Piconi said:
As long as i was able to remember stuff,i remember Vampir being a Serbian word. Even that the first "vampire" was actually serbian, village in part of banat That and Tesla might be the only 2 serbian words that will be used worldwide by everyone.
The word as it is vampir entering to European languages via Serbian is well recorded, there is no arguement at that. The question is the origin of that.
Also this might be a purely slavic thing, because there were mention of upyr practices in old russian writings from 11th century.
Might be the other way arround probably, having date in mind, slavic into turkic.
Russian displays two forms of the word under discussion:vampir and upyr‘, which are assumed to be etymologically related.
As for the former, it represents a recent borrowing either from French vampire or from German Vampir and semantically displays draculesque connotations.
As mentioned above, this term ultimately came to European languages from Serbian.
The form upyr‘ is documented in East Slavic Kievan sources already in the 11th century(as you have already said), as a proper name. Slavists, combining the forms vampir and upyr‘,constructed a Slavic protoform *ǫpy/irь that legitimizes the occurrence of the nasal bilabial consonant -m - at the end of the first sylable of the form
vampir
However, even though the reconstructed Slavic protoform has been accepted, its final etymology is still debated. None of the standard Slavic etymological dictionaries proposes a satisfactory Slavic explanation of this form.
As for Slavic languages spoken in the Balkan area, it is interesting to note that Bulgarian displays several dialectal variants of this word such as vapir, vipir, lepir, upir, vyper, voper, vapirin and vampir. (Remember Bulgars were initially a Oghur Turkic speaking tribe that languages closest relative today is Chuvash Turkic)
From the Turkic perspective, the etymology of the terms vampir and upir’ and their relation is more straightforward. Turkic languages display a verbal stem
oop
- whose original meaning is
«to gulp down, to swallow». This verb is already documented in Old Turkic
sources and originally displayed a long vowel: *
oop
also Yakut
uop
Derived forms from the verb *
oop
- are richly attested throughout Turkic, both synchronically and diachronically. The root *
oop
- occurs with
various «agent-like» suffixes to form nominals
Some examples from Southeastern (Oghuz)Turkic languages are: Turkish, Azeri and Turkmen
obur
«glutton» (*
oop
-
plus the aorist participle
-(V)r
, i.e. literally «the swallower, somebody
who gulps down»).
As for northwestern (Kipchak) Turkic languages,compare the following entries:
Kazakh
op
- «to eat up, gorge, swallow»,
obïr
«glutton, insatiable, vampire»,
Kirghiz
obur
«glutton», Balkar
obur
«sorcerer», Karachay
obur
«witch», Kymyk
obor
«evil, deceptive»,
Tatar
ubïr
«werewolf, vampire», (Russian)
upyr’
, and
upkïn
«abyss, gorge».
With respect to Southeast (Karluk) Turkic, modern Uyghur displays the
following three forms:
opqan
«glutton, someone who greedily devours
absolutely anything that’s edible»,
opkun
«vortex, whirlpool» and
opqur
«insatiable».
Some examples from Siberian Turkic languages are:
Teleut
opkun
and
opkuš
«vortex»,
Yakut
uop
- «take to the mouth»,
uobuu
«Nomen actoris from
uop
-»,
Dolgan
uopča
«bite, morsel (of food)».
As for Chuvash, the only modern descendent of Bulghar (Oghur) Turkic, it displays several forms derived from
*oop
, which are highly inter-
esting for the present etymological discussion. Chuvash also preserves traces of Turkic primary long vowels, though not systematically. In some
instances *
Chuvash displays the following deverbal nominals from
pt
*
oop
-: the
form
vupăr
~
vopăr
22
is used to refer to evil spirits, whereas
vupkăn
~
vopkăn
is used with reference to «glutton», «illness», «vortex» and also «fairy-tale figure».
These examples should suffice to demonstrate that all Slavic forms cognate of Russian opyr’ have a Turkic origin. It should not be forgotten
that at the time of the Kiev Russians, various Turkic groups were roaming Eurasian steppes. Besides, the usage of a term of foreign origin to
refer to a tabooed term is a common phenomenon in world languages.
Now, is the Serbian word vampir also a Turkic loanword?
Now, is the Serbian word vampir also a Turkic loanword ? To start with, Skok explains this word as a substitute word for the tabooed lexical item vukodlak
«werewolf», a Slavic word («wolf» plus«pelt»). Besides, important for this discussion is the wide range of variants displayed in Bulgarian. Among those variants
vapir
,
vipir
,
viper
and
voper
can be traced back to a Chuvash-type Turkic language, especially viewing that Turkic Oghur groups had appeared in the 5th century at the northern borders of Bysans and that in the first half of the 6th century they often were in the Balkan and in Thracia. Subsequently, conspicuous groups of Bulgar (Oghur) origin came to present day Bulgaria in the 7th century lead by Asparuch, fleeing from the Volga Bulgarian Empire in a time when it was subjugated to Khazar hegemony.
Within two centuries, however, these Turkic peoples got completely slavicized. Note that modern Bulgarian displays some Turkic substrate features, besides the proper name Bulgaria of the country. The form
vam-pir
differs from
vo-pur
merely for the presence of the bilabial nasal consonant m at the end of the first syllable. The occurence of this consonant could be explained as a feature of the Balcan Sprachbund. This assumption is supported by evidence from Bulgarian, where, for instance, forms such as
vapor
and
vampor
«steamboat» are
variants. The modern Greek spelling
mp
for the sound
b
, e.g. μπύρα
for
spoken
bira
«beer» may also belong here.
Another Turkic etymological proposal, would view vampir as derived from
oop
- plus the deverbal nominal suffix -
GUr
which occurs in South Siberian and Southeastern Turkic languages as well as in Khalaj in this respect the Uyghur example opqur quoted above. The diachronic paths, characterized by dissimulations and assimilations from a basic Chuvash-type form, would then be:
vam-pir
< *
vappir
< *
vapkir
< *
vup-
kor
,
ultimately going back to *oop-GUr
o conclude, the wide range of examples cited above shows that meanings such a «glutton», «evil spirits/demons» and «evil creatures that
suck like vampires» are semantically closely linked. They have clearly developed from the basic Turkic verbal stem
oop
- «to swallow, to gulp
down». Furthermore, in some languages, derivates of *
oop
- were generalized to evil kinds of demons, losing any semantic connection with the primary idea of sucking.
Banned
