#customary law

• Adat — A term used in legal anthropology and the history of religions to designate the body of customary laws, traditional practices, and unwritten norms regulating the social, family, and administrative life of Muslim communities (especially in Southeast Asia, such as Indonesia and Malaysia). This traditional legal system often coexists structurally with Islamic law (Sharia) and modern state legislation.
• Pledge-giver — An archaic form or old regional variant for the term 'arvunitor', directly relating to a person who paid a sum of money (earnest money) to secure, pledge, and reserve goods, a service, or the labor of a servant; the term reflects popular past legal and commercial practices in the Romanian Principalities regarding advance pecuniary transactions.
• Earnest money — A regional variant or truncated archaic form used in the past in the merchant language of certain areas of the Romanian Principalities to symbolically denote the giving or receiving of earnest money (deposit, financial pledge); the term referred directly to the informal legal act of binding a transaction by paying a small advance before drawing up the official deed.
• Earnest money — An old phonetic variant or regional form of the word 'arvună' (a sum of money paid in advance to secure a transaction, reserve goods, or hire a service). This term was heavily used in commercial documents and merchant speech during past centuries within the Romanian Principalities, representing the informal financial pledge that guaranteed a bilateral promise.
• To pledge — An old phonetic variant or regional form of the verb 'a arvuni' (to give or receive a sum of money in advance as a guarantee for buying a good, performing a service, or hiring a servant). The term reflects the popular legal and economic action through which a transaction became firm and binding by paying a symbolic pledge before completing the official agreement.
• Earnest money — An old graphical and phonetic variant of the word 'arvună' (a sum of money or goods paid in advance to secure a transaction, close a contract, or hire labor). This term appears frequently in medieval commercial manuscripts from Moldavia and Wallachia, representing the customary legal pledge through which parties mutually blocked their right to withdraw from an agreement without penalties.
• Dispute — An old regional graphic variant, legal archaism, or historically tolerated phonetic form in certain rural communities for the noun 'zăvadă' (dispute), defining a quarrel, a feud, a territorial boundary dispute, or a serious misunderstanding between neighbors. In ancient Romanian customary law, this conceptual pillar designated the cause or lawsuit brought before the divan or the council of elders to be judged and settled through a structural reconciliation decree.