Le roumain sauvera-t-il les mots vieux ou vieillis du français?
Will Romanian Save the Old or Old-Fashioned French Words?

Summary/Abstract: Between the end of the 18th and the middle of the 20th century, French was the main source of lexical borrowing for Romanian, thus contributing massively to the re-Latinization of a vocabulary formed by the accumulation of lexical layers of heterogeneous origin, depending on the influences of each historical epoch. Once adopted by the host language, the French words took root there and continued to exist in the form and with the meaning they had at the time of their entry into Romanian, without having to undergo the evolution they may have undergone in the original language. This is how, nowadays, over 300 words and meanings that French dictionaries describe as “old” or “old-fashioned” work in Romanian without any particular connotation of use. The study will try to identify the cultural and linguistic factors which have led to the marginalization of these lexical and semantic entities in French, but have not acted on their Romanian descendants.

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