Preliminaries

The study of Romanian, as the easternmost expression of the Romance world, still has an unresolved issue: the lack of a complete and reliable etymological dictionary. There is, in fact, a paradox. Romanian was approached from the etymological perspective at an early phase by Cihac (1870–1879, two volumes), especially if we consider the fact that similar etymological dictionaries did not exist at that time for a series of languages of the area. One should note, as an exception, the etymological dictionary of Albanian (Meyer 1891) and that both Romanian and Albanian have remained ‘etymology-resistant’ languages, in the sense that many words have remained unexplained, badly explained or have been given several explanations, details, which tells us a lot about the specific situation of these languages. Immediately after its publication, Cihac'1 work was vehemently criticized (to just use an elegant phrasing) by Hasdeu, an outstanding linguist and philologist, conversant with many languages, the initiator of the Indo-European studies in Romania, also the first editor of Slavic texts and, implicitly, the first Slavist as well. Cihac put into circulation some clichés, some of them still very persistent, despite the poor scientific quality of his work in general. On the other hand, Hasdeu's reference studies are available in newer editions, e.g. Hasdeu (1988). Cihac's method was simplistic and, of course, easily criticizable: any word of non-Latin origin was considered of Slavic, Turkic or Hungarian origin.

It is not the purpose of this paper to deny or underestimate the Slavic, Hungarian or Turkic, including Turkish (Ottoman), influence on Romanian. I would like to point out some facts which prove that the situation is, in reality, more complex than suggested by Cihac some 150 years ago and sometimes persistent until now. What Cihac really lacked, and unfortunately the situation has been so frequent in the studies dedicated to the Romanian etymology ever since, was a deeper insight into the substratum of Romanian, a field of investigation in which Cihac's first critic, Hasdeu, initiated a brilliant series of studies, some outdated, some still valid from the etymological perspective.