The result was delete. Wifione ....... Leave a message 07:10, 14 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I can't decide what is more problematic about this article. It could be the fact that it uses a native Romanian spelling for a Turkish word, so obscure a word that I can't even determine its actual spelling (zahercu?). It could be that it merely refers to food merchants, no particular reason why these food merchants are more relevant than others on the "international stage". It could also be that the term itself is antiquated (and was colloquial) even in Romanian. The encyclopedic dictionary that I use for quick reference has entries on other words from the Ottoman era from seimeni and agă, to the utterly blurry seraschier, and includes an entry on the generic term, zaherea ("a generic term for provisions [...] that the Romanian lands were obliged to furnish to the Ottoman armies"). But zaheregiu is absent. Google searches for zaheregiu and the plural zaheregii give just about no results. Some other significant problems: the article was created exclusively to fill a red link in a couple of articles from the Filotti family cruft, all of which are now deleted; incidentally, like those articles, it uses a very questionable reference that is quite possible self-published, and is certainly not a reliable source (the author is a raving amateur). Dahn (talk) 02:08, 7 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
“ | In looking at that word (Zaheregiu) as it's spelled in the article, something caught my eye. It hasn't any Turkish-language meaning, at all - even if you break it into syllables (eg. Zaher-egiu) to form a combined word. (Their are Turkish words that are similar in looks, but not similar enough to be useful.) And... it simply isn't logical that a group of Ottoman Age 'Balkan grain traders' would have a meaningless Turkish name. So, I'll bet you a fiver that (Zaheregiu) is slightly misspelled.
I'll investigate further... but for now just consider one of a few credible possibilities. Turks finally began [giving themselves "proper" western-like surnames], often attaching 'oglu' (meaning 'the son of') at the end an heroic name to create a surname for themselves. Now, observe the last 4 letters of the name in question (-egiu). They could have easily been mis-copied when they were taken from the original document (perhaps when they were manually extracted, or when they were spelled-checked, or when the were OCR-ed). Mebbe those letters ought to be 'oglu' instead of 'egiu'...The correct o-letter could have become a similarly-shaped incorrect e-letter during copy/extraction...And so on... Of those 4 letters, I suspect that...only the g and the u-letters made it through cleanly, from the source document. And perhaps, the h-letter in 'Zaher' (a word which has *no* meaning in Turkish) should be an f-letter -- resulting in 'Zafer' which means an heroic 'Victory'. And, combining, you get Zaferoglu... Son(s) of Victory...which is still a very common surname in Turkey. There are a couple of other misspelling possibilities that I also need to consider -- such as Zaferrengi, Zafiroglu, etc. |
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