Romance Languages Research Articles

A Hungarian Franciscan Preaching in Romanian. The Romanian Sermons of Olti István, OFM in Hungarian Transliteration

Franciscans carried out an important pastoral ministry in the Diocese of Alba Iulia, which included Romanian-speaking communities. A particular example of this ministry is the decades-long preaching of István Olti, OFM, a Hungarian friar, to Romanian believers, in the first half of the 19th century. This essay discusses his unpublished Romanian sermons given in Grădiștea de Munte, Sibișel, Sebeșel and Rodna Veche, preserved in the Franciscan Archives in Cluj. The sermons, entirely inspired by the Bible, are interesting not only as witnesses of the Franciscan ministry to Romanian-speaking communities, but also as examples of religious texts in Romanian, written with Latin characters, a phonetic transcription using Hungarian letters and digraphs, in a (trans)formative period of the Romanian language, when writing and printing used Cyrillic characters. Article history: Received 03.05.2024; Revised 05.05.2024; Accepted 15.05.2024 Available online: 07.06.2024. Available print: 30.06. 2024

:New Critical Nostalgia: Romantic Lyric and the Crisis of Academic Life

:<i>New Critical Nostalgia: Romantic Lyric and the Crisis of Academic Life</i>

The Term “state” and Its Use in Russian, French and Other Romance Languages”

The article deals with the peculiarities of using the term “state” in the twentieth century in French and other European languages, especially Romance languages, in comparison with Russian. Different approaches to translating this term from Russian into European languages are considered, depending on the political content and context. Various options are proposed to identify the principles of translation of related terms from lexical and political discourse.

The National Language and History Revival Movement in SSR Moldova at the Time of the Perestroika

As some of those involved in the movement for the revival of the national dignity during the late 1980s are still active on the political arena, a complete and unbiased analysis of the phenomenon is impossible. Only those who had been successful in the 1990s were to be recognized as public figures later on and were to be also included in historical accounts, whereas everybody else was ignored and forgotten. This article explores the profiles of those humanities and sciences professionals who, as part of a diverse group of advocates, initiated and contributed in earnest to the revival of national identity in ssr Moldova. It all started in the early days of Perestroika1, on the 10th of May 1987, when the Sovetskaya Moldavia newspaper published an article by Leonid Bulmaga and Ion Țurcanu. They were asking for a revision of some rarely or never mentioned periods of the ssr Moldova history as well as the rewriting and publication of a national handbook of history. Except for some reactions in July 1987, there was no follow-up to this initiative. Only in September 1988 a group of sixty-six intellectuals signed a letter of appeal for the revival of the Moldovan language, which is identical to the Romanian language. Very few of them were to draw any material profit from the disintegration of the ussr, which was to occur after a few years. Most of them faded into anonymity after 1991. One of them is Vlad Pohilă, a linguist with high professional and moral standards. In 1989 he had edited and published the first issues of the “Glasul” [The Voice] newspaper, which used Latin characters instead of the Russian alphabet imposed by ussr during World War Two. This article focuses on the extended group of advocates to which Vlad Pohilă belonged, a movement whose mission was to reinstate the Moldovan language and to recuperate those periods in national history which had been ignored in the post-war period.

Peculiarities of teaching a second/third foreign language based on English

Problem. The article deals with general issues relating to the main features of teaching a second or third foreign language (German and French, based on English) to students specializing in applied linguistics. A short list of similarities and differences between English, German and French in the context of their learning is given. This study presents an overview of the concept of multilingual education and analyses the main methods of teaching a third language. The problems associated with teaching a second foreign language are not sufficiently revealed, as this discipline is not very widespread in non-language educational institutions. It generally holds that the methodology of teaching a second foreign language does not differ from that of teaching a first foreign language, except that the second language is taught to a lesser extent. This approach does not take into account a number of characteristics that affect the effectiveness of learning the subject. Goal. The aim is to present the main features of teaching the second/third foreign language (German and French based on previously learnt English) to students majoring in Applied Linguistics. The relevance of the study is determined by the need to find more effective methods of teaching a second foreign language. Methodology. To achieve this goal, a number of research methods were used: theoretical analysis and generalization of pedagogical and methodological sources on the issues of third language teaching didactics and the concept of multilingual education. The term «multilingualism» is used in official European terminology to refer to both the linguistic diversity of a society and the ability of a person to speak several languages. The concept of "multilingual education" applies to both the development of an individual language repertoire and to «plurilingual education» i.e., education in a context of linguistic and cultural diversity. English, German and French have many things in common: Latin spelling and lexical similarities. All three languages contain many cognates - words that are similar in spelling and pronunciation and mean the same thing. All of these languages have a subject-verb-object syntactic structure. Consequently, the main problems in learning a second/third language after learning English, in the context of three foreign languages in contact with the mother tongue, are interference not only from the mother tongue but also from the second/third language, as well as positive language transfer, given that they both belong to the same Roman language group. Originality. The modern didactic approaches to multilingualism cause a major change not only in the way we teach, but also in the way we learn, develop curricula, and train future professionals. Practical value. The integration of work on language representation and multilingual learning, as well as explaining the plurilingual didactic approach to students, will make the language learning process more focused on students' real skills, more flexible and more creative.

