Bucovina: Onomastics and History(I)
The conference was delivered in the Council Hall of the Romanian Academy on May 24th 2001
Bucovina is the name of a territory whose borders have long lost their well-defined outline: it has almost become a realm of legend. Although their current homes are far away from Bucovina, in various parts of Romania there are Moldavians who claim to be Bucovinians. Of course, they are not always wrong in doing so and definitely not all of them.
As a historical reality and the name of a country belonging to the Habsburg Empire[1], Bucovina had existed for 144 years, i.e. from 1774 to 1918.
For her merits to have intervened in the process of mediating the Russian-Turkish conflict between 1768 and 1774, Austria was rewarded by the Turks with the Northern part of Moldavia[2], a territory to be named Bucovina soon afterwards. Moldavia’s opposition – on the grounds that the Ottoman Court could not dispose of a territory that did not belong to it – was disregarded, but not without consequences: Grigore Ghica, the then-current Moldavian ruler at the time, was subsequently killed.
Bucovina’s annexation to Austria did not occur unexpectedly though: in 1773, when visiting Transylvania, the Austrian emperor Franz Joseph wrote to his mother, the empress Maria Theresa, about how wonderful it would be for Austria to seize the territory bordered by Transylvania, Maramureș and Pokuttya, in order to set a faster route between Transylvania and Galicia[3].
In 1918, on the background of the events following the decline of the Habsburg Empire, Bucovina proclaimed its sovereignty to Austria, and the General Congress of Bucovina decided on the unconditioned unification of this province with the Romanian Kingdom. By the Decree-Law No. 3745/1918, the Romanian state declared ‘in force/operative’ the then-current laws in Bucovina, ensuring this region a high autonomy in order for it to become gradually a part of the Unitary Romanian State[4]. After 1944, the northern part of Bucovina was occupied by the Soviet Union. Although it thus became the largest part of the Cernăuți/Chernivtsi County, Bucovina was not – and still is not – identical to this region, which nowadays includes both a part of the former Hotin – a county that belonged to the Bucovina province until 1918 -, and some populated areas in the former Herța County, areas that had been part of Romania until 1944.
Nowadays, the south of Bucovina is part of the Suceava County, whose borders also include areas that had belonged to the Dorohoi and the Botoșani counties until 1918. In broad lines, before 1918, the Bucovina-Romania border began in the East of the town of Siret, it went slightly down towards South-East, going along the Mitoc River to the Suceava River, where it marked the boundary between Ițcani – a remaining part of Bucovina – and Burdujeni, a Romanian territory[5]. The border continued its way along the Suceava River bank down to the Știrbăț village, where it turned west and got to the Moldova River along the Șomuzul Mare, Șomuzul Mic and the Hranița rivers. Then it followed the line of the mountains between Moldavia and Bistrița, a region it got to near the Neagra River, whose bank it went along down to Pietrele Roșii. Here it changed its course and headed north, through Cîrlibaba and the Sărata River, to the Ceremuș, the river that marked the border with Galicia.
Although the name Țara de Sus/ “The Upper Land” has been used for the territory split from Moldavia in 1774, the regions of Țara de Sus and Bucovina do not coincide. Țara de Sus – also known as Moldova de Sus / “The Upper Moldavia”, as Dimitrie Cantemir[6] calls it, included the counties of Hotin, Chernivtsi, Suceava, Dorohoi, Hârlău, Neamț, and Bacău, and her ruler’s seat was in Dorohoi. The areas of Țara de Sus that became parts of Bucovina are the Chernivtsi region and parts of the Suceava and of the Hotin counties. The confusion between the two names mentioned above can be explained if we consider Diploma imperială/ The Imperial Decree (December 9th, 1862), a document that states that “[…] under the Moldavian kings, this land belonged to the so-called Țara de Sus; later on its name became Arboroasa, Plonina, and eventually Bucovina.”[7] As one can easily notice, this text writes “this land belonged to” and not “this land was called/identical with” Țara de Sus, which was a larger province.
