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Editura Universitara The magic of words. Linguistics studies - Petre Gheorghe Barlea

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ISBN: 978-606-28-1461-8

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5682/9786062814618

Publisher year: 2022

Edition: I

Pages: 242

Publisher: Editura Universitara

Author: Petre Gheorghe Barlea

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I placed the entire selection under the sign of the autobiographical pages titled How I became a linguist, published at the request of the young Bucharest researchers Emanuela Timotin and Stefan Colceriu, authors of the tribute volume Marius Sala – De ce am becomen lingvist?, Bucharest, Univers Enciclopedic Gold Publishing House, 2012.
We understand from there why the author of the following pages was preoccupied all his life with multiculturalism and plurilingualism, from which contrastive-typological studies, lexicology, semantics, dialectology and language history etc. were born. Perhaps it is less obvious, but the note of the fabulous that envelops the world of the beginnings of the attention given to the facts of the language seems to come from there. The memorialist of the occasion talks about the power of articulate language, which can make and break worlds, about the ability of words to build or, on the contrary, to destroy human beings.
We all know this truth, from the "simple" reality of everyday communication, even those who have not read Homeric poems or biblical verses or Shakespearean lines about the constructive power of words. But P. Gh. Barlea has created a profession from the search for the "core of words", from studying the mechanisms that generate ideas, feelings, attitudes and actions through the fabric of words woven into the spontaneous endowment or the masterful one in discursive formulas with practical or aesthetic purpose .
In fact, we know from P. Gh. Barlea's books and texts that a text - oral or written - is never "purely aesthetic". It always contains an ideational basis, if not ideological, philosophical, educational, legal, etc., i.e. an implicit programming. That is why, the author of the pages of this book often states, the analysis of the text, regardless of its compositional and lexico-grammatical nature, regardless of its stylistic load, can never be "purely linguistic". Starting from the semantics of some words, phrases, expressions and continuing with simple statements, up to the phrases organized in real "rhetorical periods", words are the product of logical, psychological, historical-social, religious factors, etc.
Returning to the structure of the present volume, we tried, therefore, to explain the presence of some mythological linguistic materials here. P. Gh. Barlea is, without a doubt, the one who revived this frontier discipline in modern Romanian philological research. In fact, it gives it a new dimension, because the author of the reference book Ana cea buna... does exactly what its main promoters - Max Müller and Adalbert Kuhn - did, based on the comprehensive knowledge of their theories, principles and method of analysis . At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, great Romanian linguists, such as B. Petriceicu-Hasdeu and his student, Lazar Saineanu, then Al. Philippide s.a. explained the Romanian folklore with a mythological substrate through the prism of the theory of proper names and some common names, applying principles taken from Angelo de Gubernatis (with his Mythology of Plants and Mythology of Zoology), G. W. Cox (Ancient Gods – the new mythology) that had reached knowledge Romanian scholars through excerpts and reviews and especially through the explanations, comments due to comparatists from the next generation – Antoine Meillet, Alphonse Dauzat s.a. It is known that the entire codification of comparative mythology treated from the linguistic perspective was made by the lectures held by Max Müller at Oxford and published in successive volumes in English. However, the effective spread of the method occurred only after the French versions of these books appeared, accessible including to Romanian students and doctoral students in Paris, founders of Romanian higher philological education and professional research. Over a century and better, P. Gh. Barlea comes into possession of the Parisian editions from that time, because he himself is in Paris, as maitre de langue, at the Sorbonne (2001-2004). Then he is lucky enough to find all those books and studies gathered in a comprehensive volume republished with the rigorous critical apparatus by the famous Pierre Brunel. He was already a knowledgeable connoisseur of the field, so the appearance of the valuable book exactly at the time of his teaching internship at the Sorbonne was by no means a simple coincidence. P. Gh. Barlea states that the method had, in the meantime, been somewhat abandoned. It was predictable, since Müller himself evokes the proliferation of schools of mythological research - all non-linguistic. The young C.G. are already recognized. Jung, with his psychoanalysis, J.G. Frazer, with his cultural, theological and social anthropology, among many others.
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PETRE GHEORGHE BARLEA studied Classical Philology and then Modern Philology at the University of Bucharest. He is an emeritus professor at the Department of Romanian Philology, Classical and Balkan Languages of the "Ovidius" University in Constanta, Romania, member of the Doctoral School of Humanities. He taught courses and delivered lectures on the Romanian language, culture and civilization, courses and conferences on general and comparative linguistics, Latin, Greek of the New Testament and theory of mentalities and cultural identities at "Carol IV" University ” from Prague (1993-1996), at Paris IV Sorbonne (2001-2003), as well as at universities and research centers in Italy, Spain, Belgium, Greece, Israel, Austria, USA, Canada, etc. He is Doctor Honoris Causa of UVT, where he founded several sections and departments in the field of speech sciences or of general interest for higher education. The didactic and scientific activity is focused on linguistic studies (Romanian, Latin and comparative), rhetoric, mythology, cultural history, interculturality. Among the published books: Peithous demiourgos (2004); Ana the Good. Linguistics and mythology (2007); Multilingualism and Interculturality (2010); Contemporary Romanian language (2013); Chaos and order. Positivist thinking and practice in the evolution of Brazilian society (2016); Translations and translators. Pages from the history of Romanian culture (2016); The truth from the inkwell. Studies of universal literature (2019); Transfigurations. Essays on Romanian literature (2020). Text editions: Eugen Lovinescu, A look at classicism (2012) s.a. Translations: A. Schopenhauer, Dialectica eristica or the art of always being right (2010). Since 2003, he publishes the academic journal "Diversité et Identité Culturelle en Europe" (DICE), included in numerous International Databases. He is the initiator of the "Latinity-Romanity-Romanity" International Colloquium, which he organizes annually, starting in 2001.
He is a member of the Romanian Writers' Union, a member of the Romanian Professional Journalists' Union and is part of several national and international associations and societies.

