The First Major Grammars of English and Romanian: A Comparative Approach

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Published: Dec 10, 2020
DOI: https://doi.org/10.47743/lincu-2020-2-0171
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codified grammars the English Latin Romanian and Slavonic languages

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Daniela Doboș
Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iași, Romania

Abstract

If the history of the English language is the story of its written texts, the same holds true for the history of the Romanian language, and in both cases the first grammars played a major part in the shaping up of the respective vernaculars. The paper proposes a comparative approach to the beginnings of codified grammars in English and Romanian, with a focus on those that are deemed to be the first major works– Robert Lowth’s A Short Introduction to English Grammar (1762) and Samuil Micu and Gheorghe Şincai’s Elementa linguae daco-romanae sive valachicae (1780). This approach considers topics such as why grammars might have been desirable in the eighteenth century (the political factor), and the functions of ‘grammars’, which are relevant in both cases; what language was actually codified, as well as the role of Latin in this enterprise, since it is worth noting that while English and Romanian belong in different language families, Latin was a formative element in both, ever since the territories of the two respective countries marked the North-Western and South-Eastern borders of the Roman Empire.

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Doboș, D. “The First Major Grammars of English and Romanian: A Comparative Approach”. Linguaculture, vol. 11, no. 2, Dec. 2020, pp. 45-62, doi:10.47743/lincu-2020-2-0171.
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Vol. 11 No. 2 (2020)
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Articles
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Author Biography

Daniela Doboș, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iași, Romania

Daniela Doboş is Associate Professor in the Department of English of the Faculty of Letters, “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iaşi, Romania. Her research interests are English and Romanian grammar and linguistics, specialized translation and cultural studies. She has published extensively in various journals and in various collections of essays. Among her latest articles are “Vulgar Slang in English and Romanian. A Few Notes on Romanian Hip Hop Lyrics Translated into English” in Argotica No 1(3)/2014 and “The West Going East: Archaic Romania in Western Authors’ Travel Writings of the Late Twentieth Century” in Views of the East. Travel and Intercultural Communication in Europe, “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” Publishing House, 2016. She is the author of two books on English linguistics. 

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