Donald L. Dyer (University of Mississippi)

“Did the Soviets Win After All?:

Examining the Lexicon of a Moldovan-Romanian Dictionary”

The argument that Moldavian/Moldovan is one of ten living Romance languages is made by Vasile Stati in his recent Dicţionar Moldovenesc-Românesc ‘A Moldovan-Romanian Dictionary’ (2003). Stati's position is a reworked version of a claim made by Soviet linguists just over twenty years ago, among whom Nikolaj Korlètjanu in his book Moldavskij jazyk segodnja ‘The Moldavian Language Today’ (Korlètjanu 1983). Korlètjanu held that Catalan, French, Italian, Moldavian, Portuguese, Provençal, Rhaeto-Romance, Romanian (also known as “Daco-Romanian”), Sardinian and Spanish, when joined with Aromanian, Istro-Romanian and Megleno-Romanian — which together with Daco-Romanian form a super group of languages descended from Common Romanian — constitute a family of thirteen living Romance languages. The more commonly held view is that there are only nine living Romance languages, and that Moldovan is a subdialect of the Daco-Romanian dialect of a greater Romanian, which is spoken primarily in the Moldova region of Romania and the Republic of Moldova, two linguistic regions which in fact form a speech continuum (cf. Sala 2005:163-64).

Among other things, this paper examines the lexical composition of Stati’s dictionary in an attempt to determine the socio- and politico-linguistic motivations behind it. Putting aside what truly appear to be Moldovan-specific lexica, we find that the majority of the remainder of the dictionary’s entries are fundamentally of three kinds: (1) stock presentations of words found commonly in Romanian contexts but which can be found in slightly different phonetic form in Moldovan speech areas, as well as (2) words used by (arguably) well-known Moldovan authors and/or found in Moldovan literary works; and (3) words known from (Moldovan) folk sayings which are not attributable to any particular author. One could easily make the claim that all of these are simply Romanian words being co-opted for the purpose of constituting this dictionary. Yet there is more to it than this, and an examination of the dictionary’s word stock sheds light not only on the methodology used by Stati in compiling his dictionary, but also on the process by which language varieties can be manipulated for social and political purposes.

For some, the new Moldovan-Romanian dictionary represents the successful culmination of a Soviet process begun half a century ago — ostensible proof of the separateness of the two eastern Romance languages — although the Soviets are no longer here to see the fruits of their labor. On another level the dictionary is new fodder for those who want to argue that there is more to the formation of a new language than just “calling one one.”

References

Korlètjanu, Nikolaj G. 1983. Moldavskij jazyk segodnja. Kišinev: Štiinca.

Sala, Marius. 2005. From Latin to Romanian: The Historical Development of Romanian within a Romance Context. Oxford, Mississippi: Romance Monographs.

Stati, Vasile. 2003. Dicţionar moldovenesc-românesc. Chişinău: Pro Moldova.