Die Ambiguität etymologischer Lösungen am Beispiel von rumän. reg. berdă
The Ambiguity of Etymological Solutions: The Romanian Regional Term bérdă

Summary/Abstract: The Romanian regional term bérdă (de uscătúri) means “a load of wood, a pile of wood”. It is without doubt a word of Indo-European (IE) origin. But is it a Slavic relic word or a loan from a modern Slavic language? The suggestion that it is a loan word from German, Germanic via Slavic in particular, has been rejected. Could its specific semantics possibly have been influenced by a relic word transmitted via a locally attested and now extinct IE language such as Dacian? It is attested only once with the above-mentioned meaning as a word forming a relic island at the inquiry point No. 157 of the linguistic survey displayed on map No. 592 of the Romanian Linguistic Atlas (ALR) II New Series. Usually, its solely regionally attested meanings are “slope of a gorge, slope of a hill, abyss, chasm, cliff”, which seem close to some of the Slavic meanings of a possible etymon. Using the example of this above-mentioned term, we show the difficulties encountered in trying to establish the exact source for that word, which would go beyond a mere Proto-Indo-European root etymology. A solution such as the latter would prevent us from learning about the specific loan history of the Romanian regional term bérdă.In general, it has been observed that the ambiguity of etymological solutions reveals the danger of ideologically motivated tendencies in Romanian etymology.

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