LIETUVIŲ KALBOTYROS KLAUSIMAI, VI LIETUVOS TSR MOKSLŲ AKADEMIJA

ON THE ORIGIN OF MOLD. AND ROM. DOINA

G. BOGACI

Since the middle of the previous century, the term doina, as the name of a distinct song and musical genre of pre-Romanian folklore, has become firmly established in folklore studies and general usage. Admittedly, both Vasile Alecsandri, compiler of the first collection of Romanian folk songs (1852), who gave the term wide currency, and almost all subsequent cultural figures took only its literary criterion into account when defining the genre. For a long time, this word, borrowed from the folk terminology of Moldavia, referred to any lyrical work, usually in a minor key, distinguished by its text from heroic-epic poems and from ritual, calendar, and dance songs. At that time, in the second half of the 19th century and the first decades of our century, the time had not yet come to study the melody and structure of vocal and instrumental doina, its range, stages of development, functions, performance characteristics, and other issues.

While domestic folklore studies were still accumulating facts for future generalizations, a substantial study of the origin of the name itself appeared in 1875. B. Petriceicu Hasdeu, a graduate of Kharkov University and a prominent Moldavian-Romanian philologist, proposed an etymology of the term and established links with its distant cognates. Hasdeu considered the word to be of Thracian (Dacian) origin. It is related, he wrote, to Celtic-Irish dan “song, poem” and Persian danah “a song performed by women.” Both forms presuppose the Sanskrit word dana “song, sound” as their common etymon. Other cognates of this term are Zend daēnā “song” and Armenian den, but closest of all, of course, is Lithuanian daina “song.”

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(At that time, no one could yet have been concerned with the history of this same word in Latvian)¹.

“The Dacians and Lithuanians,” Hasdeu wrote, “are therefore the only peoples who have preserved unchanged the meaning and form of the word daina—the finest legacy of the original Indo-European language, a legacy that is much earlier evidence of the kinship of our ancestors than the most ancient lapidary inscriptions”...²

The Moldavian-Romanian scholar also raised the question of whether the term might have been borrowed by the Lithuanians (from the Romanians). He noted that the Slavs have no such word and, moreover, that Moldavians and Lithuanians had once lived “in proximity.” But Hasdeu immediately rejected this possibility: names for folk songs are not borrowed, he maintained; furthermore, the appearance of -i- in Lithuanian daina (as compared with Sanskrit dana) can be explained by the laws governing the development of Lithuanian itself³. This scholar did not raise the question of the Romanians themselves having borrowed the word from the Lithuanians.

Hasdeu’s views and arguments concerning the Thracian origin of the term doina were preceded in scholarship by an explanation offered by Dimitrie Cantemir (1672–1723). According to this outstanding Moldavian scholar, doina was the name of a Dacian “god of war.” In a note to his text, Cantemir observed that the word usually appears at the beginning of “men’s” songs (in terms of performance), that is, that the invocation of this deity serves as a kind of invocation⁴. Cantemir’s testimony that the word occurred in the opening formula of songs (which, in his view, were exclusively martial in character) was confirmed by later folklore records. Indeed, the word occurs in the openings of doinas, which sometimes consist of a series of disyllabic or monosyllabic exclamations, including openings that have become optional in some places. Admittedly, in various phonetic forms and in different rhythmic and accentual positions, it is also found in the opening lines not only of doinas but of other genres, including ritual ones. Thus, in the northern part of the Daco-Romanian territory, in Maramureș, the forms dăina, dŭină; dui, dui, dui; are current; in Transylvania: dăină, dăina; ăi-nam – dăinam; ěi-nu – duinu; dăina-le; dăina-mă; ăină-dăină; dăina-dăină. In Moldavia, doina and the diminutive doinița. are current.

¹ The first introduction of the term daina into general use in 1893 by Krišjānis Barons, at the insistence of the publisher Wissendorff, and the arguments in favor of its introduction put forward by J. Lautenbach and J. Sander met with strong opposition from P. Šmits and J. Sirmāis: P. Šmits, Par jauno tautas dziesmu krājumu. „Mājas Viesis”, 1893, p. 50; J. Sirmāis, Mūsu tautas dziesmu jaunākais izdevums, „Dienas Lapa”, 1894, pp. 212—215. We owe this information to the Riga folklorist M. Beitinya, to whom we extend our sincere gratitude.

