User blog comment:Foreverwitchy/Upyr or Upir ?/@comment-70.178.143.30-20140803160653

The spelling is not important.



The Oxford English Dictionary dates the first appearance of the English word vampire (as vampyre) in English from 1734, in a travelogue titled Travels of Three English Gentlemen published in The Harleian Miscellany in 1745.[3]  An even earlier example is found in the re-telling the famous case of Arnold Paole and Petar Blagojevich in Serbia, where the London Journal of March 11, 1732, describes vampyres in Hungary (actually northern Serbia under direct Austrian rule) as sucking the blood of the living.[4]  Vampires had already been discussed in French[5]  and German literature.[6]  After Austria gained control of northern Serbia and Oltenia with the Treaty of Passarowitz in 1718, officials noted the local practice of exhuming bodies and "killing vampires".[6]  These reports, prepared between 1725 and 1732, received widespread publicity.[6]

The English term was derived (possibly via French vampyre) from the German Vampir, in turn derived in the early 18th century from the Serbianвампир/vampir,[7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12]  when Arnold Paole, a purported vampire in Serbia was described during the time when Northern Serbia was part of the Austrian Empire.

<p style="margin-top:0.5em;margin-bottom:0.5em;line-height:22.399999618530273px;color:rgb(37,37,37);font-family:sans-serif;">The Serbian form has parallels in virtually all Slavic languages: Bulgarian and Macedonian вампир (vampir), Bosnian: lampir, Croatian vampir, Czech and Slovakupír, Polish wąpierz, and (perhaps East Slavic-influenced) upiór, Ukrainian упир (upyr), Russian упырь (upyr), Belarusian упыр (upyr), from Old East Slavic упирь (upir). (Note that many of these languages have also borrowed forms such as "vampir/wampir" subsequently from the West; these are distinct from the original local words for the creature.) The exact etymology is unclear.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-Tokarev_13-0" style="line-height:1;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;">[13]  Among the proposed proto-Slavic forms are *ǫpyrь and *ǫpirь.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-Vasmer_14-0" style="line-height:1;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;">[14]  Another, less widespread theory, is that the Slavic languages have borrowed the word from a Turkic term for "witch" (e.g., Tatar ubyr).<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-Vasmer_14-1" style="line-height:1;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;">[14] <sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-15" style="line-height:1;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;">[15]

<p style="margin-top:0.5em;margin-bottom:0.5em;line-height:22.399999618530273px;color:rgb(37,37,37);font-family:sans-serif;">Czech linguist Václav Machek proposes Slovak verb "vrepiť sa" (stick to, thrust into), or its hypothetical anagram "vperiť sa" (in Czech, archaic verb "vpeřit" means "to thrust violently") as an etymological background, and thus translates "upír" as "someone who thrusts, bites".<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-16" style="line-height:1;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;">[16]

<p style="margin-top:0.5em;margin-bottom:0.5em;line-height:22.399999618530273px;color:rgb(37,37,37);font-family:sans-serif;">An early use of the Old Russian word is in the anti-pagan treatise "Word of Saint Grigoriy" (Russian Слово святого Григория), dated variously to the 11th–13th centuries, where pagan worship of upyri is reported.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-17" style="line-height:1;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;">[17] <sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-period_18-0" style="line-height:1;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;">[18]

<p style="margin-top:0.5em;margin-bottom:0.5em;"> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampire