Glosarul din Reichenau și limba română
The Reichenau Glosses and Romanian Language

Summary/Abstract: Classical Latin has, for different meanings, pairs of synonyms ormultiple synonyms. Proto-Romance, the unattested language from which all Romancelanguages come, has abandoned some of these synonyms and kept others. TheRomance vocabulary means selection, lexical replacement and semanticchange of Latin words. We show in the article that, for most meanings,Romanian keeps the same synonyms that are kept in the other Romancelanguages, and loses the synonyms that are lost in the other Romancelanguages. We have no direct access to the proto-Romance spoken anywherebetween 700-800. But the Reichenau Glosses are a collection of Latin glosseswritten after 700 in northern France. Their Latin explanations are classicizingforms of the Romance language spoken around 700; they offer us an indirectglimpse on the spoken language of the time. More often than by mere chance,they correspond to the Romanian words of Latin origin, which proves that theycome from a Late Latin language that had already lost some synonyms andkept another set.Furthermore, we show that Romanian keeps some words that are lost inFrench, and therefore proto-Romanian was probably separated earlier from thecommon proto-Romance than proto-French. We propose a few languageevolution models, fast and slow, and try to calculate the period when protoRomanian split, based on rough lexicostatistical and glottochronologicalestimations. The data suggest the period between the years 540–600 ± 30 asthe period when proto-Romanian split from the undifferentiated protoRomance.

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