The first documentary references about the Moldavian territory annexed to Austria in 1774 prove that it did not have a name of its own at the time. The first proclamation, dated November 16th 1774, issued by General Gabriel Spleny, the commander of the occupational troops, calls it “this Moldavian piece of land”. The next year, the same general – now the governor of the region – uses the same expression in a proclamation to its inhabitants, and he calls himself brigaderius et confinorum Moldaviae. In the chancellery documents, this territory goes by the name of Moldova Imperială/ “The Imperial Moldavia”, in order to differentiate it from Moldova Turcească/ “The Turkish Moldavia”.
Until the name of Bucovina came into existence, there had been other names used to refer to this region, such as: Generalatul Moldovenesc, Comitatul Sucevei, Cordon, Cordun, Cordunul Împărătesc, Cordunul Nemțesc, etc. This range of denominations is a living proof of Vienna’s heightened concern about choosing the ‘appropriate’ name for this Romanian province. Illustrative in this respect is the fact that the head of Vienna’s Aulic Council of War found the name Generalatul Moldovenesc, suggested by the head of the military forces in Galicia, inappropriate for it, and consequently he rejected it in January 1775. This happened a few months before the act according to which Bucovina was ceded to the Habsburg Empire was signed with the Turks.
Inappropriate, too, was considered the name Comitatul Sucevei (approx. “The Suceava Shire”) for at least two reasons: on the one hand, the fact that Moldavia reinstated the Suceava County, with Fălticeni as capital town, was considered inacceptable, and, on the other hand, employing this name (i.e., Suceava; t/n[8]) might have kept alive people’s memory of good old times, when Suceava was the name of Moldavia’s Throne Citadel. This could be a very plausible explanation to the fact that it was Chernivtsi that became the capital of the region, not Suceava, which, as a matter of fact, would have made a more convenient capital since this would have been in full agreement with Austria’s plans of expansion over the whole of Moldavia.
The names Cordon, Cordun and their variants seemed appropriate for the beginning of the Austrian domination on the territory in point as one and the same word developed two meanings: “border line” and “medical line; quarantine measures against epidemic diseases”. Isolating the north of Moldavia from the rest of the country was required for medical reasons; keeping the Habsburg Empire’s servants in good health was a must. There is no doubt that these public health measures were beneficial for the population of Cordon, which was consequently protected against the epidemics that had scourged Moldavia by that time. However, the meaning of the name Cordun (especially in this form) was not only that of “border line” as such; it also referred to the whole territory separated from Moldavia, both for the people within and for those outside its borders: in 1776, Mihalache Onciul, an “expatriate of Cordun” asked for the authorities’ help to solve a legal case about a piece of land on the Ceremuș River; in 1779, the Chancellery of Iași granted exemptions to the monks at the Solca Monastery, which was “in Cordon”; in 1781, Gavril, the Metropolitan of Moldavia, was writing to Dosoftei, the Archbishop of Rădăuți, about the places of worship “in Cordon”[9]; in a personal letter from Moldavia, dating from 1782, one can read about “Suceav(a) in Cordon”[10].
The name Cordon/Cordun was officially used interchangeably with that of Bucovina for some time. In 1833, for instance, an imperial commissioner would inform his superiors about how the soldiers of “the 1st company of Cordon” had caught red-handed some local smugglers bringing salt from Modova. This name occurs even in a diplomatic French report from 1795: “la surveillance des officiers du Cordon”[11]. The name Cordun was used especially by the local people, which were called – by other Moldavians and by themselves – corduneni/ “inhabitants of Cordun”. It eventually turned into a proper (last) name: in the 2000 telephone directory of Suceava, the surname Corduneanu/Cordunean occurs for 46 times. As an official name for this territory, however, Cordun had only a slim chance of survival: the cordon/ “the (military) line/border” had to disappear because it bore the idea of isolation.
The name of Bucovina would take over very quickly. According to the German historian Raimond Friederich Kaindl, “in November 1775, the word Bucovina was considered the real name of the territory acquired”[12], and it replaced successfully all the other ones. The same historian also offers an explanation for the swift acceptance of this name by the Habsburg administration: there was no direct, visible connection between it and anything in Moldavia, i.e. the country it was once part of, therefore it could not trigger any nostalgic feelings in the inhabitants, and they would not seek for its reintegration into the motherland.
