Talk:gata

I doubt gata comes from Dacian. Slavic languages (Russian) have a close word with similar meaning gatov -- please correct if I'm wrong (or confirm if the word is present in other Slavic language) ---the preceding unsigned comment was posted by 141.156.198.205 1:24, 5 September 2005 (UTC)

No one knows for certain whether it comes from Dacian. A Slavic origin for the Romanian word is not generally accepted due to matters of phonetic evolution from Slavic languages to Romanian, unless I'm mistaken. A pre-Roman substratum origin (not necessarily Dacian: could be Thracian or Illyrian) is proposed also because the Romanian word has a cognate in Albanian. Demiraj in his Albanian Inherited Lexicon 1999 (et al.) says the Albanian word is native to Albanian (from PIE *gwmti(o)-, "to go, come"), and considering that the Romanian word is much closer to the Albanian word than the Slavic, and given the fact that Albanian and Romanian have many such correspondances, most of which are considered cognates (only a few can be loanwords and this is controversial; it is accepted that, due to phonetic reasons, it is impossible for most of the Romanian/Albanian correspondances to be loans; even the Hungarian nationalist linguists accept this, though many of them prefer to consider the words "Illyrian") and are thus from the substratum. I have a reference (http://dexonline.ro/search.php?cuv=gata&source= ) which gives the Albanian word as a cognate, but doesn't mention the Slavic words, so I did not mention the Slavic words in the ==Etymology== section as a possible source. There is nothing improbable about a close cognate between Daco-Thracian and Slavic, with the Romanian word coming from Daco-Thracian, rather than Slavic. There are many cognates known between Slavic and Daco-Thracian. However, if someone has more information on the Russian word and the etymology of the Romanian word, please bring them. Alexander 007 14:40, 22 January 2006 (UTC)