ANALYSIS OF THE CONNOTATIVE AND DENOTATIVE MEANINGS OF THE ROMANIAN TERM ”ZMEU” (DRAGON) AS IT APPEARS IN THE ROMANIAN PHYTONYMY

Many of the Romanian phytonyms are directly related to the dragon („zmeu”). Like in other folkloric creations, in our ethnobotany this being has evil representations. Our paper aims to reveal an inventory, an interpretation and a statistic of Romanian names of plants which implicates the word „zmeu”, spread through the botanical terminology, a phenomenon which, as considered by E. Coşeriu is not enough highlighted (given that the individual speaker became creator of language / poetry whenever he named a flower. The conclusion of our work is that once known, botanical lexicon of a specific region is not only a thesaurus but also a document of the resident population and places of the past. Botanical popular terminology has primarily a practical value, designating, distinguishing and categorizing elements of the plant kingdom within the given natural reign, but also has a high theoretical significance, especially for linguists, both by the ethimons to which they send back and by the metaphorical meanings the phytonims mostly have.