2/2014 Arhive - romanianlanguage.org

Father Christmas – Romanian Moş Crăciun and his roots in the Indo-European mythology

By Ana Radu Chelariu| 2015-03-16T09:04:41+00:00 23 December 2014|

This paper discusses a few aspects of the Romanian Father Christmas – Moș Crăciun character in relation to the Indo-European pantheon, and proposes a different etymology of his name. A general custom in many European households was to bring inside the house on Christmas Eve an oak log known in English as the Yule log, in Romanian “butucul crăciunului”. This sacred log which was burning till spring, may have its roots in a solar cult of the most important god of the Indo-European mythology, the god of sun and fire, of thunder and lightning, be that Zeus, Jupiter, Diuspater, Wodan, Indra, Perkunas, more so Mithra, the powerful Sun god celebrating his birthday on December 25th whose cult was spread in Eastern Europe by soldiers from the Roman legions.

Editorial

By Lucian-Mihai Marin| 2015-03-16T09:04:49+00:00 23 December 2014|

Romanians have never had to experience a void of Love. However, they ebbed and flowed through life trying to keep celebrating differences whenever circumventive reasons had them deny their own private spectrum of beneficial spirituality and emotions. Instead of sharing their true beneficial nature, they ended up being shared. Lesson learned - with a growing awareness of truly celebrating differences, they are now finally able to embrace their genetics, customize and capture their true Beauty and Uniqueness. We are merely trying to spread the joy ! Lucian Mihai Marin - Founding Director

Bucovina: Onomastics and History(I)

By Gheorghe Moldoveanu| 2017-03-20T07:17:17+00:00 23 December 2014|

The conference was delivered in the Council Hall of the Romanian Academy on May 24th 2001
The author of the present paper describes the evolution of Bucovina from the inclusion into the Habsburg Empire of this territory - once part of Moldavia - to the day. After some hesitations, this land annexed to Austria-Hungary, which had not previously had a name of its own, received a Slavic name eventually. This name had been used by the Moldavian Chancellery only in the documents written in the Slavic language, since proving that it was not a Romanian territory was a necessity back then. The same criterion was used when choosing Cernăuți as the capital of Bucovina; it is worth noting, however, that this is a Romanian name, since the Ukrainian one is Cernivtsi. The author also analyses the dramatic changes in the toponymy and anthroponymy of Bucovina, both during the Austrian-Hungarian occupation and especially after the northern part of this territory, included in the Cernăuți/Chernivtsi region and currently part of the Ukrainian Republic, became part of the Soviet Union.

Words Defining the Notion of ‘WATER’ in Various Language Families of the World

By Emanoil Florin Ganciu| 2017-03-20T07:18:22+00:00 23 December 2014|

From the information shown bellow, one may conclude that a large number of the world languages share at least 8 (eight) different terms defining the notion of ‘water’ or from the same semantic field. There are, in general, at least several hundred words common to various world languages, besides those discussed in this article. I should stress that of them are found in Romanian as well. This mean that Romanian language seems to be a very old Indo-European language, not just another Romance language. The myth of Tower of Babel is wide spread in many cultures all around the world. I would like to mention here only the one of the Kaska Indians of North America: “before the Flood, there was a single center. All people lived in one country and spoke only one language”. Therefore, the myth of the Flood, as well as the one of the Tower of Babel, refer back to some real events which took place many thousands years ago and some peoples remember them even today.

The Etymology of the words țigan (gypsy) and (r)rom (romany)

By Lucian Cherata| 2017-03-20T07:16:43+00:00 23 December 2014|

The present paper analyses the etymology of the words țigan ‘Gypsy’ and (r)rom ‘Romany’. Previous approaches trace back the term țigan to the Greek word athingánōs, meaning ‘untouchable, pagan, impure,’ and (r)rom to the homonymous Persian term with the sense ‘man, husband, master of the house.’ I argue that, despite their long-established influence, these etymologies are misleading and partially inconsistent. I postulate instead that the two words are of Sanskrit origin. On this view, țigan goes back to the term at(i)-ingā-nin (‘a person who is on the move, a traveller, a nomad’). In Indian culture, nomadism and lack of purity were understood as two complementary dimensions of intangibility, a characteristic attributed to the so-called pariahs and the lower caste sudra. Due to close commercial and cultural relations between India and Byzantine Greece under the Seleucid dynasty, at(i)-ingā-nin may have entered the Greek language under the form athinganoi, with its original negative connotations enhanced by the local Christian context. As far as the word (r)rom and its variants dom and lom are concerned, a number of phonetically similar Sanskrit terms can be identified, all of which converge towards the meaning ‘lord, master of the house, husband.’ If we also take into account historical information related to the migration of the gypsy population from India, it is plausible to ascribe the term (r)rom a Sanskrit instead of a Persian origin.

The Theory of Statement in Romanian Language

By Cipriana–Elena Peica| 2015-03-16T09:05:23+00:00 23 December 2014|

This paper is intended as an overview of the Theory of Statement in a Romance language: Romanian. In this paper we will refer to the evolution of the Theory of Statement. In this respect, we will present the views of renowned authors and analyse the defining features of statement in the Romanian language, in order to shape an overall picture of the topic approached herein. We consider it important that, in the current linguistics, the basic unit subject to analysis is the statement, because this is an illustration of how modernisation of traditional grammar is achieved by borrowing technical terms that are designed to complement the shortcomings of previous terminology. Statement will be analysed both as a communicative unit and as a syntactic unit, concluding that statement may be accepted as syntactic unit in the communicative plane, although, since it is neither defined nor delimited in the relational plane, it cannot be considered a relational unit. As a syntactic unit, statement implies division, it has the status of an analysable whole, and we can talk about the internal organisation of a statement if it is created by articulating at least two components.