The author of the study tries to debate on the issue whether the toponymy, either as a science or as the totality of geographical names, is no more than the ancilla of history, geography, linguistics, or it represents something nobler and more important, and should therefore be considered an authentic linguistic thesaurus and a component of national cultural patrimony. To answer this question, the study presents some relevant results of the toponymic research undertaken at the Institute of Romanian Philology in Iaşi, Department of Toponymy, together with other contemporary scientific approaches on the status of toponymic sciences. There are two key concepts of the theory of toponymic fields which stand on the foundation of the Toponymic Dictionary, Structural and Etymological elaborated at the Institut of Iaşi: the toponymic field and the toponymic etymology. The use of these two concepts in the processing of the toponymic data places the geographical names in the historical, linguistic, geographical, social, cultural context of their origin. Thus it is stressed the fact that the toponymy is the creation of a linguistic and cultural community.
The term biblical insert (Rom. inserat biblic) refers to a concept that can encompass all types of interpretations and representations of biblical content in literature. This concept is useful for analyzing texts, whether they are translations or original works, at various stages of literary development. This concept involves aspects specific to both literary theory and textual linguistics and describes what is known in literary theory and textual linguistics as quotation, motif, theme, symbol, allusion, image, character, paraphrase, biblical story. Biblical inserts can be classified into several categories, which we have named according to the criteria we developed and the action of each type of insert in the text.
NALR-Mold.Bucov., vol. V, 2022, includes several maps, but also unmapped materials from the onomasiological group of landform terminology, which also involves some aspects of Romanian toponyms. The territorial distribution covered by these materials sheds light on their diachronic relationship with the corresponding names of Slavic or pseudo-Slavic origins, as mentioned by Emil Petrovici, and highlights either the popular or the cultivated character of some formal variants. Thus, the names Calea or Drumul lui Traian are confirmed as learned forms, promoted by the Transylvanian anthroponymy and the ideology of the 19th century, while the historical documents in Moldova and Bucovina attest the pop. ent. form Trojan. There are no survey points in the NALR that list the meaning of "defence wave" or "ditch, gully, log" attached to the recorded appellative "trojan". Obviously, this meaning has long been forgotten. Romanian entopics for the semantic field meaning "passing through high and narrow places" are newer than prislop (or prihodiște), and are the result of either figurative meanings (i.e., scară, șa, tarniță) or post-verbal derivatives (i.e., curmătură, trecătoare). Pas is a geographical neologism (from germ. Pass) and only strungă ("lathe"), from the substrate, is archaic, but still with figurative meaning as an entopic and toponym. The most reliable argument that would prove the origin and antiquity of the Romanian toponyms derived from foreign words is their positioning in "usually purely Romanian toponymic areas", as E. Petrovici noticed. Thus, the oronym Prislopul Secului cannot be considered Romanian only by considering its very close proximity to Gura Breazii, Măgura, Feredeu, Opcina Mare, Neagra, Straja, etc. The fact that the toponym Prislop appears, as a rule, in the mountainous areas of the Carpathians is evident, given its entopic meaning, but the only place named Prislop in the hilly area between Siret and Prut, from about 4 km north of the village of Tansa, Iași county, should be pointed out, the oronym being attested since 1706. The rare and late habitation in this area, dating perhaps from the 13th century, as well as the isolation of the place, wooded and uninhabited before 1400, are circumstances that do not support a Slavic etymon of the toponym. NALR-Muntenia and Dobrogea, vol. IV, indicates the presence of ent. prislop (prizlop) in Vâlcea, Argeș and Prahova counties, in only eight localities of the Northern areas, but there is no trace of this word in Dobrogea. E. Petrovici uses material from ALR to restrict the geographical spread of the ent. tarniță ῾șa᾽ to only two areas – a larger one, including the Romanian Bucovina, the North of Neamț county, and the Maramureș, and a narrower one, in the Apuseni Mountains, at Abrud and to the North of this location, with only one record of the meaning of "passing", at Pipirig, Neamț county. In reality, the spread of the appellative tarnița, which has extensions into the Ukrainian Bucovina, and of its figurative entopic is proven by the presence of the corresponding toponyms in a larger area, found in the Tarnița villages in the regions of Southern and Southwestern Romania, in Argeș, Hunedoara and Mehedinți counties. The de-semanticization and narrowing of the areas of the old appellatives and entopics from the class of terms referring to places of passage over the high ridges will continue, but the witnesses of semantic erosion, the toponyms (oiconyms, oronyms and hodonyms), will remain untouched by the passage of time.
