ARHIVELE OLTENIEI - Universitatea din Craiova

152Iustina Burcivistier – a high official that charged the treasury; he collected the taxesand the tribute for the Porte;vornic – a high official, he watched over the lord’s court, he controlledthe internal affairs, having the judge’s office and being the headman of thevillage; the employee who, in the past, collected the imposts from the villages,an equivalent of the later tax gatherer or of the mayor;vornicel – the subaltern of the vornic;Along with autochthon words, in our language, entered some Slavs orTurkish words and, in the Phanariot epoch, some Greek words, which leaded toa stratification of the profession’s terminology. Usually, these borrowed words“designates new products” or “they express either the materials from which areconfectioned different things, or the tools and the assimilated installations fromthe past” 7 . But, many times, the name of the profession was adapting to someexport requests or represented just a servitude influence.The origin of the professions exposed above is also varied. Most of thembelong to the Turkish influence: avgiu, cafegiu, caftangiu, capugiu, ciubucciu,divictar, iciceauş, ibrictar, muhurdar, paic, perdegiu, peşchirgiu,satârgiu, seiz,şamdangiu, şerbagiu etc., Slav influence: diac, globnic, jitnicer, medelnicer,pitar, postelnic, sluger, stolnic, vătaf, vornic etc., Greek influence: chelar,comis, spătar, spătărel etc.Being specific for an era, most of the quoted appellatives, lost theirinitial signification (for example cafegiu, ulterior obtained the sense of “theowner of a coffee house or of a coffee shop” and, afterwards, he also signified“the man who likes to drink coffee”), or they disappeared, long time ago, fromthe usual vocabulary of the Romanian language; they can be found in the pagesof the archives. In general, the modernisation of the human society, entailed, aswe said before, some changes regarding the disappearance of some professions(the handicraft lost its utility, he wasn’t required anymore “on the market”,maybe because a certain social-political and administrative structure, in tightconnection with the profession, was replaced, progressively, with another one)and the appearance of some new ones.Yet, there is a field in which many of these old occupations remainedactive: the anthroponomical one. A large number of people, who had differentprofessions, chose (or were imposed), as a main way of identification within thecommunity, the name of their profession. That’s how they had been registered inthe documents of that time, because then the profession represented a succinctand objective method of describing a person. Later, even if the children and thenephews didn’t practise the same occupation, they kept, near the first name, as asurname, the profession of the predecessor.Nowadays there is, within the system of the family names, many ofthem that originated from the name of a profession. They gained this statute, offamily names, especially those resulting from the occupations that were familiar7 Gh. Iordache, op. cit., p. 157.