It has to be noted that there is not only a strong phonetic similarity between the names Bucovina and Buchenland – the latter being the name the Germans used to refer to the same region -, but also a semantic one, as both of them mean “the beech tree country”.
The toponym Bucovina bears on bucovina, a word of Ukrainian origin derived from the Slavic root buk- meaning “beech tree”. This root is very easy to identify in a wide range of toponyms all over the Romanian territory; in his book Toponimia românească/The Romanian Toponymy, published in 1963 in Bucharest, Iorgu Iordan lists as many as 32 toponyms formed of this root that are spread all over Romania, from Bucovina to Banat, among which: Bucova, Bucovăț(ul), Bucovel(ul), Bucovicioara, Bucov(ul), Bucul, Bucovina, Bucoveni, Bucovineni, etc. This number is even larger in the Bucovina region. Dicționarul geografic al Bucovinei/ The Geographic Dictionary of Bucovina, published by Em. Grigorovitza in 1908 in Bucharest, mentions 11 such toponyms derived from the old Slavic root buk-: those listed by Iorgu Iordan above, Bucovinești, and Bucovinca. For the Bucovina region, there is another book of toponyms, written by Nicolai Grămadă, Toponimia minoră a Bucovinei/ The Minor Toponymy of Bucovina, 1996 (2 vols.), Editura Anima. This is the richest inventory of toponyms from Bucovina until 1945. Those with the root buk– abound – to those mentioned above the author adding Bucovata, Bucoveica, Bucovenca, Bucovița, all of them of Ukrainian origin.
However, these toponyms are not spread throughout the whole of Bucovina. They cover a rather small area, shaped like a long island, which begins in the former district of Vijnița, situated in the northern third of Bucovina, and goes down as far as Gura Humorului. This description coincides, though only in part, with what Iorgu Toma from Suceava said at the beginning of the 20th century: in older times, before the Austrian occupation, “the Ruthenian people living by the Galician border were used to calling the mountainous area between Vijnița and the Ceremuș River – an area covered with large beech woods – by the name of Bucovina, which means <beech forest/woods>”[13].
The term bucovina had existed before the territory known by this name was occupied by Austria, which does not mean that the northern part of Moldavia was called Bucovina. In a document dating from 1392, Roman-Voievod gave Ionaș Viteazul three villages on the Siret River as a present, their borderline going “into bucovina, a hill” (простѣ оу буковину могила), “up to the big bucovina, where the road from Dobrinăuți shows… at the end of the field and, from there, on the side of bucovina, up the hill.” (горѣ до вєликої буковины кдє вышєлъ путь ωть добрѣно(вц)ь на конєц полѧ а ωтолѧ по краи буковины дѣломъ).[14] Most probably, the three no-longer-extant villages were situated outside Bucovina, between the villages of Zvoriște and Șerbăuți, that is to say in the former area of Botoșani, nowadays in the Suceava county.
The common noun bucovina has been registered 25 times in Romanian documents[15], which proves that it was familiar to the learned people in the Moldavian Chancellery who used it not only in the documents written in old Slavic, but also in those written in Latin. A chancellery document dating from 1412 mentions “the large and small woods called Bucovina” (Lat. “Silvae maiores et minores, Bucovina dictae”)[16].
The context in which it is used does not always show clearly whether the word bucovina is a common noun or as a proper name. One can assume that in the document from 1392 it is a common noun, whereas in that from 1412 it is a proper name of place/toponym. However, when comparing the documents, the initial feeling of certainty fades away: the document from 1392 mentioned above is included in Documenta Romaniae Historica only with bucovina as a common noun, but in the text in old Slavic it is once capitalized (оу Буковину) – therefore it could be taken as a toponym, and twice written in lower case, thus a common noun.[17]
It is clear, however, that the toponym Bucovina as a name for the northern part of Moldavia had not been used before 1775; it was under the Habsburg administration that it came into official use.
