Romanian Texts Research Articles

Comparative constructions in old Romanian

In this paper, we analyse degree adjectival constructions in old Romanian texts. We focus on the comparative of superiority, taking into account in the first place the grammaticalization stage of the degree markers. The structures from the old texts contain polyfunctional units in competition; some of them enter a complex process of specialisation (mai ‘more’), while others disappear (camai). Afterwards, we focus on the realizations of the comparative complement in the corpus analysed: prepositional phrases headed by the prepositions ca, decît, de ‘than’. We want to see if we can establish any constraints in the use of these prepositions. We pay attention to the word order disharmonies encountered in the old texts. The configurations with pre-adjectival complements are related to the existence of certain relics of the non-configurational syntax in old Romanian.

The auxiliary of the Romanian conditional: semantic and functional arguments concerning the reconstruction of a disputed grammaticalization process

This paper aims at demonstrating the explanatory advantages of the old hypothesis concerning the origins of the auxiliary of the Romanian analytic conditional (aș + infinitive) as deriving from the imperfect tense form of the verb (a) vrea ‘(to) want’ < *volere (< VELLE). The grammaticalization process, reconstructed through the comparison with the other Romance languages and by relating it to typical directions of the linguistic change, presupposes intermediary semantic phases (the future-in-the-past value, the hypothetical value which is mostly counter-factual), whose traces may be found in the first Romanian (translated) texts, but which have been generally considered a consequence of the simple loan translation from the language source. The uses of the conditional with a reduced auxiliary (aș, ai, etc. + infinitive) are related to those (co-occurring in the old texts) of the conditional with a recognisable auxiliary (vrea ‘wanted’ + infinitive), for which the value specific to the first grammaticalization stage is still strong—that of a future-in-the past. The text also puts forth an explanation for the atypical forms within the paradigm of the conditional auxiliary—aș(i), ar(ă)—through the overlap between the forms of the imperfect and the simple past of the verb (a) vrea ‘(to) want’.

Verbs derived with în–1 (îm–1). Logico-semantic approaches in Old Romanian texts

This paper, which falls into the field of derivational morphology, aims to analyse, from the logico-semantic viewpoint, the verbs derived with în– (îm–), excerpted from old Romanian texts. Starting from the assumption that, regardless of the stages of an idiom, there are sufficient means to render some aspects that have to do, in principle, with the internal lexical creativity of that particular language, it is interesting to emphasize the way in which ‘the change of state’ is reflected in old Romanian literary texts. The analysis grids include the semantic and morphological principles—adapted to our working material which consists of a corpus of religious and laic texts from the 16th–18th centuries. Our approach has focused on various possibilities of expressing the ‘transformation’ materialized in the evolutional-dynamic process, taking into account the categorial relations between în– and the bases to which it is attached, and the conceptual values imposed by the mentioned affix on the derived term.

Towards a history of the Romanian punctuation

In the process of constructing an academic edition for old and pre-modern texts, although they thoroughly record and comment the phonetic, morphological, syntactic, and lexical variants of a text, its omissions and interpolations, etc., the Romanian philologists tend to deal tacitly with the problem of punctuation, by adding rational, syntactic punctuation, according to the contemporary norm. This method has certain advantages for the general public, but, in fact, falsifies the text, because it puts the actions of a secondary agent—the editor—on the author. Moreover, the lack of perfect archæological relevations of the Romanian old and pre-modern texts—which would show, in this respect, the more or less consequent working habits of our early writers—leads, at least for the moment, to the impossibility of presenting the scientific community with a history of the Romanian punctuation. This is, nevertheless, an idea whose achievement depends on an objective re-evaluation of our contemporary editorial practice.

Aspects of coordination by junction in Old Romanian

The approach of coordination by junction in a diachronic perspective aimed at establishing the discursive values of the connectors, in the integrated frame of these syntactic relation patterns, and the manner in which the literary norm selected the elements of each subclass throughout time. This study relies on statistical information and that referring to the dialectal areas distribution collected from recent studies in this field, and provides various examples from the first three centuries of Romanian texts, thus highlighting the continuity of this process. The main objective of the research was the integration in the coordination system of the patterns which the researches have mostly neglected so far, even in the Romanian contemporary language. Concerning the adversative relation, the present research also describes the coordination in periodic complex sentences such as concessive and conditional coordination (the latter unreported in contemporary Romanian) as evidence of spoken Latin – Romanian continuity.

