University professor Dan Ungureanu, a specialist in the history of the Romanian language, is Nicolae Coande's guest at the "SpectActor Meetings". He will hold the conference "When and where does the Romanian language appear?" on Friday, June 13, at 6:00 p.m., in the foyer of the "Marin Sorescu" National Theater in Craiova. The audience will be able to receive autographs of his latest book, "History of the Romanian Language", Cartier Publishing House, 2024.
Admission is free.
Such a book would not have been possible until recently for several reasons.
Linguists between 1950 and 1989, for 40 years, were trained at the school of continuity. Patriotism served as their methodology. The Internet brought online – mostly after 2010, when Google Books was consolidated – an enormous amount of old documents, otherwise difficult to access. Google allowed the search for words and frequencies, something impossible until then. Ancient inscriptions with elements of spoken Latin, documents between 600 and 900 with late Latin – all of these had been inaccessible. Dialect atlases – Italian, French, Albanian, Bulgarian – allow us what was impossible 20 years ago. The book does two things: it specifies in time and space when and where the lexicon of the Romanian language appears.
Romanian not only has words from classical Latin, but also from later Latin – from after the year 500.
It doesn't just have words from the Latin of the entire empire, but many from northern Italy. Let's see the small area in northern Italy where, until recently, they said hair, mouth, lips. (Dan Ungureanu)
Author:
He is a linguist, Latinist, specialist in the history of the Romance language. He has been teaching at the "Aurel Vlaicu" University of Arad since 2009. He was a scholar at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris between 1993-1995 (together with Nicușor Dan). He has a postgraduate diploma from the École Pratique des Hautes Études (Department of Anthropological and Religious Sciences), Paris, 1995 (Neoplatonic philosophy), assistant at the Department of Classical Languages, Faculty of Letters of the University of Timișoara, between 1997-2006. PhD in 2006 on the identification of kinship between languages that share a lexicon below the coincidence threshold.
Lecturer of Romanian at the University of Paris III – Sorbonne Nouvelle between 2003-2005 and the Charles University, Prague (2013-2019).
Communications, articles, books:
"Cognitive biases and statistical innumeracy in comparative Afroasiatic linguistics, NACAL", The North American Conference on Afroasiatic Linguistics Conference, Leiden, 2014, "The four layers of the lexical substrate in Romanian" in Loanwords and Substrata, Proceedings of the Colloquium Held in Limoges (5th-7th June, 2018) Innsbruck, 2020, "Romanian and Italian dialects", Academy Publishing House, Bucharest, 2016
"History of the Romanian language", Cartier, 2024. Others: "Archaeology" (excavations at the Roman sites of Tibiscum and Mehadia, the Neolithic site of Mescal, Timiș, the Dacian fortress of Ardeu, Hunedoara)
