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Re: Positive - Comparative - Superlative

From:Irina Rempt <ira@...>
Date:Tuesday, March 20, 2001, 22:30
On Tue, 20 Mar 2001, jesse stephen bangs wrote:

> Mangiat sikayal:
> > Latin had prae-: > > > > clarus > > praeclarus = clarissimus > > Oh! Well that explains the Romanian prefix pre- that I've always wondered > about. You see it mostly in prayers: 'Presfântul Tatã' = Most Holy > Father, and stuff like that.
That could also be from Church Slavonic; many explicitly Orthodox Romanian terms are Slavonic borrowings (I wrote a paper about that once, when I was studying Romanian, but didn't keep it, worse luck). For instance when commemorating the Mother of God: "presvyatuyu, prec^istuyu, preblagoslovennuyu vladic^itsu nas^u..." "to our most holy, most chaste, most blessed Queen..." (pardon my transcription, I can do it in Cyrillic and Dutch but I've never tried in English before; the ^ after a consonant stands in for a hac^ek above it) Irina -- Varsinen an laynynay, saraz no arlet rastynay. irina@valdyas.org (myself) http://www.valdyas.org/irina/valdyas