Studia Humanitatis No. II (XII) / 2021
‘Proroc’ or ‘prooroc’?
Lecturer, PhD Octavian Gordon This article analyses the etymology and evolution of the words ‘proroc’ and ‘prooroc’ in Church Romanian, demonstrating that the trisyllabic form arose through a dual false etymology — one popular and the other scholarly — through the contamination of the Church Slavonic ‘proroc’ with the Greek ‘prooratikos’. The two forms coexist legitimately in both ecclesiastical and secular literature, alongside the neologism ‘profet’, which entered the language via Latin and Neo-Latin channels in the 19th century.