Anthroponyms

Around 1150 Dacian anthroponyms and 900 toponyms have been preserved in ancient sources. As far as the onomastic of Dacians and Thracians is concerned, opinions are divided. According to Crossland (1982), the evidence of names from the Dacian, Mysian and Thracian area seems to indicate divergence of a 'Thraco-Dacian' language into northern and southern groups of dialects, but not so different as to rank Thracian and Dacian as separate languages, There were also the development of special tendencies in word formation and of certain secondary phonetic features in each group. Mateescu (1923), Rosetti (1978) sustain that Thracian onomastic include elements that are common to Geto-Dacians and Bessians (a Thracian tribe). A part of researchers support that onomastically, Dacians are not different from the other Thracians in Roman Dacia’s inscriptions. But recently, D. Dana basing himself on new onomastic material recorded in Egyptian ostraka suggested criteria which would make possible to distinguish between closely related Thracian and Dacian-Moesian names and singled out certain specific elements for the latter.