Another name for this region is Arboroasa (approx. “The Woodland”), which has been used along with that of Bucovina up to the present. According to the Imperial Diploma of 1862 mentioned earlier, this name had existed even before the Austrian occupation and it is very likely that both names circulated, though unofficially, in the local people’s vernacular during the Austrian occupation, too. But the revival of the name Arboroasa is the merit of the educated young people, who, in their desire to unify the Romanians under the same flag – those in the Habsburg Empire first –, employed old Romanian words very frequently. This was so because they considered old Romanian to be both a more unitary language than that spoken in their own times and an appropriate instrument meant to help them make their dream of unification come true. This name, however, would become extremely famous in 1875, when the first Romanian Students Society, whose name was Arboroasa, was established at the young Franz Joseph University in Chernivtsi. It was formed of Theology, Law and Philosophy students and its leaders were remarkable intellectuals of the period, such as: Ciprian Porumbescu, Zaharia Voronca, Constantin Andreevici Morariu, Orest Popescul, and Eugen Sireteanu. The society’s aims were to awaken the people’s national consciousness, to defend the Romanians’ rights to a national culture, to a national language, etc.[18] Since its ideas disagreed with the Habsburg policy, the society was soon dissolved, and its leaders, arrested. They would win in Court, but their health would be forever damaged.
The Arboroasa students’ cause would be soon afterwards taken over by the founders of the Junimea association (approx. “The Youth’s Association” – a students society established in 1878), and, in the same year, of Bucovina. In 1921, the students from Chernivtsi would organize themselves in another association, also called Arboroasa.
Choosing Chernivtsi as the capital of Bucovina was politically motivated. Although it was the same size as the town of Suceava, it had a Slavic name, as Bucovina – the new country in the Habsburg Empire – did, and the Slavs could not claim this territory, at least not for a while. As it is, cern- (i.e. “black”) is the Slavic root of the name Cernăuți/ “Chernivtsi”, to which the suffix –ăuți was added (this corresponding to the Romanian suffix -ești). The origin of the suffix –ăuți is the old Ukrainian –ovți, a suffix that has been subjected to a twofold lexical evolution: in Romanian, it preserves the archaic form, which would mean that the present-day form –ăuți, along with its older variants –ouți and –euți, is the Romanian counterpart of this suffix, whereas in Ukrainian it evolved to the form –ivți. This is how one can explain the two similar names of this town: the Romanian form Cernăuți and the Ukrainian name Cernivți.
The two names, Cernăuți and Cernivți, certainly have the same origin, namely the old Slavic root cern-, which circulated both in Ukrainian and in Romanian[19]. To this root there were added two suffixes, -ăuți and –ivți, which were totally different in spite of their common origin. The suffix –ăuți has been as productive in the northern part of Moldavia as –ivți has in the Ukrainian language; in this region, it has formed place-names/toponyms from Romanian anthroponyms (Broscăuți, Frătăuți, Șerbăuți, etc.) as well as from Slavic anthroponyms, the latter being also used by the Romanians, as the historical documents attest.
This is not unusual for the names of the places situated near the state borders, where the population is ethnically and lingustically mixed. However, a less common situation in this respect is that of the names of the places on the Romanian territory, which are recorded by the historical documents in a variety of forms influenced by the languages in which these texts were written. In the 15th century, a document dating from Alexandru cel Bun’s times mentions Litanouții, Stroinții and Zaharinții[20], three villages near the town of Suceava that are nowadays known as Liteni, Stoiești and Zaharești. As these texts were written in Slavic, the place-names were adapted to the corresponding structures in this language: the Romanian suffix –ești was replaced by the Slavic –inți and –ouți. The assumption that the scholars at the Modavian Chancellery were eastern Slavs who did not know Romanian very well and, consequently, transposed the Romanian place-names into eastern Slavic structures might be true, but only in part since translating from one language into another requires strong knowledge of both the source and the target languages, especially when proper names are involved.
