Talk:Nosferatu (word)

You dismiss the Greek origin of the word and maintain that there is no Greek word like nosophoros. I have different information, though I must admit that the time of adoption is not the last century, but some centuries back, when the influence of the Greek language on Romanian was pretty strong - via the language of the Orthodox Church. If you check an etymological dictionary, you will see that the influence of medieval Greek was very strong. Nevertheless, there seems to be not a single synonym word for vampire sounding like nosferatu or the like. None of the experts on Romanian vampire lore knows anything like it. Perhaps you have a look at the German Wikipedia s. v. "Nosferatu (Volksglaube)". (Peter Kremer)

Addendum: You claim that the word "nosophoros" is virtually unknown to the Greek language of all ages. I do not know whether you really bothered to check this in a scholarly (!) dictionary. Of course, you do not find it in the "Tourist's Concise Guide to Everyday Greek". Why not stroll to the nearest university library and have a look at Stephani's Thesaurus linguae Graeca (1844), p. 1570, or Fr. Passow, Handwörterbuch der Griechischen Sprache, Leipzig 1852, vol. II.2, p. 363 (2nd col, 1st line), or - something British for a change - H. G. Liddell & R. Scott, Greek-English Lexicon. Oxford 1996, p. 1181, 2 col., l 36. You will find - provided you can read Greek letters - both "nosophoros" and "nosephoros", both meaning "bringing the plague". By the way, could you please let me know where you picked up the information about the rules of phonological changes from Greek into Romanian? I failed to find a reference work on this topic at the "Department of Romance Studies" at the University of Cologne. (Peter Kremer, Dec 28th 2006, before midnight)

Liddell and Scott is the first place I looked, since it's kind of the standard reference - in fact there is no such word as νοσοφορος in it, but I am glad that you managed to find νοσηφορος, since I guess I hadn't checked all the possible ways that it could have been misspelled in the various vampire encyclopedias that have repeated this etymology over the years. There is a problem with it though - it's only attested in one fragmentary source (Marcellus Sidetes), and it's always hard to build a credible etymology on a "one-fragment wonder." (BTW, if you want to save yourself a walk to the library, you can search Liddell-Scott on line at perseus.org ( http://www.perseus.org/cgi-bin/ptext?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0057%3Aentry%3D%2371050")

The problem I have with this etymology is twofold. The first "fold" is simply that there is no evidence for it beyond the internal phonology and that a number of popular vampire books have repeated it as a fact, but without sourcing it. Since we do know for sure that Gerard introduced the word "nosferatu" and none of her extant works mention anything about this etymology, it was probably a hypothesis developed by a later commentator. In other words, it was just somebody's guess that was elevated to the status of fact by several decades of repetition. My guess is that it was a very early guess because it is so widespread and it _may_ have influenced Murnau, but without some kind of argument or citations, it's nothing more than a loose factoid. This would not be such a big problem though, if the phonology were convincing.

But, if you just look at the putative Greek original and the quasi-Anglo-Romanian modern form

no se^ phor os

no s fer at u

you can't help but notice that only 1 of the 4 vowels is the same, and in fact the modern form is missing that s-f vowel, so we have to account for an /s[e^]f/ elision somewhere too. If you want to propose a plausible mechanism by which omicron is reflected as /o/ /e/ and /a/ (and maybe /u/ too) in the same word, I'd like to hear it, because that would be, to put it mildly, a very unusual phonetic development in a Romance language. Or really almost any language. Of course you also have the problem that Romanian words don't commonly end with /-u/, but we can probably pass that off as a garbling of the enclitic article /-ul/. It's very tempting to see /-tu[l]/ as reflecting the morphology of a definite substantive past participle, which is why several authors have independently suggested necuratul and nesuferitul, but it's hard to advance that line beyond speculation since the phonological connection is still pretty wonky.

Then, you also might notice that the modern form has somewhere picked up a /t/. I challenge you to find any regular process from Greek to Romanian that sticks a /t/ on the end of the morpheme. You quipped about a "rulebook" for phonetic transformation - well, those actually do exist for some derivational processes (cf. Grimm's and Werner's Laws) after a fashion. It is unlikely though that anyone has done it with Greek-to-Romanian since that's not a very significant process in the formation of Romanian, but the accepted methodology is to compare other Greek loanwords and see what patterns the sound transformations follow. If you do this, you won't find anything that even remotely justifies those huge phonetic leaps that have to be made to make this etymology work.

