#necurat literally means unclean in a way nesuferit only implies

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Nesuferitul

So, we’ve gotten to the part in Dracula Daily where Bram Stoker starts throwing around the word nosferatu. Stoker got the word from Emily Gerard, who mentions it in her works on Transylvanian superstitions which Stoker used for research, where she makes it out to be the Romanian word for vampire. In this she is backed up by German writer Wilhelm Schmidt, who also treated it as the Romanian word for vampire. The word “vampire”, by the way, came to English from French, to French from German, and to German via Hungarian from the Slavic languages. Romanian is not a Slavic language, but a Romance language, as you might guess from the name. Thing is, there is no such word as “nosferatu” in Romanian. However, other German writers like Heinrich von Wlislocki treat “nosferatu” or “der Nosferat” as a Romanian word, so researchers who have gone down rabbit holes trying to derive it from the Greek for “diseased” or the Latin for “not breathing” or some Slavic basis are, quite frankly, barking up the wrong tree. Instead, it’s way more likely that “nosferatu” is a Germanicization of a Romanian word before Romanian spelling was standardized, which it wasn’t even in the late nineteenth century. The Romanian word “nesuferit” literally means “insufferable”. The prefix “ne” indicates the negative, the root “suferi” means “suffer.” However in practice nesuferit doesn’t mean “insufferable” as in “oh, that annoying man is insufferable”. Instead the meaning is much more in the sense of unbearable, offensive, horrible, diseased. It’s a word used to mean “unclean” in a taboo way. To talk about an “unclean spirit” means to talk about an incubus or succubus, something that draws your strength or poisons your soul through sex. Now, the nominative masculine definite form of a Romanian noun adds the suffix -ul. We see this with Vlad II Dracul. Dracul means “The Dragon” with the “the” also communicating male. The addition of “-ea” to “Dracul” as in Vlad III Draculea gets us “Son of the Dragon.” So, something is “nesuferit” if it is horrid or unclean or unbearable, thus “nesuferitul” is “The Horrid One”, etc. It’s male and it’s a thing and it’s awful. Nesuferitul is an incubus, a male demon that impregnates its victim. The child of a nesuferitul and its victim is born a moroi, a kind of living vampire born (un)dead. Meanwhile, a person who committed some great sin or buried in unhallowed ground or without rites would come back from the dead a strigoi, to feed on the living. Nesuferitul was transliterated into German as Nosferatu, where it was assumed to be the Romanian word for vampire, but is in fact an incubus. From there it found its way to Bram Stoker, who took it to mean undead. “The Undead” in Romanian would literally be “nemortul”, by the way. Moroi means something like “the nightmarish one”, while strigoi means something like “the screaming one”, and is cognate with terms derived from Latin “strix” or “striga”, which became the root for “witch” in many Romance languages. Interestingly, the Slavic root origin of vampire is also thought to come from a word originally indicating a witch. Anyways, there you are. “Nosferatu” is not a “real” word, at least, not a real Romanian word, and certainly not the Romanian word for a vampire. But don’t go too hard on Bram Stoker, he was only as good as his sources. This was a hundred years before online search engines, after all.