Talk:Strzyga

Copied with specific permission from. silsor 04:29, Jan 4, 2004 (UTC)

The name seems to close to Latin striga, strix to be a coincidence. It would be nice if an etymological note could be added. 85.8.12.78 00:35, 7 May 2007 (UTC)


 * Yes, Slavic Striga (=Polish Strzyga) is borrowed from Latin strix.

1. After christianisation a baby could become striga if it died before being christiened. One form of baby striga were little children with owlish wings instead of arms. Other form were owls with children's heads. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.10.231.82 (talk) 17:28, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

two pages about Strzyga
guys there is another page containing info about Strzyga but uunder the name Shtriga. One of those two should be redirected.--sturm 12:25, 25 September 2007 (UTC)


 * I think that strzyga should be merged with shtriga under "STRIGA". And there should be link to "strix" (because striga is borrowed from Latin)
 * "strzyga" in polish is called "strzyga" in english - there's no equivalent. So obviously strzyga shouldn't be merged with shtriga. Lothar25 (talk) 02:56, 5 February 2008 (UTC)
 * My hunch is that all these words are local variations on the same bunch of folk creatures, and should all be unified under the same article, possibly noting the spelling and other minor variations for some countries. But come on! It's undeniable that striga, shtriga and strzyga all refer to essentially the same thing! It's practically the same word, too! 201.216.245.25 (talk) 21:27, 21 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Well, surely. But then it should be properly sourced that this is the same. WP:VER is one the most important things on which Wikipedia is based, Sir Lothar (talk) 14:20, 23 January 2010 (UTC)

Strzyga etymology
Obviously, this word's ultimate roots are in Latin 'strix', and it has cognates in Italian 'strega', Romanian 'strigă' (related to 'strigoi'), Albanian 'shtrigë', etc. As to how it arrived in Polish, I wonder if the intermediate of Romanian 'strigă', meaning both barn-owl and evil spirit or ghost, is a pretty reasonable theory, particularly as it is known various Romanian (Vlach) peoples migrated northward toward Slovakia and southern Poland in the Middle Ages and such, and a few words and concepts did become part of their languages (as well as a few surnames). It couldn't have been borrowed directly from Latin 'strix', since the form of the word does not match. And Italian evolved an 'e' in the word ('strega'). Albanian 'shtrigë' also wouldn't match, and had no way of really reaching Poland as there wasn't really direct interaction between them. There is, however, a derivative form 'striga' in Latin, and it is admissible that it could have been borrowed straight from it, but given Poland's location, and the semantic development of the term in line with others in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, it's uncertain. A Romanian etymological dictionary (http://www.dex.ro/strig%C4%83) says that the Polish word, along with a Slovenian equivalent must be derived from Romanian, though I don't know if you can cite that with absolute certainty. Polish also has a related form 'strigonia', which seems to correspond directly with the Romanian form 'strigoaie' (the '-oi' and '-oaie' suffixes likely derived from Latin '-oneus', '-onea', and the 'n' is still found in Aromanian and likely was found in Old Romanian, when it was shared to Poles by northern migrating Vlachs. Word dewd544 (talk) 00:21, 10 March 2017 (UTC)