² B. Petriceicu Hasdeu, Principie de filologia comparativa arioeuropea cuprindênd grupurile indo-perso-tracice, greco-italo-celtic și leto-slavo-germanic cu aplicăciuni la istoria limbii romane. Curs ținut la Facultatea de Litere și Filosofía din București, I, 1875, pp. 28—29.

³ Ibidem, pp. 26—27.

⁴ Димитрий Кантемир, Дескрипция Молдовей, Кишинэу, 1957, стр. 197.

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Only in Moldavia, Bukovina, and Maramureș does the word doina and its variants occur as a term denoting a musical song genre. In Transylvania the word is used only in openings. In other areas of the Dacoromanian language, doina is unknown as a term: it is not used at all in Muntenia, Oltenia, Banat, or Dobruja⁵.

Cantemir’s view that the musical genre and its name were originally military in character found followers in the nineteenth century as well: this was the view of Iordachi Mălinescu and the well-known Moldavian writer C. Negruzzi, who even composed three march-like “doinas,” passing them off as folk songs.

The argument of Hasdeu, who substantiated Cantemir’s view in keeping with the level of scholarship of his time⁶, did not, however, convince any of the later scholars. Both before and after Hasdeu (though without engaging in polemic with him), researchers sought the word’s origin in other languages: Latin donativum ‘a gift received by a Roman soldier after a battle’ (!), Latin Diana ‘protectress of hunters’ (and, consequently, of warriors), Danubius ‘the Danube’. All three proposals were put forward in 1842 by the amateur Iordachi Mălinescu⁷. Others sought the etymon in Slavic languages: Slavic двойница ‘double spindle-whorl, double distaff’—A. Cihac⁸; Russian дуть, дунуть—K. N. Burileanu⁹. Other philological scholars derived the word from Greek δην, δαν—the Doric name for ‘Jupiter’—as did Petru Maior¹⁰, but more often they derived it from Latin: Diana+oda (!)—the poet I. Eliade-Rădulescu¹¹; Latin doleo, through the hypothetical intermediate form *dolina—A. T. Laurian and I. C. Massim¹², among others. Finally, some researchers derived the word from the language itself: from the verb a dăina ‘to sway, to oscillate’, or from the interjectional repetition often found in the openings of this poetic genre: dui, dui, dui¹³. The view was also expressed that this word in the Dacoromanian language was of Germanic origin.

In the latest work on this same subject, the documentary and nuanced study already cited above by the Romanian folklorist Ovi-

⁵ All these examples are brought together with their context in the study by the Romanian folklorist Ovidiu Papadima, Considerații despre doină, „Studii și cercetări de istorie literară și folclor“, IX, 1960, no. 2, pp. 326—329.

⁶ The author also mentioned the name of the scholar who first drew a connection between Dacoromanian doină and Lithuanian daina: the Munich-based orientalist Martin Haug („Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft“, 1855).

⁷ Iordachi Mălinescu, Un discurs și poezie, „Foaie pentru minte, inimă și învățătură“, V, 1842, стр. 97—99; Ap. B. Petriceicu Hasdeu, Op. cit., стр. 21; Ovidiu Papadima. Op. cit. стр., 312.

⁸ A. de Cihac, Dictionnaire d’étymologie daco-romane, Francfort s/M., 1870, s. v.

⁹ C. N. Burileanu, Intre frunză verde“ și doină, București, 1936, стр. 57.

¹⁰ Ap. B. Petriceicu Hasdeu, Op. cit., стр. 21.

¹¹ Ap. Ovidiu Papadima, Op. cit., стр. 314.

¹² A. T. Laurianu și I. C. Massim. Glossariu care coprinde vorbele d’in limb’a romana straine prin originea sau form’a loru și celle de origine indouioasa, București, 1876, s. v.

¹³ Tiberiu Brediceanu, 170 melodii populare romînești din Maramureș. București, 1957. стр. 5.