Avram Iancu’s Will and Legacy: Unknown Legal Documents (1850–1877) in the Rațiu Collection of the Lucian Blaga Central University Library in Cluj-Napoca

Our article presents the little known so-called Rațiu collection of documents from the years 1850– 1877 regarding the death of the Romanian hero Avram Iancu. The documents were donated in 2015 by Indrei Rațiu to the Lucian Blaga Central University Library in Cluj-Napoca. They are valuable legal historical documents regarding the testaments of Avram Iancu (1824–1872) and of his father, Alesandru Iancu (1797–1855), as well as their trials for succession. The documents were written mostly in the Romanian language with Cyrillic and Latin letters, but inserts and documents in German and Hungarian were also added.

Do Acoustic Characteristics of Dysarthria in People With Parkinson's Disease Differ Across Languages?

Cross-language studies suggest more similarities than differences in how dysarthria affects the speech of people with Parkinson's disease (PwPD) who speak different languages. In this study, we aimed to identify the relative contribution of acoustic variables to distinguish PwPD from controls who spoke varieties of two Romance languages, French and Portuguese. This bi-national, cross-sectional, and case-controlled study included 129 PwPD and 124 healthy controls who spoke French or Portuguese. All participants underwent the same clinical examinations, voice/speech recordings, and self-assessment questionnaires. PwPD were evaluated off and on optimal medication. Inferential analyses included Disease (controls vs. PwPD) and Language (French vs. Portuguese) as factors, and random decision forest algorithms identified relevant acoustic variables able to distinguish participants: (a) by language (French vs. Portuguese) and (b) by clinical status (PwPD on and off medication vs. controls). French-speaking and Portuguese-speaking individuals were distinguished from each other with over 90% accuracy by five acoustic variables (the mean fundamental frequency and the shimmer of the sustained vowel /a/ production, the oral diadochokinesis performance index, the relative sound level pressure and the relative sound pressure level standard deviation of the text reading). A distinct set of parameters discriminated between controls and PwPD: for men, maximum phonation time and the oral diadochokinesis speech proportion were the most significant variables; for women, variables calculated from the oral diadochokinesis were the most discriminative. Acoustic variables related to phonation and voice quality distinguished between speakers of the two languages. Variables related to pneumophonic coordination and articulation rate were the more effective in distinguishing PwPD from controls. Thus, our research findings support that respiration and diadochokinesis tasks appear to be the most appropriate to pinpoint signs of dysarthria, which are largely homogeneous and language-universal. In contrast, identifying language-specific variables with the speech tasks and acoustic variables studied was less conclusive.

Considerații privind valoarea de optativ a conjunctivului românesc și bulgăresc în propoziții independente

