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The name "Nosferatu" has been presented as possibly an archaic Romanian word, synonymous with "vampire". However, it was largely popularized in the late nineteenth century by Western fiction such as ''Dracula''. Probable etymology of the term might be derived from the Romanian ''Nesuferitu'' ("the insufferable/repugnant one") or ''Necuratu'' ("the unclean one, ''spiritus immundus''"), terms typically used in vernacular Romanian to designate Satan (the Devil). == Origins of the name == The etymological origins of the word ''nosferatu'' are difficult to determine. There is no doubt that it achieved popular currency through Bram Stoker's 1897 novel ''Dracula'' and its unauthorised cinematic adaptation, ''Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens'' (1922). Stoker identified his source for the term as 19th-century British author and speaker Emily Gerard. It is commonly thought that Gerard introduced the word into print in an 1885 magazine article, "Transylvanian Superstitions", and in her travelogue ''The Land Beyond the Forest'' ("Transylvania" is Latin for "beyond the forest", literally "across/through the forest"). She merely refers to it as the Romanian word for vampire: "More decidedly evil is the ''nosferatu'', or vampire, in which every Roumanian peasant believes as firmly as he does in Heaven or Hell." However, the word had already appeared in an 1865 German-language article by Wilhelm Schmidt.〔Hogg, Anthony (2011). "(Unearthing Nosferau )", ''Diary of an Amateur Vampirologist'', 28 February. Accessed 28 March 2011. The article in question is Wilhelm Schmidt, "Das Jahr und seine Tage in Meinung und Brauch der Rumänen Siebenbürgens", ''Österreichische Revue'', 3(1):211–226.〕 Schmidt's article discusses Transylvanian customs and appeared in an Austro-Hungarian magazine, which Gerard could have encountered as a reviewer of German literature living in Austria-Hungary. Schmidt's article also mentions the legendary Scholomance by name, which parallels Gerard's "Transylvanian Superstitions".〔 Schmidt does not identify the language explicitly, but he puts the word ''nosferatu'' in a typeface which indicates it to be a language other than German. ''Nosferatu'' does not correspond to any existing word in the Romanian language in any historical phase (aside from that introduced by the novel and the films). Internal evidence in ''Dracula'' suggests that Stoker believed the term meant "not dead" in Romanian, and thus he may have intended the word ''undead'' to be its calque.〔"For all that die from the preying of the Un-dead become themselves Un-dead, and prey on their kind. And so the circle goes on ever widening, like as the ripples from a stone thrown in the water. Friend Arthur, if you had met that kiss which you know of before poor Lucy die, or again, last night when you open your arms to her, you would in time, when you had died, have become nosferatu, as they call it in Eastern Europe, and would for all time make more of those Un-Deads that so have filled us with horror." (Stoker 1897). This seems to be the motivation for Leonard Wolf to gloss ''nosferatu'' as "not dead." (Stoker, Wolf 1975)〕 Peter Haining identifies an earlier source for ''nosferatu'' as ''Roumanian Superstitions'' (1861) by Heinrich von Wlislocki. However, Wlislocki seems only to have written in German, and according to the ''Magyar Néprajzi Lexikon'', Wlislocki was born in 1856 (d. 1907), which makes his authorship of an English-titled 1861 source doubtful. Certain details of Haining's citation also conflict with David J. Skal,〔 so this citation seems unreliable. Skal identifies a similar reference to the word "nosferat" in an article by Wlislocki dating from 1896. Since this postdates Gerard and has a number of parallels to Gerard's work, Skal considers it likely that Wlislocki is derivative from Gerard. There is also evidence to suggest that Haining derived his citation for ''Roumanian Superstitions'' from a confused reading of an extract in Ernest Jones's 1931 book, ''On the Nightmare''.〔Hogg, Anthony (2010). "Examining Roumanian Superstitions." ''Diary of an Amateur Vampirologist'', August 22. Accessed 28 March 2011.