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In Papadima’s study, a firm opinion is expressed regarding the word’s origin. The Transylvanian form dăina, as Hasdeu also proposed “with good reason,” may be of Dacian origin¹⁴; the Moldavian form doina, however, belongs “definitely” to the Slavic languages¹⁵. Why, then, draw such a sharp distinction between names for one and the same thing?

It is true that, apart from Hasdeu, none of the authors listed above argued for their assumptions; they simply proposed their etymologies, without even attempting to refute the opinions of earlier authors.

In all likelihood, these researchers were disconcerted by the unexpectedness and enormous “scope” of Hasdeu’s etymology. In fact, according to the latest findings in linguistics, there are not all that many Dacian elements in the Moldavian language. The most recent researchers of the Thracian language, the Bulgarian etymologist Vl. Georgiev¹⁶ and the Romanian linguist I. I. Russu¹⁷, in works devoted specifically to the so-called autochthonous elements, neither discuss nor even include the word doina in the list of Thracian words preserved in the languages of the peoples of the Balkan Peninsula. The unexpected variants found at very close distances from one another (and even in one and the same locality!) also contradict the hypothesis of a single ancient “Dacian” prototype for a language as cohesive as Daco-Romanian. Its phonetic form likewise provides strong evidence against the word’s great antiquity among Daco-Romanians: the expected modern form in Daco-Romanian would be not doina but *doaină. Scholars may also have been disconcerted by the fact that Hasdeu ruled out borrowing too categorically, despite the fairly frequent transfer into other languages not only of names but of the objects themselves—folk instruments, dances, and songs—as, for example, cobza, lăuta, ghitara, polca, mazurca sîrba, bulgăreasca in Daco-Romanian; and the word daina itself in modern Latvian, among others. (It should be remembered, however, that all these borrowed objects and words are not adopted in “pure” form: they are always blended with the traditional repertoire.) Finally, Hasdeu could not possibly have taken into account the considerable phonetic variation of the word, the musical character of the doina (its proximity to or distance from Lithuanian dainas, which no one has yet studied...), or the stages and geographical range of the doina’s own use.

Most importantly, what neither Hasdeu (who did not then have the necessary materials) nor the later etymologists took into account is that the word doina occurs most often only in the opening formula of the poetic text of this musical genre (and regionally, of some other genres), in the part which, as musicologists have established, is connected neither genetically nor

¹⁴ Ovidiu Papadima, Op. cit., p. 316.

¹⁵ Ibidem, p. 317.

¹⁶ Vladimir Georgiev, Trakiiskiyat epik, Sofia, 1957.

¹⁷ I. I. Russu, Limba traco-dacilor, București, 1959.

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even thematically, to the other parts of the doina as such¹⁸. And if it also occurs in the text of the doina itself, there too the word fills out a line, bringing it to a natural metrical length.

In all likelihood, it was precisely from this introductory “foreign” formula—optional in this genre today—that the word doina gradually became detached and came to denote, first regionally and then, from the mid-XIX century onward (with an expansion of its meaning), this distinctive poetic and musical genre as a whole. Examples of individual words becoming detached from an initial formula, or from song texts generally, and acquiring an independent, generalized meaning are common in folklore. The opening formulas of songs may consist of various exclamations and entire sentences borrowed wholesale from other languages: such are the Romanian openings of ballads in the Changai language, Moldavian introductory formulas for Gypsy songs, and so on. Entire stanzas, too, are transferred into a different linguistic environment (for example, in Vinnytsia Oblast a Ukrainian folklorist discovered the Moldavian text that served as the prototype for Pushkin’s “Zemfira’s Song”; children’s “counting-out rhymes” contain words and entire expressions taken from other languages, etc.). The presence of words that have lost all meaning in introductory formulas, and of words that subsequently separate the stanzas of various ritual songs (such as the wholly incomprehensible Romanian word ler in the formula ler, doamne, derived from Latin (Na) IleI (uiah), domine, both demonstrates the possibility of incorporating new borrowings into an opening formula and is consistent with the possibility that it may later become detached. Finally, the word doina, with all its variants, is current by no means throughout the Daco-Romanian territory. Indeed, only in Moldavia, Bukovina, and Maramureș—that is, only in the northern and northeastern parts of the territory—does the word function in popular speech as a term denoting a particular musical genre; over a relatively large area of Transylvania it has survived only in opening formulas and has no definite meaning. In the southern part of the Daco-Romanian-speaking territory the word is entirely absent, as it is, moreover, in all the Romance dialects of the Balkan Peninsula. This, of course, could not be the case if the word had a single Dacian origin.

