foame

Where it comes from

Inherited from Latin famēs, from Proto-Indo-European *dʰH- (“to disappear”). Compare Galician fame, French faim, Italian fame and Portuguese fome. The Romanian phonetic development was unusual in this case, with the diphthong -oa- normally resulting from a Latin -o-; however, compare the aforementioned Portuguese term, as well as Dalmatian fum and Romansh fom. The development in Romanian has garnered numerous explanations, neither of which are certain: some have attempted to explain it through influence from a derivative, atonal form, such as fometos < *fămetos, or, given the presence of the related foamete, possibly from confusion with the unrelated Latin fōmes, fōmitem (“tinder”) (note the parallelism between this and iască (“tinder”), from ēsca (“food”)); a somewhat similar phonetic occurrence is also found in words like înota (cf. also Italian nuotare).