The Romanian and Bulgarian languages share common features stemming from the Balkan linguistic aria. Among the distinctive grammatical constructions in Balkan languages is the new-type analytic subjunctive, a replacement for the infinitive in various languages such as Romanian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Albanian, and Greek. The subjunctive can manifest in present, imperfect, perfect, and pluperfect tenses in most languages. However, Romanian has more limited combinations, employing only the present and perfect tenses. Despite these differences, the subjunctive shares structural, semantic, and usage similarities across Balkan languages. The use of the subjunctive in optative sentences is a common feature in Balkan languages, conveying achievable desires in the present and strong but unrealizable wishes in the past. This paper aims to broaden the research on the Balkan-type subjunctive by illustrating parallels in the modal values of this mood in Romanian and Bulgarian in independent optative sentences. The research underscores numerous correspondences in the use of the subjunctive in optative sentences in Romanian and Bulgarian. In both languages, within the optative context, the subjunctive expresses various sentiments such as desire, wishes, regret, protest, and indignation. The expression of both factual and counterfactual desires using present and past subjunctive forms is also similar in both languages. The present forms of the subjunctive express a factual desire, meaning an achievable wish that could be fulfilled in the future. The present subjunctive forms are very often encountered in idiomatic expressions that convey wishes and imprecations. Many similarities are noted between expressions in the two languages, both in terms of structure and in semantics and lexical means. The use of present subjunctive forms is not typical for expressing counterfactual wishes (unrealizable or difficult to achieve) but occurs in specific contexts. Wishes expressed through past subjunctive forms are counterfactual because the circumstances in which they could have been realized are omitted. Such statements convey the speaker's regret regarding an unfulfilled desire. In Romanian grammar, detailed treatment of the uses of the perfect subjunctive is lacking, but it is noted to have optative value. In Bulgarian, counterfactual wishes are expressed using three past tenses of the subjunctive – pluperfect, imperfect, and perfect. In this regard, the capabilities of the perfect subjunctive in Romanian stand out for expressing multiple meanings. With the exception of some meanings of the imperfect subjunctive in Bulgarian, the perfect subjunctive in Romanian can convey nearly all the meanings of the three past tenses in Bulgarian. The study highlights numerous similarities in the use of the subjunctive in Romanian and Bulgarian in optative sentences, offering observations that contribute to a deeper understanding of this mood within the field of Romanian, Bulgarian, and Balkan linguistics.

Pragmatic strategies in teaching the Romanian language to international students

The following paper examines effective language-teaching strategies for international students learning Romanian amidst the increasing globalization. Addressing challenges faced by diverse learners, the study employs a methodology encompassing literature review, classroom observations, and interviews with experienced instructors. Emphasizing the importance of pragmatic elements in language instruction, the research explores the integration of technology, cultural immersion, and real-world applications to enhance pragmatic competence. Grounded in sociolinguistic theories, the article underscores the role of pragmatic competence in effective communication. Beyond linguistic structures, language instructors are urged to incorporate nuanced elements reflecting Romanian culture. Pedagogical strategies tailored to international students include task-based activities, role-playing, and language immersion. Assessment involves qualitative analysis of student performance, feedback, and proficiency assessments. The article also delves into the role of technology, discussing the integration of virtual reality, online platforms, and multimedia resources for immersive learning. The study concludes with implications for educators, curriculum developers, and policymakers, advocating for culturally sensitive language curricula. Overall, it contributes to the discourse on language education by emphasizing the interconnectedness of language and culture, promoting pedagogical approaches that foster cross-cultural communication.

Statistical Insignificance is not wholesale transfer in L3 Acquisition: an approximate replication of Rothman (2011)

Abstract This study was an approximate replication of Rothman (2011),examining the determiner phrase syntax of a large sample (n = 211) of L3 learners of Portuguese who spoke English and Spanish. Rothman (2011) investigated whether L3 Italian or Brazilian Portuguese speakers are differently impacted by another known Romance Language, if it was their L1 or L2. The original study concluded that groups did not perform differently on experimental tasks on the basis of a null effect, and that the typological similarity of Spanish, Portuguese, or Italian predicts transfer in the initial stages of L3 acquisition. The present replication recreated all materials, which were unavailable, and examined the same population and questions. However, rather than examining L3 Italian and L3 Brazilian Portuguese, the present work maintained a constant L3 Portuguese. Learners were divided into two groups in a mirror-image design (n = 96 L1 English-L2 Spanish, n = 115 L1 Spanish-L2 English), and data were collected online. Like the original study, there was no main effect of group in any of the two-way analyses of variance. However, results show that it should not be assumed that experimental groups behave equivalently based on a null effect: Of the four total post hoc tests of equivalence, only two were significant when the equivalence bounds were set at a small effect size (d = $ \pm $ .4). Ultimately, it is argued that determining the smallest effect size of interest and subsequent equivalence testing are necessary to answer key questions in the field of L3 acquisition.