On top of that, you have this problem that "nosephoros" was such a rare word that the only attestation Liddell-Scott could find was one occurrence in a 2nd century fragment. For all we know, the reading might not even be correct, which is something you always have to consider when you find references to unique vocabulary items in unique manuscripts. Maybe you scoff, but this honestly would not be the first time that I've had that happen.

So I stand by what I said - the authority for this nosophoros/nose^phoros derivation is nothing more than unsourced hearsay, the phonological connection is tenuous at best, the cultural context of the proposed loaning doesn't make much sense, and the supposed source word was exceptionally rare if it ever existed at all. Unsupported x improbable x questionable x rare = bogus. I left the etymology in the article because it is repeated often enough that it has to be mentioned, but it's so blatantly improbable that I can't see how we could repeat it without pointing out how and why it's so suspect, especially when more probable explanations are available (i.e. Gerard just hopelessly garbled some fairly common Romanian word) Tarchon 05:21, 21 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

And in case anybody really desperately needs to know, David J. Skal is the earliest printed source for the "nesuferit[ul]" idea that I know of, and Manuela Dunn-Mascetti is the one for "necuratul." The reason I haven't put it in the references (aside from the fact that it's kind of a low priority) is that I haven't personally been able to check them, but those are the earliest that have been pointed out to me or that I've found in various web-based sources. Additionally I've had a couple Romanians independently suggest "necurat[ul]" but I have no idea what the Wiki stance is on "private communication" references. Also, for what it's worth, I'd independently noticed the resemblance to "nesuferitul" before I'd encountered Skal's suggestion. Most Romanian speakers I've talked to seem to be a little more dubious about "nesuferitul" though, mostly because the semantic connection isn't as obvious as with "necuratul." I understand that this is very weak sourcing, which hopefully will improve, but one has to consider that this is a subject in which there are virtually no academic-quality sources. Only the primary and secondary sources, Gerard and Stoker, carry much weight, and they are cited. The position I've taken with my contributions is that none of the suggestions about the etymology that have appeared over the years are anything more than unproven and probably unprovable speculations, and the key problem discussing it is not to prove the truth of the speculations but to show that some of the oft-repeated speculations which have been claimed to be fact are highly unlikely when you take some entirely verifiable facts about linguistics into account. Tarchon 00:59, 22 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

Curiously enough, in common Italian language the latin term spirare has two completely different meanings:

• to breathe, hence Nosferatu = not breathing, as the main article says
• to pass away, hence Nosferatu = not passed away

...and the latter being by far the most common use.

The term undead doesn't exist in Italian, and may find a perfect translation in non spirato, phonetically very similar to nosferatu.

I'm not an etymologist, so I cannot judge whether this is a mere coincidence or not. And that's the reason why I'm not writing this in the main article.

Anyway my nickname is surely nothing more than a coincidence.

--User:Nosferatu it/Signature 22:13, 30 August 2007 (UTC)

That's an interesting point. It could be that the spirare etymology was originally proposed by an Italian (it has a very murky history). The problem with that as an etymology though is that there's no evidence at all that the word is Italian. You can always find similar words with similar meanings in some language somewhere. To figure out where a word comes from though you have to look at where it's been - not what it sounds like in some other language. Nosferatu also sounds like English "no suffer rat too" - obviously the character is connected with rats, so QED? Etymology is 99% about historical citations and 1% about phonology and semantics. If you have an 1850 Italian source that talks about a vampire-like "nospirato", then you've got something. Tarchon 18:50, 20 September 2007 (UTC)Reply

Why does the term Nosferatu, currently link to the article Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens? Shouldn't Nosferatu redirect to here? --Hibernian 06:35, 27 May 2007 (UTC)Reply

It's a historical thing. This started out as a section of the article on the movie and the guy keeping it apparently got annoyed with increasing length of the etymology section and pulled it out into a redirect. I would think that this is properly the main article, but I didn't want to hassle with the whole voting process. Tarchon 18:50, 20 September 2007 (UTC)Reply

Although by no means a linguist, I'd like to propose a different origin / etymology of the word:

from the ancient Greek words "νόσφι" + "ερατός" > νοσφιερατος (nosphi^era^tos), where:

• "νόσφι" (nosphi) is an adverb meaning "away from, far from, separated from" (Homer, Hesiod). See "nosphi" at Liddell-Scott on-line.
  