The Vocative Case: Romanian versus Latin

The vocative is a residuary case in most Indo-European languages, mirroring a particular Proto-Indo-European status. Its syntactical function is preserved in the descendant languages, but the morphological aspects are strongly simplified. In Latin, not unlike the cognate languages, the general tendency is toward a formal overlapping with the nominative case. The Romanian vocative is, in the Romance frame, surprisingly multifarious. It displays four distinct variants: desinence and intonation; desinence, intonation and prolongation of the final vowel; intonation and vowel prolongation; solely intonation. Old Romanian texts attest the tendency of gradually replacing the vocative form with the nominative form, perceived as more expressive. On the other hand, there is an observable development of the formal marks specific to this syntactical function; these marks are only partially inherited from Latin. In nowadays Romanian language the formal specificity of the vocative case is not diminishing – on the contrary, some colloquial vocative forms (not yet acceptable in the frame of the linguistic norm) emphasize an unambiguous linguistic will to maintain this case, while the general tendency is to reduce as much as possible the differences between the actual two cases of the Romanian language, nominative-accusative and genitive-dative.

The signified as a reflex of language contacts

The present study joins the series of works aiming to bring up to date, within Romanian linguistics, the theories concerning (Romanian-Hungarian) linguistic interferences manifested in bilingual communities and the research of lexical properties which have entered the Romanian written language either by the influence of the Hungarian dialects, spoken in different regions of the country, or by the translation of Hungarian texts into Romanian. The study will focus on Hungarian loanwords in old Romanian language which are discussed in terms of their changes in meaning. The inventory of the Hungarian loanwords’ meanings listed here was made based on a corpus of old Romanian texts, taking into account the material provided by various dictionaries with etymological concerns. As the few examples analysed in this study show, lexical meaning is impregnated with both intellect and emotional sensibility. The emotional universe, however, is rarely taken over along with the loanword. The emotional content is most often adapted, in its turn, to the sensitivity and spirituality of the speakers who borrowed the word.

Discourse-driven V-to-C in Early Modern Romanian

The Moldavian Chronicles of the 17th and 18th centuries are the first literary texts written directly in Romanian. In these Early Modern Romanian (EMR) texts, declarative clauses display an alternation between clitic > V(erb) and V(erb) > clitic orders, which reflects low verb movement (Verb-to-Tense/V-to-T) or high verb movement (Verb-to-Complementizer/V-to-C), respectively. The analysis concentrates on V-to-C, and demonstrates that, within a cartographic approach to the left periphery of the clause, V-to-C is actually V-to-Focus. Hence, the paper argues for discourse-driven (versus structure-preserving/formal) verb movement to C in EMR, and thus contributes to current studies that view V-to-C in Old Romance as an epiphenomenon of the information packaging at the left periphery of clauses.

SMT-based ASR domain adaptation methods for under-resourced languages: Application to Romanian

This study investigates the possibility of using statistical machine translation to create domain-specific language resources. We propose a methodology that aims to create a domain-specific automatic speech recognition (ASR) system for a low-resourced language when in-domain text corpora are available only in a high-resourced language. Several translation scenarios (both unsupervised and semi-supervised) are used to obtain domain-specific textual data. Moreover this paper shows that a small amount of manually post-edited text is enough to develop other natural language processing systems that, in turn, can be used to automatically improve the machine translated text, leading to a significant boost in ASR performance. An in-depth analysis, to explain why and how the machine translated text improves the performance of the domain-specific ASR, is also made at the end of this paper. As bi-products of this core domain-adaptation methodology, this paper also presents the first large vocabulary continuous speech recognition system for Romanian, and introduces a diacritics restoration module to process the Romanian text corpora, as well as an automatic phonetization module needed to extend the Romanian pronunciation dictionary.

Ocupaţia sârbă din Banat în memorialistica bănăţeană / Serbian Occupation in Banat Memories (1918–1919)

Great events often cause brutal confrontation within history and biography that always create tension – at least inmodern history – a memorialistic wave. As such, the quantity of Banat library memoirs about World War I andpro-union action in the province is not surprising.These include numerous passages concerning the entry and presence of Serb forces in the Banat. This occurredin the eastern and central part of Banat, an area with an absolute majority of Romanian inhabitants. The referencesare more valuable the less they are about these events in our historiography.In this study, things are searching in one hand. However this stage is essential knowledge that will be muchimproved when linked with memorialistic Serbian and Swabian sources.Almost all the Romanian memorialistic text mentions the fall of 1918 and the behaviour of the Serbs during thewithdrawal. Fortunately, in the ’30s of the last century, Professor Ilieşiu from Timişoara, produced a questionnairecontaining some questions about this episode. This questionnaire was distributed to all villages of Banat, largeand small. The answers – with few exceptions – highlight a negative image, the brutal behaviour of the troops, achain of abuse and the suspicion that the Romanian troops were not going –despite their temporary mandate-toleave the province. The picture of the Serbian army is that of an oriental horde, no supply lines and generally nomodern military mores. It unscrupulously consumes the resources of the local people. The soldiers are primitiveand unruly drunks-.The only sympathetic figures are the Romanian soldiers from Timoc, who attempt to defend the people. Theynotify communities about the reprisals against them, and do translation service for Romanians. Their solidarityremains to be studied in its own rightThe arrival of Serbs with the mission to maintain order, found the Banat pacified. The Romanian NationalCouncil and National Guards pacified the region and began introducing Romanian government. Much more thanthat, under the armistice agreement in Belgrade in November 1918, the Serbian military presence does not removebut maintains the old Hungarian administration system, seen here as representing the foreign and Hungarian.their return was seen as a restoration. The Serbs gave signs that they wished to maintain the occupation untilannexation of the entire Banat in Serbia. Toward this end they stopped the delegation to Alba-Iulia. All this ledto the beginning of resistance. In some parts-Naidăş for example- detachments moved to armed struggle. In otherregions, Romanians returning from the front, engaged in open battle and defeated the Serb units. Volunteers fromthe Old Kingdom -were sent on special missions in the Banat to report to Romanian Headquarters on the situationand to prepare the people for possible resistance. It was not necessary. b e Serbs finally withdrew but not beforelooting everything from the industrial products to herds of cattle. But military conflict was avoided. Eventuallya border was established between Serbia and Romania that would be the most stable of all that were fixed in thepeace treaties of Versailles, a sign that balance and intelligence had prevailed.