The village registered in 1790 under the name of Tomești or Suceveni had had a long history; in 1431 its name was Tominți[21], and in 1742 it was referred to as a place called Tomești “on the Siret River, before Cupca”[22]. What name would its people use on their village’s first documentary attestation? As the suffix used in its formation is identical to that in the toponym Tomești, the name of the Tomescu stream that flows through the present-day Suceveni could give an answer to this question: as well as Tomescu – a noun derived from an adjective – had a possessive meaning, namely “Toma’s brook/small river”, Tomești – based on the same adjective, only with a plural meaning – had as its referent “Toma’s offsprings, those who pertained to Toma genealogically”. The same meaning was rendered in Slavic by the suffixes -ouți and –inți. Employing one form or another would also depend, in the last resort, on the scholar’s knowledge, scholar who was not always very careful about the forms he used. In various documents, such as land-ownership or donation bills, the way in which the name of the village was written was of minimum importance, and many times this name was not mentioned at all. Such is the case of the village of Pârtești, which is recorded in the documents of the first half of the 15th century as “the village at the spring of the Soloneț river, where Tatomir and Pârtea went”[23].
Besides the place-names ending in –ouți and –inți, the documents of the time would also employ some ending in –ești. For instance, in 1473, the Moldavian ruler Ștefan cel Mare/ “Stephen the Great” would reissue a document endorsing Corlat’s ownership of the village Berchișeștii. It was also in the times of the same ruler that the first documentary attestation of the village called Corcești on the Cozancea river was made. In 1785, Corcești was merely a land estate pertaining to the Dragomirna Monastery, but the local people would call it Corceasca; this is the only way in which the name of the river flowing across this region could be explained. The river was called Corceasca and its name was attested by documents issued in the 18th and the 20th centuries. In all probability, the form of a name in its first documentary attestation was most important, for the Romanian or the Slavic form these first documents employed would be preserved for as long as the documents were written in Slavic. It is an undeniable fact that what is recorded in writing is more influential over times than what is spoken, not only in the case of the legal but also of other types of documents. One could use this premise to explain why the instances when the Romanian and the Slavic forms alternate are extremely rare in written documents.
The Ukrainians’ presence in Bucovina is undeniable. Both the toponyms mentioned so far and the historical documents written before the creation of Bucovina account for this, the latter also including references to their presence outside Bucovina as well. As a result of certain historical circumstances specific to this region, the number of Ukrainians in Bucovina is the largest as compared to the other regions in Moldavia: after this territory was annexed to Austria and especially after it was transformed into a Galician administration center, the number of Ukrainians in Bucovina increased. Attracted by the privileges granted by the authorities to the new-comers, the Ukrainian immigrants coming from Galicia contributed extensively to this state of affairs.
Toponymy, however, is not always a proof of the presence of the Ukrainians in the places whose names are considered. As described above, by comparing the official with the popular names of some villages, the conclusion is that there are toponyms of Slavic-Ukrainian origin that are the result of the process of translating these village-names into Slavic. Nevertheless, the translating process left a traceable mark on the place-names generally, not only on the village-names: that is to say, if the village-names were translated – a task difficult to achieve at times – then it is clear that the translation of the place-names, which were based on a popular terminology transparent in meaning most of the times, was a common practice, too, and it is difficult to point out whether it was the Slavic or the Romanian name that was in current use at one moment or another.
Bucovina, however, faced a special situation. In 1782, the Austrian administration set forth a real estate delineation committee whose purpose was to settle the ownership relations by establishing the boundaries of villages and land estates and by developing the cadastral plans based on the documents in the owners’ possession. This enterprise, however beneficial it may have been from an administrative point of view, would sometimes have catastrophic consequences on the names of places recorded by the new documents, especially by the cadastral plans. Most of the times, the authors of these documents were Polish officers who did not know Romanian, therefore, they often replaced Romanian names with Ukrainian ones. As a result, there occurred many differences between the names recorded by the cadastral plans and those recorded by the list of documents (Acta granicialia), even though there were many other discrepancies between this list and other documents of the time. For instance, for Fântâna Albă (“The White Fountain”) recorded in Acta granicialia, the cadastaral plans mention Biala Kirniza, for Fântâna Putredă (“The Rotten Fountain”) – Hnila Kirniza, for Pareu Niagru (“The Black Stream”), Cirnipotok, and many others. Moreover, some place-names were only partially translated: Pareu Turkuluy (“The Turk’s Stream”) was rendered as Potoc Turculy, Câmpul Hreanului (“The Horseradish Field”) as Krinova Kempu, Valea Bursucului (“The Badger’s Valley”) as Bursukova Dolina[24], etc.