• "ερατός" (era^tos) is an adjective meaning "beloved / lovely". See "era^tos" at Liddell-Scott on-line
  
• Interestingly, the ancient Greek verb "νοσφίζομαι" (nosphizomai) (derived from "nosphi") means "depart from", and also metaphorically means "separate someone from life" (Euripides). See "nosphizomai" at Liddell-Scott on-line here or here.
  
  

So "νοσφιερατος" (nosphi^era^tos) would mean something like "separated / deprived from one's (life and) beloved ones". Phonetically, it is extremely close to "nosferatu" and the meaning also makes (almost perfect) sense.

I'd like to hear your comment on this :)

Bill Dekleris, 195.97.81.120 18:04, 1 September 2007 (UTC)Reply

No, I don't think you'd like to hear my comment on it. :) Tarchon 18:50, 20 September 2007 (UTC)Reply

Ignoring the snarky comments, I think that's pretty convincing. Here's a suggestion my friend and I came up with: the word "sfera" means "sphere" in Romanian. It seems reasonable to someone who doesn't know Romanian that the word "sferatu" could mean "earthly", "of this world"; and hence "no sferatu" would mean "not of this earth". Any comment from someone who knows the language?--Rfsmit (talk) 00:15, 20 August 2008 (UTC)Reply

It's just another "sound alike" hypothesis. See my comment about "no suffer rat too". There's no historical connection at all. Plus, "sferatu" isn't a word in Romanian either. Tarchon (talk) 17:49, 26 August 2008 (UTC)Reply

Actually you were wrong about it being a "sound alike" hypothesis. Perhaps you're confused by the automated translation tools on the Internet leaving words in "-tu" untranslated? "Sferatu" might not be a word in modern Romanian, but "sfera" is. The final -tu of Nosferatu looks to be a suffix, as it does in other words in "-tu". Plainly, it's a real, yet rare particle. Now, I'm not sure on this, but it appears that "-tu" is either the simple past tense, or it's equivalent to English "-er" (inceputu = begun; while desertu = deserter). (Or am I seeing "-tu" when it's actually "-u"?) So I maintain that "No-sfera-tu" looks remarkably like it could mean "otherworld-er"; or "otherworld-ed", i.e. "banished from this sphere". Now, (sigh) can a linguist comment on this please?--Rfsmit (talk) 21:53, 26 September 2008 (UTC)Reply

"-tu" isn't a suffix in itself. "Început" is a noun that means "beginning" or the p. participle of începire, "begun." "Începutul" is the definite form ("the beginning"). There is no "începutu" in standard Romanian orthography, but the 'l' in "-ul" is often dropped in speech, sometimes spelled like "începutu'". Most Romanian past participles end in "-t" (not all, but most), and the masc. definite article is "-ul", so naturally Romanian has thousands upon thousands of words that end in "-t-ul". There's no particular reason to think that Romanians go around calling vampires "the unsphered ones" though. I don't know why you can't see that you're doing "sound alike" - your whole argument is that it "looks remarkably like" this, that, and the other thing. Using the word "look" instead of "sound" doesn't make it any less of a loose appeal to coincidence. You have to cite actual cases of Romanians using word X to mean "vampire" or at least something respectably close like "Necuratul". "Nesfârşitul" ("the endless one") is really a much better fit than *nesferatul in that it actually does exist as a word, but it still lacks any citations of a relevant usage. Necuratul, nesfârşitul, nesuferitul, any one would fit to the level of accuracy in Gerard's transcription, but there's just no way to tell without more primary evidence. A (sigh) linguist is just going to tell you the same thing I'm telling you since this is all pretty straightforward linguistics. Tarchon (talk) 21:34, 10 March 2009 (UTC)Reply

