Rom. Baniţă (‘vas de lemn folosit ca măsură pentru cereale’) și legăturile sale cu familia lexicală a rom. Ban (‘titlu feudal’)

Abstract

The first part of this article contains the author’s objections to the mainstream etymological opinions according to which Romanian (Rm.) baniţă was borrowed from Slavic, the putative source-word being a Slavic *banica. The latter has been presented as a suffixed diminutive from Slavic banja ‘bath (tub)’, in its turn borrowed from Vulgar Latin (*bannea < Lat. balnea). In fact such an etymological interpretation is debilitated by a number of confusions and conflations. Therefore, this author propounds a connection between baniţă and ban ‘local authority’ (later ‘feudal title’), whose Old Germanic origin has already been demonstrated. In such a case baniţă would appear to have designated a standard measure for grain that dates from the period during which Germanic elites imposed tributal systems on non-Germanic populations of Eastern and Southeastern Europe.