Govor, Vol. 25 No. 1, 2008.
Review article
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE ROMANIAN LITERARY LANGUAGE - PHONETICAL AND PHONOLOG1CAL ASPECTS
Camelia Firica
; Spiru Haret University, Craiova, Romania
Abstract
The beginning of the Romanian literary language can be traced back to the 16'h century, the period when the oldest literary Romanian texts known so far were dated. The dialectal basis of the Romanian literary language is a rather debated issue, since the specialists in the field have formulated several divergent opinions. Some support the idea that the Wallachian dialect lies at the basis of the Romanian Literary Language, some take into consideration the contribution of ali Daco-Romanian varieties, while others support the theory that until the end of the 19th century one cannot speak about a unitary literary language, but about several literary variants, each based on the corresponding regional Daco-Romanian sub-dialect. The process of the unification of the Romanian literary variants started after 1780, when the first printed grammar appeared, and continued through the 19th century with the efforts of the most prominent Romanian scholars. In their endeavour to standardize the modem literary language, those scholars conformed to the criteria invoked by Petru Maior and Heliade Radulescu: Latin, grammar, geographical distribution, and euphonic criteria; it was the Wallachian literary variant which satisfied these criteria, especially the phonetic ones. Other literary variants also contributed to the format ion and improvement of the language structure, especially in morphology and vocabulary. During the process of its evolution, Romanian has undergone several phonetic, phonological, morphological, and lexical changes. The paper deals with phonetic and phonological characteristics and the evolution of the Romanian literary language from the first printed texts up to the modem period.
Keywords
phonetics; phonology; language history; literary text; the Romanian language
Hrčak ID:
173434
URI
Publication date:
1.3.2008.
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