All this indicates that the Moldavian word doina is a borrowing.

One may hypothesize that the Daco-Romanian word doina was borrowed from the Lithuanians in the XIII—XV centuries. The following facts (of a linguistic nature) support this hypothesis.

In Lithuanian, daina means “folk song,” whereas in Moldavian it denotes only a specific poetic and musical genre. Thus, in Moldavian the word’s meaning is much narrower than in Lithuanian. This narrowing of meaning is characteristic precisely of lexical

¹⁸ Em. Comişel, Preliminarii la studiul ştiinţific al doinei, „Revista de Folclor”, IV, 1959, No. 1—2, p. 157.

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Borrowings, as we already know, occurred in the northern half of Daco-Romanian territory, that is, precisely in the territory whose inhabitants could indeed have come into contact with the Lithuanians, been their “neighbors,” or at least entered into military, commercial, and cultural relations with them. In addition, now that a considerable number of facts have accumulated, one can also note the following apparently by no means accidental coincidence: the word doina occurs in its dialectal forms daina and daină (so close to—and identical with—the Lithuanian daina!), both in introductory formulas and as a folk term in the north, precisely within the area where this genre occurs and where its earliest stage of musical evolution is found.¹⁹ Finally, one should also suppose that the word doina was borrowed because, unlike Lithuanian, where the word has extensive support among words of the same root, in Daco-Romanian doina is a root word; moreover, all words derived from it are formed with relatively recent suffixes: the noun дойнаш is formed with the suffix -аш, a recent addition to the language and of Hungarian origin; the diminutive-affectionate form дойницэ contains a suffix of Slavic origin; and all the other derivatives—дойнар, as well as дойни, дойнишоарэ и дойнитор—although formed with suffixes of Latin origin, are nevertheless fairly recent formations in Moldavian, dating from the period when Moldavian itself was in use. All this—the narrowing of meaning, the coincidence between the area of the dialect form дайна and that of the earliest musical stage of the doina, and, finally, the morphology of the newer formations from the root word дойна—could not have occurred if the word дойна (as a term, not as a poetic and musical genre!) were of Dacian origin.

The borrowing of Daco-Romanian дойна may have taken place during the expansion of the Lithuanian kingdom’s borders (XIII—XV centuries) as far as the borders of Moldavia and northern Transylvania. Whether this borrowing took place directly or through Polish is unclear; a word of equally uncertain origin, dana (in context: Da, dy, dana, da, dy, dana; Oj dana moja dana; Dana, dana, dana, dana; Dana...le... and so on), is also found in Polish songs.²⁰

Initially, a verse unknown to us—or perhaps just this one word, previously used in some independent verse (perhaps indeed of a military nature and in Lithuanian!)—was incorporated into the text of the traditional opening of a local traditional doina melody. Together with the poetic verse or refrain word, elements of an unusual melody were introduced into that opening, superimposed on it, or conflated with it—

Бэла Барток, Insemnări asupra cântecului popular romînesc, Cu o prefață de Zeno Vancea, „Revai Lexicon“, Vol. Supl., 1935, стр. 73; Ap.: Tiberiu Alexandru, Béla Bartók despre folclorul romînesc, București, 1958, стр. 73; Cfr. Em. Comișel, Op. cit., стр. 149.

²⁰ См., например, сборник: Dolf Chybiński, Od Tatr do Bałtyky, Kraków, 1950, NN 89, 140, 177, 208 и др.

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nated elements of an unusual melody. (As we already know, the opening of this Daco-Romanian musical genre, in which the word doina alone occurs, is not genetically or thematically connected with the traditional doina.) Then, owing to the opening’s having become fixed and, consequently, to the word’s frequent use, it became detached from its context as a term for the entire musical genre. We can observe this detachment even today in Maramureș, where the term duina cannot be separated from the usual repetition dui-dui-dui, which should nevertheless be regarded not as the word’s formative root, but as its consequence. Yet in Maramureș, where the connection between the refrain-like repetition and the term that has become detached remains perceptible today, the earliest type of doina melody has been preserved in fossilized form. Given the uneven development of musical genres across different territories, we may assume that the same process took place in Moldavia: the word became detached from a similarly “foreign” opening and established itself as a term. But this occurred at an early stage in the doina’s existence, when it had acquired this imported opening. The melody of the doina itself followed its own path of evolution here, diverging from the earliest stage preserved only in Maramureș.

