BLOOD SUCKING

I've been through the region, and there's no English word Serbians are more proud of than vampire. This word for "mythical person biter" apparently was first mentioned in the eighteenth century (much earlier that Bram Stoker's nineteenth century Dracula masterpiece). In one exclusive instance in 1732, the word "vampire" was used, as from German vampir. However, this was isolated and most uses of vampire can be traced to the French word vampire, which derives from Hungarian (a non-IE language!), and the word vampir. This traces through Serbo-Croatian, where the same word had the same definition. This in turn can be followed even further back to Slavic upir, still with the same definition. Where this comes from is a source of much controversy. The natural intuition would be all the way back to Proto-Indo-European, since Slavic is an IE language, but the sound styles don't really match up. This has lead linguists to debate endlessly over vampire, with some factions claiming that it has origins in Macedonian and others claiming that it comes from Tatar ubyr "witch", though that is disputed. Another group claims that it's from Turkic, through Proto-Slavic. A lot of speculating about an imaginary creature!