Dialectologie și toponimie: corelații diatopice și semantice (terminologia formelor de relief)
Authors:   Institutul de Filologie Română „Alexandru Philippide” al Academiei Române – Filiala Iași, Ciubotaru Mircea 
Published: February 2024

NALR-Mold.Bucov., vol. V, 2022, includes several maps, but also unmapped materials from the onomasiological group of landform terminology, which also involves some aspects of Romanian toponyms. The territorial distribution covered by these materials sheds light on their diachronic relationship with the corresponding names of Slavic or pseudo-Slavic origins, as mentioned by Emil Petrovici, and highlights either the popular or the cultivated character of some formal variants. Thus, the names Calea or Drumul lui Traian are confirmed as learned forms, promoted by the Transylvanian anthroponymy and the ideology of the 19th century, while the historical documents in Moldova and Bucovina attest the pop. ent. form Trojan.
There are no survey points in the NALR that list the meaning of “defence wave” or “ditch, gully, log” attached to the recorded appellative “trojan”. Obviously, this meaning has long been forgotten. Romanian entopics for the semantic field meaning “passing through high and narrow places” are newer than prislop (or prihodiște), and are the result of either figurative meanings (i.e., scară, șa, tarniță) or post-verbal derivatives (i.e., curmătură, trecătoare). Pas is a geographical neologism (from germ. Pass) and only strungă (”lathe”), from the substrate, is archaic, but still with figurative meaning as an entopic and toponym.
The most reliable argument that would prove the origin and antiquity of the Romanian toponyms derived from foreign words is their positioning in “usually purely Romanian toponymic areas”, as E. Petrovici noticed. Thus, the oronym Prislopul Secului cannot be considered Romanian only by considering its very close proximity to Gura Breazii, Măgura, Feredeu, Opcina Mare, Neagra, Straja, etc.
The fact that the toponym Prislop appears, as a rule, in the mountainous areas of the Carpathians is evident, given its entopic meaning, but the only place named Prislop in the hilly area between Siret and Prut, from about 4 km north of the village of Tansa, Iași county, should be pointed out, the oronym being attested since 1706. The rare and late habitation in this area, dating perhaps from the 13th century, as well as the isolation of the place, wooded and uninhabited before 1400, are circumstances that do not support a Slavic etymon of the toponym. NALR-Muntenia and Dobrogea, vol. IV, indicates the presence of ent. prislop (prizlop) in Vâlcea, Argeș and Prahova counties, in only eight localities of the Northern areas, but there is no trace of this word in Dobrogea. E. Petrovici uses material from ALR to restrict the geographical spread of the ent. tarniță ῾șa᾽ to only two areas – a larger one, including the Romanian Bucovina, the North of Neamț county, and the Maramureș, and a narrower one, in the Apuseni Mountains, at Abrud and to the North of this location, with only one record of the meaning of “passing”, at Pipirig, Neamț county. In reality, the spread of the appellative tarnița, which has extensions into the Ukrainian Bucovina, and of its figurative entopic is proven by the presence of the corresponding toponyms in a larger area, found in the Tarnița villages in the regions of Southern and Southwestern Romania, in Argeș, Hunedoara and Mehedinți counties. The de-semanticization and narrowing of the areas of the old appellatives and entopics from the class of terms referring to places of passage over the high ridges will continue, but the witnesses of semantic erosion, the toponyms (oiconyms, oronyms and hodonyms), will remain untouched by the passage of time.