This is how the bilingualism in toponymy was born, a phenomenon that cannot be denied in bilingual communities. Yet, the role of toponyms is that of identification; this requires people to use a unique name for each place, consequently the name which seems most adequate imposing itself over the others irrespective of the language it comes from. The lack of correspondence between the name of a specific place and its predominant population can be explained in a rather simple manner: the Galician immigrants did not generally found new villages; they only increased the population of the already existing ones. In this way they could also attend the churches of the respective villages. As a result, the villages preserved their initial names. This is the case, among others, of the village Ipotești near Suceava, attested in the documents of the 16th century, a village whose present-day population is predominantly of Ukrainian origin.
Bilingualism has also influenced the pronunciation of toponyms. The Romanians pronounce the name of the village Ostrița in the Cernăuți region by stressing it on its suffix, Ostríța, whereas the Ukrainins, on its root – Óstrița, each of the two following the pronunciation rules specific of the two languages, respectively, as far as the derivatives with the suffix –ița are concerned. Both the root and the suffix in this name are of Slavic origin, which may mean that this toponym is a Slavic-Ukrainian one. But the suffix –ița entered Romanian from Slavic and has been frequently used to form new toponyms from older ones (Sucevița < Suceava, Moldovița < Moldova). This is also the case of the toponym Ostrița, for the toponym Ostra is recorded once in the Suceava county, as the name of a river and of a village, and another time in the Cernăuți region, as a village name coming from that of a hermitage.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the population of the Ostrița village was Romanian, but in its first documentary attestation the name of the village was Clișcăuți, a name that had survived until the 18th century when it was replaced with Ostrița. The reasons why this substitution was effected are still unknown. It is not impossible, however, that a re-populating process with new comers from Ostra and a re-creation of Ostra to have taken place, since these phenomena have been attested with other village-names in Romania as well[25]. Nowadays, when the Romanian language becomes less and less important in the Cernăuți region, the pronunciation Óstrița gets more and more frequent, as can easily be noticed among the Romanian students from the Cernăuți region who are currently studying at the “Ștefan cel Mare” University of Suceava.
by Gheorghe Moldoveanu
Translated by Valentina Curelariu, PhD Lecturer, University of Suceava
(To be continued in the next issue.)
[1] The Romanians in Bucovina considered this region a țară/i.e., a country not only in the old acceptation of this word (as in such toponyms as Țara Vrancei/The Vrancea Country, Țara Hațegului/The Hațeg Country, etc.), but also as the name for an autonomous territory within the Habsburg Empire. The Apel către alegătorii din Bucovina / Appeal to the Voters in Bucovina from 1861 states that the future members of the parliament of the autonomous Bucovina shall “be aware of the sufferings of the Country, of the Nation, of the Church”, as only in this way will “the intellectual state of the country of Bucovina occupy the high position it deserves alongside the other cultivated countries of Europe” (Rom. “viitorii aleși in dieta Bucovinei va trebui <<să fie cunoscători de suferințele Patriei, Națiunii și Bisericii>>, căci numai astfel <<starea intelectuală a țării va apuca treapta aceea care se cuvine să aibă Bucovina între țările cultivate ale Europei>>.” (Ioan G. Sbiera, Familia Sbiera, după tradițiune și istorie și amintiri din viața autorului, Cernăuți, 1899, pp. 135-139; emphasis added).