1. Contents / 5
2. Note on the edition – Credits (M. V. Constantin) / 7
3. Introductory study: Development in linguistics (M. V. Constantin) / 11
4. How did I become a linguist? The power of influence of the plurilingual environment / 20
5. Linguistics and mythology. An interdisciplinary approach to vocabulary / 36
6. Italic poses of the nymph Ana. Isoglosses and isomiths in the Italic ethnolinguistic space / 67
7. Mythological bases of European hydronymy. The example of the Danube / 89
8. The words of mania in the Romanian versions of the Homeric poems / 101
9. The selection of terminological series in the Romanian translations of the Homeric texts (Hom., Od., V, 63-75) / 121
10. Titu Maiorescu and the orthographic system of the Romanian language / 134
11. The literary Romanian language in 1918 / 153
12. Attributive determination in the Romanian and Czech languages. A contrastive-typological approach / 162
13. Logical basis of conditional structures / 174
14. From bilingualism to monolingualism in the Romanian communities in the U.S. and Canada / 188
15. Disappearance of languages - human catastrophe or natural phenomenon of "linguistic changes"? / 213

The studies, articles and, no less, the autobiographical confessions or evocations brought together in this volume give an account of the linguistic thinking of Petre Gheorghe Barlea, from which the range of his concerns in the field naturally follows.
I placed the entire selection under the sign of the autobiographical pages titled How I became a linguist, published at the request of the young Bucharest researchers Emanuela Timotin and Stefan Colceriu, authors of the tribute volume Marius Sala – De ce am becomen lingvist?, Bucharest, Univers Enciclopedic Gold Publishing House, 2012.
We understand from there why the author of the following pages was preoccupied all his life with multiculturalism and plurilingualism, from which contrastive-typological studies, lexicology, semantics, dialectology and language history etc. were born. Perhaps it is less obvious, but the note of the fabulous that envelops the world of the beginnings of the attention given to the facts of the language seems to come from there. The memorialist of the occasion talks about the power of articulate language, which can make and break worlds, about the ability of words to build or, on the contrary, to destroy human beings.
We all know this truth, from the "simple" reality of everyday communication, even those who have not read Homeric poems or biblical verses or Shakespearean lines about the constructive power of words. But P. Gh. Barlea has created a profession from the search for the "core of words", from studying the mechanisms that generate ideas, feelings, attitudes and actions through the fabric of words woven into the spontaneous endowment or the masterful one in discursive formulas with practical or aesthetic purpose .
In fact, we know from P. Gh. Barlea's books and texts that a text - oral or written - is never "purely aesthetic". It always contains an ideational basis, if not ideological, philosophical, educational, legal, etc., i.e. an implicit programming. That is why, the author of the pages of this book often states, the analysis of the text, regardless of its compositional and lexico-grammatical nature, regardless of its stylistic load, can never be "purely linguistic". Starting from the semantics of some words, phrases, expressions and continuing with simple statements, up to the phrases organized in real "rhetorical periods", words are the product of logical, psychological, historical-social, religious factors, etc.
Returning to the structure of the present volume, we tried, therefore, to explain the presence of some mythological linguistic materials here. P. Gh. Barlea is, without a doubt, the one who revived this frontier discipline in modern Romanian philological research. In fact, it gives it a new dimension, because the author of the reference book Ana cea buna... does exactly what its main promoters - Max Müller and Adalbert Kuhn - did, based on the comprehensive knowledge of their theories, principles and method of analysis . At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, great Romanian linguists, such as B. Petriceicu-Hasdeu and his student, Lazar Saineanu, then Al. Philippide s.a. explained the Romanian folklore with a mythological substrate through the prism of the theory of proper names and some common names, applying principles taken from Angelo de Gubernatis (with his Mythology of Plants and Mythology of Zoology), G. W. Cox (Ancient Gods – the new mythology) that had reached knowledge Romanian scholars through excerpts and reviews and especially through the explanations, comments due to comparatists from the next generation – Antoine Meillet, Alphonse Dauzat s.a. It is known that the entire codification of comparative mythology treated