O nouă etapă în cercetarea dialectologică românească: Noul atlas lingvistic român, pe regiuni. Moldova şi Bucovina, volumul V

This text is a discussion of the latest volume of Noul Atlas lingvistic român, pe regiuni. Moldova şi Bucovina, published in 2022. Although the structure of the volumes published so far is preserved, we cannot ignore the technical novelties (the editing is done with the help of a computer-aided editing software, the result of the cooperation between dialectologists and computer scientists). The documentary material contained in this volume (relating to time, meteorology, relief, school, army, administration, trade) is interesting both for researchers in the fields of dialectology, history of the Romanian language, toponymy, ethnography, and for the general public. Referring to some of the maps in this volume, we have shown their importance for the onomasiological study of some terms.

The Acquisition of Pragmatically Constrained Japanese Pronouns by L1 English Learners: Results from a Context Translation Task

The allocation of explicit and implicit pronouns and the literature extensively discusses the syntactic and pragmatic conditions that permit and necessitate the use of overt and null pronouns in Romance languages, such as Spanish and Italian. This topic has been explored by various researchers, including Alonso-Ovalle and D’Introno (2000), Fernández-Soriano (1989), Luján (1987, 1999), Montalbetti (1984), Rigau (1986, 1988), and Rizzi (1997). Rothman (2009) argues that the employment of overt subject pronouns in Spanish is pragmatically unusual, except in select discursive situations when their existence contributes more to semantic interpretation than just agreement features. In Japanese, null forms of pronouns are more common than overt pronouns, as observed by Martin (1976). However, like Spanish, the distribution of pronouns in Japanese is influenced by both syntax and pragmatics. In pro-drop languages, overt pronouns, as well as lexical subjects, have the role of resolving any potential uncertainties that may occur when new referents are introduced in a conversation.

Evaluating soundscape in the Italian language: Validation of the translation of the English standardized perceptual attributes of the ISO/TS 12913-2:2018 and comparison with other Romance languages

The Soundscape Attributes Translation Project (SATP) has successfully translated English standardized perceptual attributes of the ISO/TS 12913–2:2018 into various languages. This paper validates the Italian translation of the widespread use of the soundscape circumplex model attributes for using standardized listening experiments protocol. The Italian translation of the ISO soundscape circumplex model was compared with the original English version. Furthermore, a comparison with other Romance languages (i.e., Portuguese, Spanish, French) that have already concluded the validation was carried out. The study was conducted following three phases: (i) a consensus on the final eight attributes of the Italian language was achieved, (ii) the recruitment of 30 naïve normal-hearing Italian listeners and the preparation of the set-up for the listening tests was fostered, (iii) listening tests based on the 27 binaural recordings provided by the SATP project to examine the differences in subjective evaluations of the same sound environment were administrated in the Audio Space Lab of Politecnico di Torino. The main findings of the listening tests consisted in the validation of the Italian translations against English, in the comparison of the perceived loudness in the Italian and English listening tests that showed no significant differences, and in the satisfactory match of Italian translations in comparison with other Romance languages. Although slight differences probably due to cultural aspects were found, these outcomes are helpful to properly develop the Italian version of the ISO 12913-2 and to pursue accurate and replicable soundscape studies.

Investigating the Impacts of Learning Latin on the Acquisition of Romance Languages in English Speakers

Investigating the Impacts of Learning Latin on the Acquisition of Romance Languages in English Speakers

What's hidden below definiteness and genitive: on indefinite partitive articles in Romance.

In French, Italian, and other Romance languages indefinite nominal phrases can be introduced by what appears to be the conflation of a genitive preposition and a definite article, the so-called "indefinite partitive articles" (e.g., Fr. Je cuisine de la soupe depuis deux jours. 'I've been cooking soup for two days'). This is rather unexpected, since these nominal phrases are neither definite nor in a syntactic position in which we expect to find a genitive preposition. This led part of the literature to consider them as built by lexical items synchronically distinct from the genitive preposition/definite article but homophonous with them. This contribution shows how a constituent-based approach to the lexicon-syntax interface as nanosyntax, paired with a specific take on the sequence of syntactic functions, can capture their apparently conflicting distribution without stipulating multiple homophonous lexical items. The key factor in this proposal is a revised analysis of the Romance lexical item (LI) for (i)definite articles- linked to a constituent containing not only features of definiteness but also lower indefinite features and higher nominative/accusative case features- and (ii) the genitive preposition DE- linked to a constituent containing not only genitive features but also lower nominative/accusative features. Holding these LIs crosslinguistically stable, the variation attested in this domain is modeled as depending on the amount of functional structure lexicalized by the nominal root in the different languages.

