Notes on Petru Maior’s language in Învățătură pentru ferirea și doftoria boalelor (1816)

Liliana Soare

doi:10.17684/i4a55en

Abstract

Petru Maior’s translation elaborated in 1816, insufficiently studied, offers precious material as regards the norms of literary language in Transylvania in the first two decades of the 19th century. We focused on the fundamental features of the literary language, but, at the same time, we mentioned the secondary features which were considered relevant for the literary norm promoted by the scholar. It can be observed that the linguistic material extracted from this translation reflects, besides phonetic and morphologic norms specific of the author’s dialect, norms established following other criteria than those exemplified by the local tradition, that is the criterion of proximity to the Latin etymon or proximity to the Wallachian rule promoted by the religious prints of the mid- eighteenth century. As far as the neologistic vocabulary used in this translation is concerned, a semantic classification was performed, aiming at both general cultural vocabulary, as well as at specialized vocabulary (medical terminology). The medical terminology of the text was presented on the two constituent coordinates: the literature, neologistic one and the folk, traditional one. There were considered the most important aspects of phonetic and morphological adaptation of loans, taking notice of the high number of loans properly integrated due to the Latin-Romance orientation of the scholar, as well as of the large share of analogue phonetic variants and unadapted terms (Latinisms and Italianisms).

Highlights

The second half of the eighteenth century and the first two decades of the nineteenth brought an unprecedented diversification of Romanian writing
The cultural primacy is held by Transylvanian scholars who produce original, authentic scientific texts, and at the same time develop a rich activity of translation and adaptation of many texts of science popularization
The literary language promoted by Maior in this translation has the Wallachian literary norm of the 1750

Summary

Introduction

The second half of the eighteenth century and the first two decades of the nineteenth brought an unprecedented diversification of Romanian writing. The writing contains a number of linguistic (phonetic, morphological and lexical) phenomena of importance to the history of Romanian literary language norms at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Being our first text of veterinary medicine, it brings a special contribution to the development of the Romanian medical language in particular and to the modernization of literary vocabulary in general. See, in this regard, Ursu (1961 and 2012). This study is aimed at capturing the configuration of the literary language employed by P Maior in this translation by emphasizing phonetic, morphological and lexical peculiarities

The norms of literary language

The semantic classification of the literate neologistic lexicon

Terms relating to nature

Specialised lexicon

Phonetic and morphological adaptation of loans

Conclusions