from the linguistic perspective was made by the lectures held by Max Müller at Oxford and published in successive volumes in English. However, the effective spread of the method occurred only after the French versions of these books appeared, accessible including to Romanian students and doctoral students in Paris, founders of Romanian higher philological education and professional research. Over a century and better, P. Gh. Barlea comes into possession of the Parisian editions from that time, because he himself is in Paris, as maitre de langue, at the Sorbonne (2001-2004). Then he is lucky enough to find all those books and studies gathered in a comprehensive volume republished with the rigorous critical apparatus by the famous Pierre Brunel. He was already a knowledgeable connoisseur of the field, so the appearance of the valuable book exactly at the time of his teaching internship at the Sorbonne was by no means a simple coincidence. P. Gh. Barlea states that the method had, in the meantime, been somewhat abandoned. It was predictable, since Müller himself evokes the proliferation of schools of mythological research - all non-linguistic. The young C.G. are already recognized. Jung, with his psychoanalysis, J.G. Frazer, with his cultural, theological and social anthropology, among many others.
But the linguistic perspective, in the form of historical semantics, of M. Bréal, Lazar Saineanu's luckier contemporary, and A. Meillet's teacher, then in the form of linguistic geography, of the theory of word disease, continues to prove effective. However, little by little, the mythological component of the analysis was lost. The new generations of researchers preferred the more stable terrain of historical-geographical, social-economic, etc. realities. Antoine Meillet would launch the claim that made his career that the vocabulary of a language reflects the entire history of the communities of its speakers - a fact that can be verified at any time, it is true, even through the diachronic analysis of the etymology of simple words. The successors retained only this side of historical comparatism, ignoring the fact that Bréal, Meillet, Dauzat did not avoid the mythological component of the history of words either.
Then, the tone began to be set by the structuralist method, conceived on the phenomena of language by Ferdinand de Saussure (who knew well the generation of Max Müller and Adalbert Kuhn and invoked it) and applied in mythology by Claude Levy-Strausse. They followed generativism, cognitivism, methods that almost completely separated linguistics from mythology.
As for the Romanian researchers, the great scientists of those times, due to their age, left history gloriously before a mythological-linguistic school was formed. The only one who invoked M. Müller in full knowledge of the case was the then young Lazar Saineanu, but he too was forced to leave the Romanian research, in the proper sense of the term, by going to France, as a result of the authorities' refusal the time to be granted Romanian citizenship, as is known.
P. Gh. Barlea preciously evokes the sui generis schools of mythological linguistics of our time, referring to Ivan Evseev from Timisoara, and to his doctoral students (among whom Steva Perinat, with the mythology of the waters, seems to receive all the praise), then to Lucia Berdan from Iasi and, finally, to the larger group from Bucharest. But all of them practice a linguistic-mythological comparatism of a new type. Müller's and Kuhn's studies are rarely cited, sometimes with errors in bibliographic references (Adalbert Kuhn is confused with Thomas Kuhn, the famous philosopher of science). It is a linguistic mythology "by ear", P. Gh. Barlea seems to say. And this, because, in the meantime, interest in general linguistics, historical semantics, comparative-historical grammar has decreased enormously, and etymology or diachronic linguistics, in general, are today replaced by genealogical linguistics, based largely on computational methods . The studies in the present volume, such as "Italic poses of the nymph Ana" - emerging from the research materialized in the above-mentioned book, Ana cea Buna, as well as "Mythological bases of European hydronymy" (written in collaboration with R.‑M. Barlea ) shows how this kind of research should have been designed, if the right people could be found for such efforts.