Mightn't there be a dialect variant of Nesuferitul that pronounces it Nesuferîtul? Prior to a spelling reform in the 20th Century, î sounds were often written â, as they still are in reference to Romania. Might Nesuferâtul be where "Nesuferatul" would come from? 71.223.141.236 (talk) 19:49, 24 December 2007 (UTC)Reply

Yeah, I've long thought that might be the case, but that would be "original research" so we can't really point it out until someone puts it in a book somewhere. I'm sure someone will eventually take the idea from here and put it in their next "vampire lore" encyclopedia though, and then we can cite it. I have a pretty elaborate analysis of the phonology worked out that I can't use for the same reason. From that, I'm fairly convinced that it does come from nesuferitul. Tarchon (talk) —Preceding undated comment was added at 17:35, 26 August 2008 (UTC)Reply

If it's linguistically logical, and those linguistic developments have been documented, then it's not "original research" to point out each of the logical steps to reproduce it here.--Rfsmit (talk) 21:58, 26 September 2008 (UTC)Reply

Just a simple observation. The Greek word *νοσοφόρος translates to fosfer in Dutch (my home language). In English it is Phosphorus, The chemical element that has the symbol P and atomic number 15. The name comes from the Greek: φώς (meaning "light") and φόρος (meaning "bearer"). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphorus —Preceding unsigned comment added by Annehurst (talk • contribs) 03:14, 21 August 2008 (UTC) Reply

Phospohorus is φωσφόρος in Greek (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CF%86%CF%89%CF%83%CF%86%CF%8C%CF%81%CE%BF%CF%82), not νοσοφόρος. Tarchon (talk) 18:26, 26 August 2008 (UTC)Reply

A couple of points that could be relevant:

1. Romanian has words for vampire; one is "vampir", obviously, and others are "strigoi" and "moroi", both of which have Wikipedia entries that could perhaps be linked from this one.

2. Not everyone in Transylvania speaks Romanian. Some residents there speak German, Hungarian, and Romani (Gypsy language, not remotely related to Romanian), and a hundred years ago surely more, and probably Hebrew (before the Holocaust, but I don't know this for sure). Modern Romanian also has Hungarian and Turkish words, among others. Perhaps the person who referenced the word actually heard it from one of these languages. Another question, though, is that Transylvania wasn't always part of Romania. Also, there is a stereotype in some parts of Europe that all Romanians are Gypsies; perhaps the scholar in question could have confounded Romani and Romanian.

3. Just a possibility that came into my head, so, alas, it's original research: "nusfârşitul" means "the unending" in Romanian. Superstitious Romanians are known to come up with ways to describe the devil without saying "dracul". But it's hard to believe an English scholar would reference a word as being THE Romanian word for "vampire" that was a misunderstanding of real Romanian, and no one in Romania would have ever heard the misunderstood phrase used to refer to vampires, even in its correct form.

--Badmuthahubbard (talk) 22:40, 26 November 2008 (UTC)Reply

Sorry, just wanted to correct myself, the Romanian word I suggested should read "nesfârşitul", not "nusfârşitul".

Badmuthahubbard (talk) 16:26, 1 December 2008 (UTC)Reply

Yeah, I have seen nesfârşitul, and the similarity is tempting, but like you couldn't find any indication that anyone used it to mean vampir, strigoi, moroi, etc. It's not clear to me that endlessness would be a property of vampires that stood out in the mind of Romanian peasants, even if it appeals well to the modern day vampire myth. Tarchon (talk) 21:42, 10 March 2009 (UTC)Reply

My dear friend, if you don't have any ideas at all about the etymologie of european languages, why do you try to sound important and make stupid suggestions? Your suggestion that the word Nosferatu may come from Hungarian or Gypsy language is so, so incredibly stupid and proves that you don't have any knowledge and feeling that is so much needed for any scientific analyses of different languages. Please use a Latin dictionary or something and don't throw in some amateur thoughts that only achieve to confuse everybody.

"...perhaps the scholar in question could have confounded Romani and Romanian."

