Vocabulary of Civilization in Romania: Rule and State

The present project deals with Romanian lexic of civilization in the years 1840-1870. This period considered to be significant to a great extent within the process of the state formation of the "United Romania" (Moldavia and Walachia were united in 1856, the first constitution of Romania representing a rather Romanian state dates from 1864). The process during the same the Romanian nation finds and "proclms" its new state identity is reflected to a great extent by sources belonging to mass-media or other texts ,reproducing" the changes of the socio-reality of the time. Therefore the sources of this investigation will be some selected articles from newspapers and magazines as well as constitutional texts. These texts reflect the socio-political changes of the identity of the Romanian State in the 19th century with particular clarity. The investigation will be dedicated first and foremost to the semantic fields of socio-political and state organization (for instance "Prosecution"). The selected texts from mass-media will be examined from a semasiological point of view. The arising and developping concepts concerning life within a Romanian State community and the lexical expressions used for them will be at the center of the investigation. We will have to examine in detail which new concepts of social life (signifié) were created with which lexical expressions / correspondences (signifiant / terms) and which was the original language and the original morphology (French or Romanian pattern) of the terms and concepts taken over into Romanian. As Moldavia `and Walachia were over the centuries deeply rooted in the Byzantine-oriental culture and as they received at time intensely in the 19th century Western models of culture, especially the French one, it is to be expected, that the investigation of the evolution of the Romanian vocabulary of civilization might be particularly instructive as a development contrasting to history of culture and voacabulary of other Southeast-European States.

The present project makes visible in a detailed way how languages are "built up" in general as well as in the specific case of the Roumanian language. The present research is concreted by taking example the vocabulary of civilisation of the modern Roumania in the 19th century (the main period for lexical development being the years 1840-1870). The development of the Roumanian language in this time coincides with a process during the same Roumania creates herself a new civil and national identity. Therefore the present, actually, linguistic study investigates the modernisation of the Roumanian language by illustrating, at the same time, the social and political transformation which took place in the Roumanian historical States, Walachia, Moldavia, Transylvania, in the 19th century. Corresponding to the complexity of language, that is, to its two different but always coexisting "levels", those of the word and its sense, the present study shows exactly how are developed the "material" of language (words, terms) as well as its significance (the meanings of words and terms). The linguistic, lexical as well as semantic, development of Roumanian is to be explained mainly by the adoption (assimilation) of words and meanings from other linguistic and cultural spaces. The examples taken re-construct the farreaching cultural transfer the modern Roumanian national state was underlying while assimilating words and - with them - mental patterns, especially from West European states (France, Italy). The various word-histories given in the investigation describe central terms and meanings of modern states, its main principles, tasks and functions. From these terms are pointed out especially in their first use in Roumanian language those which determine the relation between the state and its citizens. Furthermore the linguistic analysis applied on Roumanian word material demonstrates how these special words of statality successively have been changing in use. In this way is pointed out for example how some of the fundamental terms of the declarations of human rights - equality, security, property, a.s.o. - as well as basic terms (meanings) of modern constitutions - as are population, territoriality, state (government) authorities - have been developed and condensed to what we understand today as "the" equality, "the" security, "the" property. The presented histories of fundamental terms of modern statality helps to understand how Roumania, after a long period in which this state "anchors" in a rather Byzantine civilisation re-integrates herself into West European cultures. The historical example of cultural and civil transfer and interchange in Roumania can be used for reflecting upon solutions of the numerous socio-political questions which are confronting the actual and future European Unity.