Especially for the comparative-historical research method, the author of the present volume has boundless appreciation. Of course, today it can no longer be applied in its classic form and it is no longer necessary. But a true linguist recognizes its value in all the modern methods generated by it: comparative grammar, genealogical analysis of languages, contrastive-typological analysis, historical semantics, translation studies, etc. Even the emergence of Saussurean structuralism appeared not only as a reaction of the promoter to the method of his teachers, but as a result of a certain type of professional training, the one provided by the generation of those who taught Ferdinand de Saussure, says the Romanian linguist from today. In the small (since unfinished) study we have resumed here, The Romanian Language in 1918, the author talks about the diachrony/synchrony opposition in the description of the system of a language or a group of languages. Choosing a specific moment, especially reduced to a single calendar year, is unproductive, says the preamble. It is unrealistic, for the simple reason that a language is always in diachrony - an observation formulated by Eugenio Coseriu, in Sincronía, diacronía e historia, 1958, in response to F. de Saussure's theory. Of course, synchronic analysis must be done to describe systematically and in detail the structure of a language at a given moment, as well as to better follow historical, structural changes, but it remains based on a procedural convention.
In general, the studies and researches of P. Gh. Barlea are based on a deep knowledge of the principles, laws, tendencies and functioning mechanisms of living, natural languages, through the action of internal and external conditions, on the one hand, through knowledge of the methods and research grids, from the old historical comparatism, as I said, to linguistic pragmatics and cognitivism. In addition, he knows the history and structure of several ancient and modern languages - often, even in their dialectal variants, which facilitates a special approach to linguistic phenomena, an understanding of the springs of human communication from their depths and in the diversity of their manifestations.
On the other hand, P. Gh. Barlea is one of those linguists who do not study language as an abstract entity, but in its concrete, real communicative postures, through application to utilitarian, everyday communication or to that with a declared aesthetic destination. This explains why the study material is selected sometimes from the speech of Romanian emigrants in America, for example, sometimes from Homeric poems or from the literary folklore of ancient and modern peoples. The studies devoted to Homeric poems or biblical texts were a constant of P. Gh. Barlea's activity, based on a never-failing passion. Obviously, the most visible perspective of the analyzes is the translational one, by the force of things. But the respective translations are always put in relation to the history of the Romanian language, more precisely, to the maturation stages of literary Romanian. Because it is about a biunivocal process, says the author of these analyzes - much more numerous than we have remembered here: on the one hand, the respective texts from the treasury of universal spirituality cannot be equated in another language except when it has reached a certain degree of maturation; on the other hand, the translation process itself, due to the efforts of many generations of scholars, contributes to the full maturation, enrichment and nuance of the beneficiary languages. In addition, these analyzes show that any approach to a text requires interdisciplinary treatment, necessarily calling on related fields of language sciences: historical semantics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, onomastics, pragmatics, etc. The texts selected here, about the "words of mania" in Homer and about some Homeric phytonyms, ornithonyms and theonyms prove this certainty. He provides more evidence in the articles published in Diacronia magazine and in various others...
The studies devoted to bilingualism and linguistic interferences of all kinds are more clearly derived from the Professor's first life experiences in the ethnolinguistic environment in which he was formed. We should first remember that one of the subjects that P. Gh. Barlea taught in the last two and a half decades was even called Multilingualism and interculturality, with a voluntary inversion of the logical order of the terms. The book that resulted from the course support (in fact, courses, because there were several variants in the study programs) is not a simple adaptation to a fashion that appeared at the beginning of the 2000s in Europe and in the world. It comes from the spiritual biography of the author. I have retained here only one study from that book, "The Disappearance of Languages..." - which I considered emblematic for the impact that P. Gh. Barlea's encounter with the work and personality of Eugenio Coseriu had, but also for his thinking as a linguist confident in the logical evolution and in the special dynamics of languages. I have added the contrastive-typological grammar research dedicated to attributive determination in the Romanian and Czech languages, the fruit of the fertile period spent by P. Gh. Barlea at the venerable "Carol IV" University in Prague, as well as the ever-enriched study on lexical-semantic interferences and grammar of bilingual Romanians from the communities in the USA. The origin of these observations lies in the documentation internships spent at Kent State University, or those as guest professors at private universities in Cleveland, Texas, Oregon, Kichener‑Canada, founded by his colleagues and friends, Petru Cocarteu and Viorel Duca, starting with 1996.