Linguistic change in times of the COVID-19 pandemic: a corpus linguistic comparison of language contact phenomena in Romance languages

Abstract The radical social, political, and economic changes caused by the COVID-19 pandemic are clearly reflected in language use through the appearance of numerous neologisms, most of which can be considered borrowings from English. In this article, we take a contrastive linguistic approach and focus on the emergence of new lexemes in the press language of four Romance languages (European Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Italian and European French) with a special focus on language contact. Since no press corpora were available with specific data on the COVID-19 pandemic, we created our own corpora for the entire year 2020 using Python in order to compare how lexical innovation is dealt with in the four languages. Our results show that conceptual innovation, especially when it occurs abruptly, can lead to equivalent, often phonotactically adapted neologisms in the case of neighbouring languages. However, the integration of foreign words and the formation of neologisms also show language-specific peculiarities which are not only related to structural characteristics of the respective languages, but also to sociolinguistic and sociocultural factors. Our study elaborates on the relationship between these factors and shows the potential of contrastive and computational approaches for the study of lexical repercussions of language contact.

Divergence-time estimation in Indo-European

Abstract Divergence-time estimation is one of the most important endeavors in historical linguistics. Its importance is matched only by its difficulty. As Bayesian methods of divergence-time estimation have become more common over the past two decades, a number of critical issues have come to the fore, including model sensitivity, the dependence of root-age estimates on uncertain interior-node ages, and the relationship between ancient languages and their modern counterparts. This study addresses these issues in an investigation of a particularly fraught case within Indo-European: the diversification of Latin into the Romance languages. The results of this study support a gradualist account of their formation that most likely began after 300 CE. They also bolster the view that Classical Latin is a sampled ancestor of the Romance languages (i.e., it lies along the branch leading to the Romance languages).

Variant Choices of Future Time Reference in Galician: The Grammaticalization of [haber (de) + infinitive] as a Window to Diachronic Change

Compared to neighboring Romance languages, Galician currently maintains a more ubiquitous usage of the construction [haber (present) + (de) + infinitive] as a future marker in variation with the periphrastic construction with ir ‘go’ and the morphological future. We examine this under-studied construction to gain a better understanding of Galician grammar and also contribute new data with which to consider diachronic change regarding the grammaticalization of the future from obligation markers. We conduct a variationist analysis of 1589 tokens of future forms in recorded conversations (CORILGA) in order to determine the frequency of usage, patterns of variation, linguistic conditioning and degree of grammaticalization of the periphrastic forms with haber and ir in contrast to the morphological variant. We find evidence to suggest that the periphrastic construction with haber is highly grammaticalized as a future marker and we identify factors of the production context that modulate the grammaticalization process.

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Political joke as an alternative literary form to official literature in the Moldavian SSR

The article analyzes the relationship between the political joke as an alternative literary form to official literature in the Moldavian SSR and the socio-political context. In the first part of the article are designed the terms joke and political joke, and further aspects of the socio-political context of MSSR are pursued, which are starting points in the analysis of the political joke in Soviet Bessarabia. Some themes of political jokes in Bessarabia of the 1940s and 1990s are highlighted, with some examples of jokes “from the people”, collected during field discussions with some citizens of the Republic of Moldova, from the online environment and from a literary periodical magazine from 1988. The article demonstrates the words and expressions of daily life of Bessarabians, who made their way into the political jokes of the Moldavian SSR. The jokes that were presented in the article, as examples of political jokes in the Moldavian SSR, reflect the social and political realities of that time period. In these jokes are told stories that cheer and amuse us through irony, sarcasms, suggestions, especially for the bizarre language that the characters used. The political joke is regarded as a form of satire or humor, being framed in a literary species, namely the species of comic folk prose. This literary form, such as the political joke, was an alternative to the official literature of the MSSR. In this article we analyze two themes on which the satire of political jokes in MSSR focused: the distortion of the Romanian language and the effects of propaganda.