〕 Gerard's claim that ''nosferatu'' was Romanian might be incorrect. If the assumption is incorrect, then research into the etymology of the term needs to start by identifying the domain-language. A leading alternative etymology is that the term originally came from the Greek * ''nosophoros'' ( *νοσοφόρος), meaning "disease-bearing". F. W. Murnau's classic film ''Nosferatu'' strongly emphasizes this theme of disease, and Murnau's creative direction in the film may have been influenced by this etymology (or ''vice versa''). However, several difficulties with this explanation should be noted. Gerard clearly identified the word as Romanian and proponents of the "nosophoros" etymology (as well as most other commentators) seem to have little doubt that this is correct, even though Gerard's limited familiarity with the language gives her little authority on that point. If this Romanian identification is taken to be correct, the first objection to the "nosophoros" etymology is that Romanian is a Romance language. While Romanian does have some words borrowed from Greek, as do most European languages, Greek is generally considered to be only a minor contributor to the Romanian vocabulary—absent any other information, any given Romanian word is much more likely to be of Latin origin than Greek. Second, while *νοσοφόρος would be a regular compound according to the conventions of Greek morphology, the word itself is not known in any historical phases of the Greek language. That is to say, the word *νοσοφόρος simply is not known to have ever existed in Greek, which would seem to make the burden of proof rather high for proposing it to have been the original form of another word in an entirely different language. One instance of a Greek word similar to *νοσοφόρος, νοσηφόρος ("nosēphoros"), is attested in fragments from a 2nd-century AD work by Marcellus Sidetes on medicine plus another of the Ionic dialect variant νουσοφόρος ("nousophoros") from the ''Palatine Anthology'', but the supporting evidence for a relationship between this apparently very rare term and ''nosferatu ''is still very weak. The glaring difficulty with the *νοσοφόρος etymology is that no source has ever presented an argument for it any more substantial than that the two words, one of which may not have even existed, are vaguely similar in sound and meaning. No derivation has been proposed that would accord with a regular derivational process, and no citations of any intermediate forms in primary sources have ever been presented. In some versions of the "nosophoros" etymology, an intermediate form '' *nesufur-atu'',〔 or sometimes '' *nosufur-atu'' is presented〔 but both the original source for this and the justification for it are unclear. This form is often indicated to be Slavonic or Slavic. It is likely that either Old Church Slavonic or the protolanguage Proto-Slavic is intended. As with *νοσοφόρος, this supposed Slavonic word does not appear to be attested in primary sources, which severely undermines the credibility of the argument. Another common etymology suggests that the word meant "not breathing", which appears to be attempting to read a derivative of the Latin verb ''spirare'' ("to breathe") as a second morpheme in ''nosferatu''. Skal notes that this is "without basis in lexicography", viewing all these etymological attempts with similar skepticism.〔 Nosferatu could also be a combination of the Latin words ''nox''(night) and ''fero'' (to bring,carry), literally translated as 'the bringer of night' A final possibility is that the form Gerard gave is a well-known Romanian term without the benefit of normalized spelling, or possibly a misinterpretation of the sounds of the word due to Gerard's limited familiarity with the language, or possibly a dialectical variant of the word. Two candidate words that have been put forth are ''necurat'' ("unclean", usually associated with the occult) and ''nesuferit'' ("the insufferable").〔 The nominative masculine definite form of a Romanian noun in the declension to which both words belong takes the ending "-ul" or even the shortened "u", as in Romanian "l" is usually lost in the process of speaking, so the definite forms ''necuratu'', ''nesuferitu'' and ''nefârtatu'' are commonly encountered (translatable as "the unclean", "the insufferable one", and "the devil", respectively). ''Nesuferitu'' seems an even more likely candidate of all the three considering that the pre-reform Romanian writing accepted the circumflex diacritic ''â'' as a variant of ''î'' (''România'' → ''Romînia''), therefore the word might have been transcribed as ''nesuferatu''. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Nosferatu (word)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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