NAMES OF THE "DIFFERENT" PEOPLE IN THE BANAT DIALECT

The vocabulary of the Banat speech has not been subject to ethnolinguistic analysis. This article makes a first attempt to lay the linguistic material within the framework of the language - culture relationship. The motivations for naming in folk beliefs and rituals are sought. Lexemes are also interpreted in the light of diachronic linguocultural studies with attention to their historical appearances and their successors in dialects. The choice of names for the "different" people is dictated by the important place they have in all mythology, religion, and culture as mediators between the sacred and the profane. Several names for people who can approach the divine and interpret the messages of the deities are attested in the Banat dialect. They are conventionally divided into three groups: 1. those who can do magic; 2. those who predict the future; 3. those who heal with incantation and other practices. Some of the lexemes have two meanings and name two types of mediators. In the Banat speech the verb бая is found, which is found already in the Old Bulgarian period: баяти, also in archaic and New Bulgarian damascenes: бая, баялница ‘fortune-teller; a woman who foretells the future’. In Father Maurizio's 1845 Dictionary there are lexemes from the same root: бая and байене. The linguistic facts prove that regardless of religion - Orthodox or Catholic - Bulgarians keep the traditional practices of incantation.