ROMANIAN help for AmE speaker: some vocabulary translations, plus a breakdown of "negru ca abanosul

[runa27]

So, I'm going to be teaching myself Romanian in the future, because a.) it's a beautiful and intriguing language with a rich and interesting history and b.) I have a story set in Romania using (naturally) some Romanian characters and it's nowhere near close enough to the Spanish I've studied previously for me to "get by" in some of my resources

Comments

[turquoiseyes]

Well, as far as "abanosul" goes, it could actually be the word that means "ebony" in Romanian. The only reference I have to that, though, is that in Eastern Europe, "abonos" is the term used for "ebony" and "abanosul" is pretty much a Romanian spelling of the same...I hope I'm not completely wrong on that one, though, so further inquiry would be great :)

[runa27]

I was wondering if that was the case, too. I didn't know about abonos, but it makes intuitive sense (fairly close to ebony, plus knowing negru means black...). Also, the EUdict reference specifically uses jet-black and ebony (-colored), making me wonder now if it's literally black as ebony.

I wonder if the reason I wasn't able to find abanosul, is that it is one of those words that is conjugated? (Er, can you "conjugate" something that isn't a verb? Ugh, I need to brush up on my grammatical terms). Hmm...

Actually, that may well be the case! Granted, this is a user-generated dictionary, so I'm taking everything with a grain of salt until I hear from somebody fluent. But it looks like abanos refers to the ebony wood/tree. It also looks like lemn may also refer to more generic wood, given some of the other results when I click on the "abanos (lemn.)" reference, so that would mean that indeed abanos literally translates as ebony?

Wonder if this means Abanosescu would be a good derived surname? Which would be neat, as it's close to

[turquoiseyes]

Heh, my own grammatical terms(and especially the ones in English) are pretty much non-existent. I forgot the simplest of terms as for me the intuitive method works best when learning any foreign tongue and not burdening my weak lil' brain with all those terms :)

"Abanosul" may well be a sort-of-conjugation in relation to the description "the color of [ebony]" where it changed it's form from "abanos", depicting the tree/gem to a more descriptive form, something like saying "ebony-ish" in a way, but that's just me guessing.

As for the surname, I can't really help much there, but from a completely unprofessional point of view, it sort of doesn't seem right? As if it should be rather Abanoscu instead of Abanosescu? As I said, it's completely unprofessional and I have little to no knowledge of how you'd make a believable Romanian surname so I say if you still feel iffy about it, ask around some more, or if your time is running out, go for it and wait and see if the editors will comment anything on it. You could probably even prompt them

[runa27]

Well, it's specifically escu, not scu, that means "patriarchal origin", as it were. An excellent example of what I'm talking about that should clarify it:

Ion is the Romanian equivalent of the name John. The very common Romanian surname Ionescu is the literal equivalent of Johnson (a variant of the same is Enescu).

But, by the same token, I have seen some names that seem like they might not be from literal names of patriarchs, like Lupescu (from the word for wolf), so I kind of have this assumption that "if it was a plausible nickname or appellate for a patriarch, it might still get that suffix, or to have mutated into such". But then, there are other surnames in Romanian that don't have escu on the end, too. I haven't run across them as commonly, but they do exist

[muckefuck]

Checking in, I noticed that no one has stepped forward to answer your other questions. My knowledge of Rumanian is pretty superficial, but maybe I can offer some assistance all the same.

Selena is the name of a Rumanian pop singer, so I assume this would be the preferred form of the name in the language.

Felinescu looks like an invented name, but perhaps that's what you're going for? There is at least one person on Facebook using it. Similarly Pisichescu (from pisic "kitten") gets a few hits. On the other hand, Motanescu (from motan "tomcat") looks like a genuine surname, but the association may be too subtle for the effect you want.

Mic (with article: micul) is the masculine singular form of the word for "little". Miko recalls Мико, the Ukrainian equivalent to Nicu.

Hoshima doesn't seem to resemble any common Rumanian word.

[runa27]

Thank you! :D