Not one single scholar with his brain in the right place confounds Romani with Romanian, please overthink what you said. I think this is such an insult (because of the ignorance that is needed to think such a thing) to Romanians and speakers of any Romance language, it's like saying that Swedish could be confounded with Arabic or something like that. --Pletet (talk) 21:47, 9 February 2009 (UTC)Reply

It's not so far-fetched - Gerard was just a German-speaking literary critic and novelist from Scotland, not really a specialist in East/Central European languages. I wouldn't be at all surprised if she didn't know the difference between Romanian and Gypsy/Romani speech, although she did clearly distinguish between Romanian and Gypsy ethnicities. The main reason I think it probably was Romanian is that it seems very similar to a Romanian definite past participle with the "ne-" prefix. Most Romanians seem to immediately recognize the similarity. They know it's "ne[something]tul" but they can't quite decide what would fit for the "something". Tarchon (talk) 22:02, 10 March 2009 (UTC)Reply

After quite a bit of pondering the Saxon sources, particularly the recently discovered articles by Schmidt, the only thing that makes sense to me is that nosferat/u was a Saxon misconstruction of the Romanian zburatoru, possibly via the (archaic) phase "unu zburatoru". The only sources for it are all German-speaking, but there are three of them and they all seem to be pretty convinced it's a real belief from first hand observation. Schmidt's account rather strangely starts out by saying that "nosferatu" is a vampire, but then in the description also gives the easily recognizable and standard "zburatorul" as another synonym, which is certainly a common enough Romanian term for an incubus. Gerard bowdlerizes her account of it, cutting out all of the sexual content, which is a big reason why the connection to the zburatorul is not so obvious from her writings, but it's clear from Schmidt and Wlislocki that this "nosferat" is as much incubus/succubus as it is vampire. The real clincher for me is 1770 article in Magazin für die neue Historie und Geographie (v. 4, p. 108) that describes the Moldavian "zburatorull" in terms that are uncannily similar to the Schmidt-Wlislocki nosferatu -"a haunt, a handsome young person, who falls upon young people, especially the newly engaged, by night...". This is clearly the same thing Schmidt was talking about 95 years later, albeit with some aspects of the vampire creeping into it by then. I suspect what happened with it is that zburatoru was borrowed into Saxon dialect as nosferatu and that by Schmidt's time, it had become, in effect, the Saxon word for the Romanian word for this particular species of incubus, which is why Schmidt felt the need to give us the proper Romanian term as well (perhaps not even recognizing their common origin). You can see how much more Saxonized it has become in Wlislocki in 1895. He practically treats it as being German. 03:07, 12 March 2016 (UTC)

As an example of how garbled these folklore expressions could get across the crazy mosaic of languages in the Balkans, compare Romanian zgrimințeș, a synonym for solomonari, a type of sorcerer. Zgrimințeș comes from Slavic, probably Serbo-Croatian grabancijas, which itself comes from Italian negromanzia which is a reanalysis of the Late Latin necromantia (necromancy). Tarchon (talk)

Seems to me that zburatorul could easily be the source of the "probably misheard unwritten folklore word" that became nosferatu. say zburator (which is apparently the root form) funny and it's easily sferatu. Then something something a prefix. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:449:4582:CB00:848E:88B5:CD54:523D (talk) 23:23, 28 October 2024 (UTC)Reply

Hi! im just writting my pov of the etymology of the word nosferatu.

i have done a reasearch in wiki here are my results:

Nos- fera-tu

(1) Nos- means in ProtoGermanic,Czech,Polish,Serbo-Croatian= nose(!). and in Welsh = night http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nasa , http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nos (2)fera- means in Latin= wild animal.(!) http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fera (3) in Old Irish= man.

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fer

(4)tu-means in Latin,French,Italian,Romanian,Romani = you(thou). but also (5) means in Czech= here. and (6) means in Croatian=there. http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tu

So i think that Nosferatu could propably mean you(thou),the wild animal(beast,savage) with the nose according with 1,2,4

                                              you(thou),the man with the nose  according with 1,3,4 

Also Romanian language is a based in Latin lamguage and Latin is based in Greek. So -fera might comes from the Greek φέρω(fero)= bear,bring like νοσοφόρος(nosoforos)-the bearer of the disease. I think that if we dlike to adoupt the idea that -fera=to bear, according with the above would be you(thou), the nose bearer but ithink is funny so i dont think it would be right even if Nosferatu has al ong and terryfying nose in that case dont match. Also the idea that the meaning could be "not of this earth" as someone mentioned has a connection with(5) so it could be "not from here".( not from the living world).Finally according with Welsh translation of Nos=night, you(thou),who bears/brings the night( the night bearer).

