Diversitate si Identitate Culturala in Europa (Nov 2024)
Latin – Romanic – Romanian: the case of “problematic participles”
Abstract
The relationship between genetic inheritance and recent innovation, and between parallel evolutions and specific particularizations of related languages, is difficult to reduce to an acceptable analytical scheme. No matter how efficient the research methods, specialists cannot firmly decide whether a certain phenomenon can be framed within a relatively linear historical evolution, with visible marks of expected filiations, or is the result of general language laws, acting through specific mechanisms on the phonetic, lexicosemantic, grammatical and pragmatic-stylistic manifestations of languages. Among the strange, difficult phenomena, hard to fit into the morphological systems of languages, at least through some particularities, is, alongside interjections and onomatopoeias, for example, the “perfect passive participle,” as it has been codified in grammars over time. With ambiguous belonging and manifestations – verb and adjective, with possibilities of substantivization, adverbialization etc., with a permanent predisposition to evade the rigour of morphological, syntactic and semantic paradigms, the passive participle seems to carry with it its entire versatility, protean, creative and expressive character – from Indo-European to Ancient Greek and Latin, and from there, into the Romance languages, including Romanian. But we are not very sure that it did not reinvent each time, with small particularities in each language, in accordance with certain springs of human thought and speech, difficult to penetrate at this stage of the development of sciences. In fact, the “oddities” of the participle manifest themselves in other languages as well – not only in Latin and Romance ones and not only in Indo-European languages…