Iancu Flondor’s speech before King Ferdinand 1st and the Romanian Government, delivered on Nov. 29th 1918, begins in this way: “We hereby lay before your Majesty – king of all Romanians – the heart of a whole country. This country has been of an old and purely Romanian essence ever since the Romanian shepherds were crossing the Galician mountains […]” (Rom. “Aducem Majestății Voastre, rege al tuturor românilor, inima unei țări întregi. Această țară a avut vechi temeiuri curat românești de pe vremea când păstorii români stăbăteau munții galițieni […]” (Radu Economu, Unirea Bucovinei. 1918, Editura Fundației Culturale Române, 1994, p. 168; emphasis added).
[2] For more details, see Mihai Iacobescu, Din istoria Bucovinei. Vol. 1 (1774-1862) – De la administrația militară la autonomia provincială, București, Editura Academiei Române, 1993, pp. 49-91.
[3] Cf. Mihai Iacobescu, op. cit., p. 60
[4] Cf. Radu Economu, op. cit., p. 119, et seq.
[5] Nowadays, the former Ițcani and Burdujeni are parts/districts of the town of Suceava.
[6] Cf. Dimitrie Cantemir, Descrierea Moldovei, București, Editura Tineretului, 1967, p. 87
[7] Rom. “[…] țara aceasta se ținea sub stăpânirea principilor Moldovei de așa-numita Țara de Sus; mai târziu se numea Arboroasa, Plonina și în urmă Bucovina.” See Radu Grigorovici, “Diploma imperială din 9 decembrie 1862”, in Analele Bucovinei, 1995, Nr. 2, p. 464.
[8] The abbreviation t/n stands for “translator’s note”; t/n
[9] Cf. Mihai Iacobescu, op. cit., pp.110-111
[10] Cf. Vasile Bogrea, in Dacoromania, III (1923), p. 814
[11] Ibidem
[12] Cf. R.F.Kaindl, Bukowina in Wort und Bilt, Cernăuți, 1903, p. 124
[13] Cf. Iorgu G. Toma, Școala Română, societate culturală în Suceava, Suceava, 1909, p. 7. (Rom.: “se obișnuise poporațiunea ruteană din părțile învecinate ale Galiției a-i zice coastei muntoase, acoperite cu întinse păduri de fag, dintre Vijnița și Ceremuș, Bucovina, ceea ce inseamnă <<pădure de fag>>.”)
[14] Mihai Costăchescu, Documentele moldovenești înainte de Ștefan cel Mare, Iași, vol. 1, 1931, pp. 7-8 (Rom. “drept în bucovina, o movilă” […] “în sus până în bucovina cea mare, pe unde se arată drumul de la Dobrinăuți … la capătul câmpului și de acolo pe marginea bucovinei, pe deal”.)
[15] Cf. Mihai Iacobescu, op. cit., p. 113
[16] Ibidem, p. 114
[17] Cf. Documenta Romaniae Historica, A. Moldova, București, Editura Academiei Române, vol. I, 1975, p. 3
[18] Cf. Constantin Morariu, Cursul vieții mele. Memorii, Suceava, Editura Hurmuzachi, 1998, p. 28, et seq.
[19] The Suceava Telephone Directory for the year of 2000 counts 14 surnames derived from this root; some of them sound Romanian (Cernescu, Cernișor, Cernăuțeanu), others, Ukrainian (Cerneleac, Cerni, Cerne(v)schi, Cernodolea).
[20] Cf. Mihai Costăchescu, op. cit., p. 270
[21] Ibidem, p. 318
[22] Nicolai Grămadă, Toponimia minoră a Bucovinei, Centrul de Studii ,,Bucovina” din Rădăuți, Editura Anima, vol. II, 1996, p. 468
[23] Mihai Costăchescu, op. cit., p. 117. Rom. “satul de la obârșia Solonețului, unde au fost Tatomir și Pârtea”.
[24] Cf. Nicolai Grămadă, op. cit., vol. I, p. 60, et. seq.
[25] The new name was generally formed by derivation with diminutives, by adding some modifiers (such as nou/ “new”, mic/ “small” or “little”), by derivation with suffixes showing origin, etc.