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

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).

Keywords

• literary norm
• neologistic lexicon
• phonetic and morphological adaptation of loans