The Romanian speech synthesis (RSS) corpus: Building a high quality HMM-based speech synthesis system using a high sampling rate

This paper first introduces a newly-recorded high quality Romanian speech corpus designed for speech synthesis, called “RSS”, along with Romanian front-end text processing modules and HMM-based synthetic voices built from the corpus. All of these are now freely available for academic use in order to promote Romanian speech technology research. The RSS corpus comprises 3500 training sentences and 500 test sentences uttered by a female speaker and was recorded using multiple microphones at 96 kHz sampling frequency in a hemianechoic chamber. The details of the new Romanian text processor we have developed are also given. Using the database, we then revisit some basic configuration choices of speech synthesis, such as waveform sampling frequency and auditory frequency warping scale, with the aim of improving speaker similarity, which is an acknowledged weakness of current HMM-based speech synthesisers. As we demonstrate using perceptual tests, these configuration choices can make substantial differences to the quality of the synthetic speech. Contrary to common practice in automatic speech recognition, higher waveform sampling frequencies can offer enhanced feature extraction and improved speaker similarity for HMM-based speech synthesis.

Modeling a Quite Different Machine Translation using Lexical Conceptual Structure

The goal of this study is to outline the readability of an Example-Based Machine Translation for any pair of languages by means of the language-independent properties of the lexical conceptual structure (LCS). We describe LCS as a representation of traditional dependency relationships and use in experiments an isolated pair of verbs, extracted from Orwell's 1984 parallel English - Romanian texts. We discuss the mental models in terms of specific knowledge structures. Finally, we present LCS-Based Machine Translation from the point of view of a complex adaptive system and present our ongoing work in order to capture the neutral linguistic core of any mental model corresponding to the real world.

Prospects for Civics Education in Transitional Democracies: Results of an impact study in Romanian classrooms

An impact study was conducted in the 1994/5 and 1995/6 school years with a single cohort of Romanian students (n = 109) who used an experimental civics text in the 7th and then the 8th Forms. The text emphasized critical thinking, dialogue and participatory methods of instruction. The results appear to confirm the results of others that have shown a clear link between instructional methodology and the development of participatory attitudes, or ‘civic behavior’ in students. This relationship is evident even at such an early time in the post-totalitarian period. The study also shows that students in this age group generally become more aware of the role and rule of law, expanding their notions of citizenship beyond that of civility and good manners. This may well be a reflection both of the emphasis of the Romanian civic culture texts, as well as the emerging ability of students to grasp abstract concepts related to the state and governance.

Noun Morphology in Romanian

0. This paper is a morphophonemic and morphemic study of a class of Romanian words defined by their inflectional behavior as nouns. The point of departure is an array of isolated examples in phonemic form; the result is a classification of nouns by morphological types and a morphemic formula. The corpus from which the examples are drawn consists of Romanian texts' interpreted with the aid of native speakers, supplemented with utterances by the speakers themselves.2 The underlying phonemic analysis is the author's. Phonemic data are here given for orientation only; they do not pretend to be a complete presentation of Romanian phonology. The phonemes of standard Romanian3 are the following: SYLLABIC: two front vowels /i e/, three central vowels /i a a/, and two back vowels /u o/, of which /i i u/ are high, /ea ~/ are mid, /a/ is low; NONSYLLABIC: six labial consonants /p b f v m w/, eight alveolar consonants /t d c s z n 1 r/, five palatal consonants /6 g A j/, and three velar consonants /k g h/; ACCENTUAL: one stress /'/ and three pitches /1 2 3/;4 JUNCTURAL: one phraseinternal juncture /+/ and three phrase-final junctures /I II ./. The language has phonological words, defined as free forms with a single stress, e.g. /kibriturile/ 'the matches', /deobi66j/ 'usually', /umpri6ten/ 'a friend'. It also has morphological words; without recourse to syntax one can isolate four classes by the type of inflection which they exhibit in paradigms: nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and verbs.5 We are here concerned exclusively with nouns.