples of the linguistic interculturality between German and Romanian in Transilvania and in Romania, in this case demonstrated in terms of onomastic.
The present paper accumulates information and studies the etymology of the Romanian ethnonym “Aleman” and its versions, beginning from their geographical spread throughout Romania and Germany. The Romanian surnames “Aleman” and “Aloman” (highest prevalence in the area of Transylvania, in the Sibiu and Alba counties), as well as “Aliman”, “Alimănescu”, “Alaman” and “Alman” (highest prevalence in the areas of Muntenia, Oltenia and Dobrogea) do not come from the French term “allman” as their German equivalents “Allman”, “Allmang”, “Lallemand” do, which are concentrated in the Western Germany (in the Saarland, Rhineland-Palatinate German federal districts), due to the fact that there are no correspondents to the surnames of the Transylvanian Saxons. Therefore, the origin of these Romanian surnames is more likely to relate to the Turkish term “aleman” (see Iordan, 1983, p. 25 and 23), which also refers to the Germanic tribe of alamans or alemans, having the same meaning of “German”. The geographical proliferation of the “Aleman” and “Aliman” versions of the term is specific to the East to West population migration phenomena. These versions are the only ones existent in today’s Germany. Thus the “Aleman” and “Aliman” surnames are to be found in strongly industrialized centers such as Munich, Stuttgart, Karlsruhe, Mannheim, Wiesbaden, Bielefeld, Hamburg and not in the area of the German-French frontier (see following map).
In the paper, all German surnames (63 different names) and also the Romanian ones (45 different names) are analyzed from a semantic and statistic perspective. These family names belong to the inhabitants of Petreºti/Sebeº who were the victims of the First World War, of the Second World War and of the communist régime. The names of these 216 people were taken from the commemorative plaques from the Lutheran Protestant Church and on the Heroes’ Monument placed in the yard of the city’s Orthodox Church.
In this work we aim to analyze the statute of the Romansh language and of its idioms in the Grison/Graubűnden Canton (Switzerland), from the Sursilvan lyrics perspective of Tresa Rűther-Seeli and her contemporary, Linard Candreia. Because of the massive split of the five Romanic idioms with own writing, of the fact that none of them had developed into a standard literary language, as well as of the massive decrease in the population who speaks them, the situation of these idioms becomes dramatic, in spite of and because of the intervention of the political factor to impose a standard official language – Romansh.