A polymorphic word in old Romanian (adjective, noun, adverb and interjection): ferice ʻgood/blessed/well, happyʼ

Abstract

Consulting the main Romanian lexicographic works and taking into account some previous contributions on Romanian (diachronic) morphosyntax, the author aims to discuss the meanings of the word ferice ‘good/blessed/well, happy’ and its morphological values or syntactic implications, as they are presented in the old Romanian writings, more precisely in some old texts integrated into the SOR Corpus, enriched with new sources recently published. To this day, despite the antiquity of the word in question, it has been discussed only sequentially, which calls for revealing its morphosyntactic behavior. Consulting the main Romanian lexicographic works and taking into account some previous contributions on Romanian (diachronic) morphosyntax, the author aims to discuss the meanings of the word ferice ‘good/blessed/well, happy’ and its morphological values or syntactic implications, as they are presented in the old Romanian writings, more precisely in some old texts integrated into the SOR Corpus, enriched with new sources recently published. To this day, despite the antiquity of the word in question, it has been discussed only sequentially, which calls for revealing its morphosyntactic behavior. Therefore, it will be possible to establish much better the place and role of the word ferice ‘good/blessed/well, happy’ at the sentence level (in the old language), proposing some relevant analytical solutions, leading to some interpretative repositioning, so necessary for a proper understanding of language facts that are not always clear.