The Daco-Romanian Area East of the Carpathians:

Milestones from the Memory of Language

Abstract

Having an important ethnographic component, which recorded, through field surveys, the situation of Romanian idioms from 1929 to 1938, the Romanian Linguistic Atlas (the series by Sever Pop and Emil Petrovici) reflects the overall lexical structure of the Romanian language. The latter’s territorial unity is proven by the status of most of the elements inherited from Latin, corroborated with substratum
elements; both strata are related to the first borrowings from Daco-Romanian, the ones representing the Slavic adstratum. Often, the territorial distribution of these basic elements of historical Daco-Romanian takes the form of two-member complementary areas, a southern and a northern one. In relation to this linguistic complex, regional borrowings owed to the Romanians’ contact with the languages of their neighbours (Hungarian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, or Russian) constitute a stock that is variable both from a historical and a functional viewpoint. 100 years after the birth of “Great Romania” this analysis rejects the claim that there existed a “Moldavian” language, different from Daco-Romanian, both in what
regards folk speech and its alleged cultivated, literary version. The territorial foundations of the political structure called “Romania”, born after the Treaty of Versailles, may also be verified on a map called Vˆlkerkarte des rumanischen Sprachgebietes (i.e. “the ethnic map of the Romanian linguistic territory”), included in Linguistischer Atlas des dacorum‰nischen Sprachgebietes, published in 1909 by the
German linguist Gustav Weigand.