The Academy Dictionary, 1871–1877: the war for words

In Vienna, at Saint Barbara College, Samuil Micu-Klein writes the first printed grammar of Romanian, later revised by Gheorghe Șincai. It is 1780, and the Greek-Catholic scholars of Blaj, trained in Vienna and Rome, want to show the world that Romanians are Romans — and that their tongue can be led back toward Latin. From the labour of the two comes the Elementa linguae daco-romanae.

Petru Maior carried the dream further: at Buda, in 1812, he printed his History of the Beginnings of the Romanians in Dacia, and in 1825 the same press issued the Buda Lexicon — in Mircea Seche's assessment, the first explicative and etymological dictionary of Romanian ever printed, worked on by several authors for over thirty years.

The excesses were born then too: unpopular etymologizing spellings — fântână written fontana, țară written tiera — a war on și, wrongly declared Slavic, and words patched from two roots, like răzbel from război and bellum. All of it was the dress rehearsal for what came next in Bucharest.

In Bucharest, on 1 April 1866, the Princely Lieutenancy stamps decree no. 582: on the initiative of C. A. Rosetti, the Romanian Literary Society is born. A year later it is called the Romanian Academic Society, and in 1879 a special law declares it a national institute: the Romanian Academy.

Among the founding members are August Treboniu Laurian — a Transylvanian born at Fofeldea in 1810, a Göttingen doctorate, a veteran of 1848 — and Ion C. Massim. The Society's first mission is clear: a dictionary and a grammar of the Romanian language, an orthography, and a history of the Romanians.

The dictionary commission goes to Laurian and Massim. The two do not set out to photograph the language as spoken, but to steer it toward Latin: non-Latin words are exiled to a separate glossary, and in their place the dictionary proposes new Latinate words — over 20,000 creations of their own.

In 1871 the Glossariu comes off the press, the ledger of condemned words; the two dictionary volumes stretch to 1877. The final count: 3,600 pages, 70,000 headwords, an etymological spelling you could not read unless you knew Latin.

The method is merciless: words that entered the language after 1830 are marked with an asterisk, definitions avoid synonyms, and everything that does not sound Latin is dispatched to the Glossariu. That is where dragoste ends up — a word the peasant spoke every day — while for război the authors themselves reject the hybrid resbellu and point to bellu.

The Glossariu is both cemetery and courtroom: it records the condemned words, and it passes the sentence. Of dragoste it writes that it is foreign to the language and fallen into disuse. The verdict turned out to be a wish, not an observation.

Picture a peasant at the plough, asked by a Bucharest gentleman to say cespete instead of brazdă. The scene is Titu Maiorescu's — he had joined the Academic Society in 1867 — and he answers in 1881 with his study “Neologisms”. The demonstration is peasant-plain and merciless: for brazdă the Glossariu offers the peasant five or six words — sulc, liră, plancă, rasoriu, cespete — and expects the whole village to say cespete.

The list is an inventory of disaster: bujor becomes rosa de Alpi, castravete becomes cucumă, ciocan becomes toacă or maior, and clește is left with the Latin forceps — “surely we won't call it forcipe?”, Maiorescu asks. The peasant never did.

The law Maiorescu states stayed famous: words are not born from the cold distillation of reflection, but from the warmth of feeling. And literary historians record the end of the Latinist school in one sentence: the purification attempt provoked laughter and discredited it for good.