Alexandru Ciorănescu ‒ contributions to the etymology of the Romanian language

Abstract

The Romanian language has gone through countless trials and vicissitudes, from the first Latin words that came to collide with the speech of the natives of Dacia, until the modern era. After, in the first centuries after Christ, it managed to consolidate itself on an area that stretched from the Black Sea to the Adriatic Sea and from the Balkans to the Wooded Carpathians, becoming a true "lingua franca" of the inhabitants of Europe from East, it had to yield to the newcomers, restricting itself to the hearths where it is spoken today by approximately eighteen million "Daco-Romanians", a few hundred thousand Aromanians, a few thousand Megleno-Romanians and barely a few hundred Istro-Romanians. The interest of the Romanian language in terms of the general study of European languages was imposed early on and is constantly growing. In this sense, the present article aims to present Alexandru Ciorănescu’s approach, to develop and complete an etymological dictionary over five thousand kilometers away from the country, which must be considered a huge effort. The Etymological Dictionary of the Romanian Language is a work and information tool made available to those interested not only in the Romanian language, but also in other languages (Romance, Slavic, etc.) with which it had connections during its history. The edition in Romanian is intended to be a modest tribute to the scholar Alexandru Ciorănescu, a prominent personality of Romanian philology and culture.