The article is an analysis of Romanian popular cultural representations and stereotypes about women, as they emerge from the versified materials collected in the period 1897-1900 by the team coordinated by the historian philologist Gr. Tocilescu. From the more than 4000 folklore pieces in the massive volumes, several anthropological categories stand out that mark the vision of a male and religious society on women. They are generally assigned negative roles. The texts contain reflections of some conceptions dating from the pre-modern Romanian world, according to which women are associated with the devil, being the instrument of temptation, deceptions and curses by which men feel permanently threatened. The article proposes a breakdown of the categories that make up the stereotypical image of women at the end of the 19th century. A certain complexity is reflected by opposite images that are both documented in these texts. Thus, we meet the maiden, but also the old spinster, the public woman and the "dishonest" girl cheated on by her lover; the good wife, the unhappy fiancée or wife, the good daughter, sister or mother, but also the perverted mother, the unfaithful wife; women are more faithful as lovers than they are as wives; the mysterious nun may be opposed to the woman-man figure; wealth in women is seen as a trap, being usually accompanied by a poor mind and a very bad temperament. I have insisted on the examples, mainly because of the plasticity with which they render the underlying conceptions. In the light of such synthesis, we may ask ourselves, in the perspective of the long duration theorized by anthropologists, how much of these prejudices are still active today.
Our list of lexemes that start with C which we extracted from the Chronicle from the Beginning of the World, manuscript no. 3517, comprises around 300 items in total, more than those with A (130 lexemes) and B (108 lexemes) that we have previously analysed. Due to the large volume of our research, we decided to divide the list into two parts. Thus, in the first part of this paper, we are analysing 104 lexemes. Some of these lexemes have been described in our book on the lexis of the Chronicle (Dragomir 2017), in the chapters on words of different origins, on derivation or in connection with other issues related to the lexis, but with no reference to the lexicographical situation in DA and DELR, as we make here, resuming the information presented in the book. These lexemes were selected from the text of The Chronograph on the same grounds we specified in the analysis of the words that begin with the letters A and B and the first part of the letter C and can be used in the compiling of the two academic dictionaries, especially since the second edition of The Romanian Language Dictionary is in progress. Currently, the letters A and B are being edited at the Department of Lexicography of the "Iorgu Iordan – Alexandru Rosetti" Institute of Linguistics from Bucharest, and the letter C is being edited at the Department of Lexicology and Lexicography of the "Alexandru Philippide" Institute of Romanian Philology from Iași.
In this article I analyze the novel of transition as a subgenre of contemporary Romanian literature, arguing for its relevance in a discussion of how postcommunist literary works reflect the social reality of their time. Drawing on the notion of subgenre as it was defined by Franco Moretti, I focus on novels written and published in the narrow period between the 1990s to the mid-2000s by authors who experienced the transition and sought to render it in their literary works. My focus lays particularly on temporalities in transition and on how they are captured and subverted in literature. In contrast to the temporalities vehiculated by the most powerful ideologies of the 1990s, one conservative and the other future-oriented, the literature of the time creates a third temporality, a cautious and ironic one, which I call subversive temporality, given its evasiveness and disengagement with political realities. I conclude by proving that this literary behavior is both an aftereffect of the subversive strategies of the literature written in late communism, and a reflection of the feeling of disempowerment in the face of rapid, overwhelming social change.
This article aims to present the lexicons (or resources that are similar to lexicons), which were elaborated in Romania during the period 1973–2022, in all media forms, from the written to the digital. The term lexicon is hereby understood as it is used within the field of generative grammar. For each project I considered the following pieces of information: description, objectives, team, funding, input data, work methodology, data model and, respectively, the results. As to the data model, I have made terminological conversions, due to the fact that some projects, especially those realised by researchers with an Information Technology background, use a terminology that is more specific to Information Technology field than to linguistics or philology.
