Munca si Rasplata ei: Secolele XVII-XVIII. Studiu de terminologie (review)

This comprehensive semantic study, written in Romanian, deals with a well-defined field of onomasiology, labor and its remuneration, key concepts that govern human transactions and relations (e.g. the commissioning of tasks and the rewarding of their accomplishment). The linguistic expression of the forms assumed by the rewards of labor ultimately leads to a thesaurus dependent on the various kinds of social positions and trades involved in the bargaining process.

The natural language providing the building blocks for this work is Romanian, a language spoken by some twenty million people in its present-day territory and five million more outside Romania. As the easternmost of the Romance languages, it consists of a mainly Latinate lexicon plus a sizable number of Slavic elements. Of its three major historical provinces— Wallachia, Moldavia, and Transylvania— the first two were mostly under Ottoman rule (fourteenth–nineteenth centuries), while Transylvania was, during the later Middle Ages and Modern periods, part of the Hapsburg and Austro-Hungarian empires respectively until the end of WWI. Thus, Romanian came into contact not only with Slavic but also with other languages spoken in Central and South-Eastern Europe (German, Greek, Hungarian, Turkish), from which it borrowed and naturalized some of its vocabulary.

The time frame selected by Busuioc covers Romanian texts from the earliest extant publications, late sixteenth century to 1821, the latter a landmark in the history of the Danubian principalities, Wallachia and Moldavia. The uprising of 1821 put an end to the so-called Phanariote period that had lasted for over a century (from 1711 in Moldavia, from 1716 in Wallachia). During this time, the two Romanian countries had been administered by Greek princes (hospodars) appointed by the Porte from its clientele of Greek extraction living in the Phanar district of Istanbul.

A period of progress and unification from an administrative point of view, and of Greek-inspired cultural and educational enlightenment, it was marred by corruption and great hardship for the lower classes of society, peasants and tradesmen. B divides the era into two parts: (1) from the earliest printed texts to the establishment of Phanariote rule, and (2) the Phanariote years. Given Austro-Hungarian political and cultural domination in Transylvania, Romanian texts were comparatively few. Hence B opts for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as better suited units for her work.

B’s study of terminology of the precapitalist period is based on historical, economic, and legal or administrative sources; hence, most of the terms—apart from the generic ones—presuppose relationships that no longer exist. Stylistically, they are colorful from our twenty-first-century perspective. For the specialist, they have a different kind of fascination, revealing long forgotten realities, as well as etymologies with their roots in Greek and Turkish customs.

B provides long and exhaustive lists of terms carefully defined, classified, and cross-referenced. There is a Foreword by Dinu Giurescu and an English abstract by Charles M. Carlton. We have in this two-volume study a model of painstaking research and scholarship.