Propably could be the first one you(thou),the wild animal(beast,savage) with the (terryfying,ugly,horrible)nose or you(thou),who bears/brings the night( the night bearer) or even you(thou),the disease bearer( if Nos-=νόσος(disease))

For the Nos- , im sure that means nose in this case. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.72.183.35 (talk) 05:52, 15 August 2009 (UTC)Reply

Although it has nothing to do with vampires i'd like to add that 'tu' means 'here' not only in Czech but also in Polish (I'm Polish therefore I know).80.50.140.198 (talk) 01:35, 7 April 2012 (UTC)Reply

Based on the article and the first comments, it appears that this article is based to a non-trivial degree on original research or (for WP) undue synthesis. I have added the original-research tag. 94.220.254.157 (talk) 20:25, 2 March 2010 (UTC)Reply

If Emily Gerard just made up an impressive sounding word and declared it Romanian (to a readership of which the vast majority could not understand a word of Romanian). 82.153.198.135 (talk) 12:49, 17 June 2010 (UTC)Reply

If Nos is merely an abomination for Narem, and if feratu is an abomination of Feritu (a swift strike), clearly a fourth declension noun in Latin, it is clear that [Aliquis] Qui Nosferatu is merely a corruption of [Aliquis] Qui Naremferitu, someone who punches someone else in the nose. Clearly abominable! 216.99.201.236 (talk) 07:58, 10 September 2011 (UTC)Reply

I'm talking about the one suggesting the individual syllables from a Latin standpoint, "nos/noster tu fera" "you are our wild beast". This etymology suggested seems improbable, due to the fact that it is unlikely Romanian would have preserved a Latin construction so conservatively for this word, considering the way the rest of the language evolved. In addition, each of the Latin words led to a different Romanian word that has changed phonetically over time, except for 'tu'. Nos (noster) -> 'nostru, noastră' ("our"), Fera -> 'fiară' ("wild beast"). Word dewd544 (talk) 14:21, 29 October 2011 (UTC)Reply

That would be nostra tu fera, and only in the most effete Classical Latin. Vulgarly, you'd never split the NP like that, more like "tu fera nostra". Valde dubito. Tarchon (talk) 00:52, 23 February 2016 (UTC)Reply

I could be wrong about this but in Italian does "Nos" not mean "Our" or something like that and in some other language does "Feratu" mean "Fair Lady"? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Domicrow1 (talk • contribs) 21:17, 23 June 2012 (UTC)Reply

My take on the etymology is that it comes from the Latin "non speratus" meaning "the one who is not to be hoped for", i.e. a terrible demon whose name must not be uttered for fear of the consequences, but who has to be referred to in this understated but devastating way.Iconophile Cawkwell (talk) 08:29, 20 October 2014 (UTC)Tim Cawkwell, Norwich, UKReply

The last phrase in the article ("considering that the pre-reform Romanian writing accepted the circumflex diacritic â as a variant of î (România → Romînia), so that the word might have been transcribed as nesuferatu.") makes absolutely no sense and should be removed. It is true that â and î were used interchangeably to denote the high central vowel phoneme of Romanian /ɨ/. However, /ɨ/ is a completely different sound than /i/ and the word nesuferit(ul) has an /i/, not an /ɨ/, so there is absolutely no chance that it would be written with an a. With respect, that statement can only have been conceived by someone who does not have a clear understanding of phonology and specifically of Romanian phonology. See Romanian_phonology#Vowels. Pasquale (talk) 16:45, 5 November 2017 (UTC)Reply

• It's partly a victim of edit entropy over the years, as is a lot of the article, but German and English authors are the only primary sources, and they had very little awareness of Romanian orthographic standards and diacritics, so the original point was that "nosferatu" could reflect an -âtu/-îtu form. I agree it doesn't particularly support the nesuferit origin very well. Maybe I will just take it out entirely since it doesn't really point to anything useful anymore. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.181.67.17 (talk) 00:10, 9 May 2020 (UTC)Reply