European scholars were unaware that the word дойна existed in Moldavian and Romanian. Some of them, such as Johann Schmidt, traced Lithuanian daina to the root di-t, “to dance”; others derived it from deja, “lament,” and dejoti, “to lament” (Schleicher). Pictet and Albert Weber went further, establishing its connections with cognates in other Indo-European languages (Persian, Zend, and others). The latest Lithuanian etymological dictionary by E. Fraenkel²¹, which adopts Schmidt’s view, notes that the word daina is also used in Latvian with the same meaning, and that it is related to the Latvian verb diēt, “to dance,” “to sing.” Extensive documentation on the semantics of this word is provided in the Latvian-German dictionary by K. Mülenbach and J. Endzelin²².

The hypothesis advanced above concerning the Lithuanian origin of Daco-Romanian дойна concerns, of course, only the terminological aspect of the question. The doina is a lyric genre. Lyric poetry is an essential part of the folklore of all peoples. In its specific form and content, the doina is particularly close to the lyric songs of the peoples living in the Balkans. But neither the genre’s widespread distribution as a whole nor its more specific resemblance among a particular group of peoples can be regarded as borrowing or migration. Folklorists use the term polygenesis to denote the spontaneous emergence of a genre among different peoples simultaneously, sometimes very

²¹ Prof. E. Fraenkel, Litauisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch, Lieferung I, Heidelberg—Göttingen, 1956, s. v.

²² K. Mülenbachs—J. Endzelīns, Latviešu valodas vārdnīca, I—IV, Rīgā, 1923—1932.

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far removed from one another, as a consequence of identical conditions of material and spiritual life.

The style of the musical genre doina, as more than one musicologist has observed, points us not northward, not toward Lithuania, but eastward (cf. the Ukrainian dumy) and southeastward (Béla Bartók)²³, eastward (C. Brăiloiu)²⁴, and toward the Persian-Arab maqam (Emil Riegler Dinu)²⁵.

No one has yet undertaken a comparative study of the Moldavian doina and the Lithuanian daina, but there is no doubt that this subject will soon find an enthusiastic researcher.

As is clear from the foregoing, the question of the common origin of the Moldavian and Lithuanian terms doina—daina is not as straightforward as it appeared more than 80 years ago even to so eminent a scholar as Hasdeu. The remarkable phonetic similarity of these two terms and their semantic proximity call for further painstaking research through the joint efforts of linguists (dialectologists and etymologists) and, above all, musicologists—not only Moldavian and Romanian, but also Ukrainian, Polish, Latvian, and, of course, Lithuanian.

Chișinău

MOLD., RUM. DOINA KILMĖS KLAUSIMU

G. BOGACIUS

Reziumė

The author of the article advances the hypothesis that the word doiną, which has been widely established since the mid-19th century as a folkloristic term denoting a particular type of song, may have been borrowed by the Daco-Romanians from the Lithuanians in the 13th–15th centuries, when the Lithuanian state borders reached Moldavia and northern Transylvania. They may have borrowed it directly from the Lithuanians or via Polish. That the word dōina is a loanword in Daco-Romanian is also suggested by the fact that its meaning has narrowed in comparison with the meaning of Lithuanian daina; moreover, derivatives of doina are formed with new suffixes, mostly of foreign origin.

²³ Béla Bartók, Op. cit., 191, 192; Ap. Tiberiu Alexandru, Op. cit., 75.

²⁴ Const. Brăiloiu, La musique populaire roumaine, „La revue musicale“, N spécial: „La musique dans les pays latins“, 1940, стр. 7—8.

²⁵ Emil Riegler Dinu, Das rumänische Volkslied, Berlin, 1940; Ap. Em. Comişel, Op. cit., стр. 150.