According toTheresa Bane's 2010 Encyclopedia of Vampire Mythology, "Nosferatu" is the plural form of Nosferat (“plague carrier”) and cites four sources for this. It also presents "Necuratul" (“unclean one”) as a variant. The listing make no statement about the language the word is from.--2606:A000:7D44:100:886A:EC5A:473A:5345 (talk) 03:00, 18 December 2017 (UTC)Reply

No, if we're talking romanian, the u at the end would be the shortened version of the definite article "-ul". The most likely origin imo is the word "nesuferat" (literally insufferable, but also used for diseased or otherwise distasteful individuals), which completed with the shortened definite article gives Nesuferatu'. TheBlackCaiman (talk) 10:43, 2 November 2024 (UTC)Reply

Strangely, the article does not mention the latin form "non expiratus" or "non feratus" (not dead). Being italian, the word Nosferatu immediately recalls the italian expression "non spirato" (not dead, derived from the above-mentioned non expiratus) to me so I always thought it came from there. The possible latin origin is mentioned in this book on vampirism by Alessandro Norsa:

https://books.google.it/books?id=aQDHDgAAQBAJ&pg=PT37&lpg=PT37&dq=non+expiratus&source=bl&ots=iZkUlUnrSB&sig=J9o9on7zoQ8H_zJl83DzM99GhTM&hl=it&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj4rc_9v4jcAhXMzqQKHVf0CTUQ6AEILjAB#v=onepage&q=non%20expiratus&f=false

--NuM3tal95 (talk) 17:41, 5 July 2018 (UTC)Reply

I am surprised the article has considered the lesser relation of the Greek word nosophoros (νοσοφόρος) but ignores the stonger and more probable relation to another Greek word, νόσφιν (nosfin), and its various derivatives.

The following definitions can be readily found in the online Greek-English Lexicon:"Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon", from the Perseus Digital Library.

νόσφιν (nosfin): far from, aloof, apart, forsaken, secretly (!).

νοσφίδιος (nosfidios): clandestine (!) (i.e. something planned or done in secret).

νοσφιδόν (nosfidon): by stealth (!).

νοσφίζω (nosfizo): turn away, shrink back, foresake, abandon, separate, remove, deprive, rob.

νοσφίζομαι (nosfizomai): separate, to turn one's back upon, depart from, to deprive.

νοσφιστής (nosfistes): speculator (i.e. stealer).

νοσφισμός (nosfismos): absence.

From the above definitions it is clear that there seems to be some correlation between the meanings of the above words and the nature of a vampire, that is:

far away, forsaken, secretly, clandestine, by stealth, abandoned, departed, to steal, to be absent.

Also notice that the above words are not compound words (except νοσφίδιος), that is they have only one synthetic, the word nosfi. A second word is not added after nosfi. Only their endings change according to grammar, being either a verb or an adverb, an adjective, a noun, and so on.

Any comments?

Ate Nike (talk) 20:12, 23 October 2021 (UTC)Reply

In response to former Mayor of New York City Rudy Giuliani's comment on his podcast "Common Sense", in which he asks, "Why doesn't he leave this country and take a knee somewhere else?", Eminem released a parody diss verse to the backing track of his 2002 hit song "Lose Yourself". The verse was debuted on The Late Show in February 2022, and compared Giuliani to "a less ethical Nosferatu". DezzyDezz (talk) 22:29, 20 February 2022 (UTC)Reply

https://www.estrellos.com/view.php?star=Nosferatu 2001:861:3B80:7080:E70B:912:88C2:E295 (talk) 02:02, 1 August 2024 (UTC)Reply

Phonologically, nesuferitu` is by far the closest match to "Nosferatu" in modern Romanian language. The meaning of nesuferitu` as someone who is detestable, insufferable, or intolerable further strengthens the case for it as the origin of "Nosferatu". However, in everyday usage, it would be unheard of to use nesuferitu` when referring to vampires or any fictional or spiritual beings. The word that you would be using is nefârtatu`, which is a synonym, common in rural areas, for drac, a male devil/demon. But phonologically, nefârtatu` starts to move away from "Nosferatu". So for this Romanian speaker at least, both words can lay a strong claim as the origin of "Nosferatu". 50.233.194.34 (talk) 21:47, 16 November 2024 (UTC)Reply