In his successive returns, P. Gh. Barlea noticed that there is a natural distribution of bilingualism by age groups, but also a logical-semantic and thematic selection. The strictly professional terms of every immigrant of Romanian origin were the Anglo-American ones, even if sometimes they were used in phonomorphologically adapted forms to the specifics of Romania: driver, respectively a draivui s.a. Also, the terms of new realities for them, absolutely mandatory in the structure of American society, such as financial-banking operations (almost daily), were, from the beginning of the establishment of the Romanians in the American diaspora, strictly English. The explanation is simple, says P. Gh. Barlea, such terms did not exist in the vocabulary with which simple, ordinary people would have left Romania. Because a farmer or a tradesman in socialist Romania did not have access to any other type of bank, apart from the popular CEC. While an American, no matter how recently he arrived, ran into financial-banking procedures all the time, even before he had found a stable home. That's why, whenever I talk about loans, guarantees, interest, accounts (covered or overdraft), the terms used are exclusively from American English.
Studies on antonyms are part of the history of P. Gh. Barlea's existence as a linguist. Gheorghe Tohaneanu, another great teacher of his, after Lucia Wald, said with the bonhomie irony that characterized him as "P. Gh. Barlea remained hanging on the antonymy like a liana from its tree". Before and after the book Contraria Latina-Contraria Romanica..., 1999, P. Gh. Barlea published a lot on this topic. The deepenings of the type dedicated to semantic enantiosemy have already found their place in later volumes, such as Miezul kuvinoror, 2001. For the present volume, I have selected only the pages devoted to adverbial structures, antonymic attraction and graduality, as samples of the development and deepening of some sub-themes in the book to finish.
Finally, the interest in Latinity, in general, and Romanian and Eastern Latinity, in particular, are also as old as the intellectual career of P. Gh. Barlea. We also find biographical reminders for this concern. His high school classmate and lifelong friend, Petru Cocarteu, used, at one point, the Latin type negative imperative, with the long infinitive, as it appears in other Romance languages (cf. it. non andare!) and in the dialect speech from Banat, Transylvania and Bucovina: Don't be upset, Madam! Studies of this kind, more and more comprehensive, but also more systematic, were presented at international colloquiums and congresses (Romania, Belgium, Spain, France, Italy, etc.) and were published, in French and English and in variants different, in the volumes of those manifestations. A projected volume of synthesis about Eastern Latin seems to have been abandoned by the author. Moreover, the themes that constituted the pillars of P. Gh. Barlea's research have many such projects interrupted and resumed only partially or abandoned for good, under the pressure of the numerous other socio-professional obligations of the tireless scholar P. Gh. Barlea - in other words, a determined follower of of "things well done" and tasks completed on time.
Among his fragments of works is the essay on "Aut-type disjunctive structures in Latin and Romance languages". The theme is, of course, related to the old and consistent passion of P. Gh. Barlea for the logic of opposites, from which so many pages dedicated to antonyms, another type of contrary, contradictory and complementary structures were born. From other memorial pages, we learn that the logico-syntactic disjunction of the aut type was the subject of an attempted doctorate under the direction of the distinguished Prof. Dr. Alexandru Niculescu. His departure (which became final) to the Sorbonne University and then to the University of Udine, followed by the hiatus in doctorate registrations caused by Elena Ceausescu's "famous" doctorate in chemistry, canceled this attempt and delayed the re-enrollment of P. Gha Barlea until 1990, when he resumed an earlier proposal by Prof. Lucia Wald to become her doctoral student. He no longer maintained the first theme accepted years ago by the same teacher ("Iter - road terminology in Latin"), but he was part of the first batch of doctoral students of the famous Latinist and Indo-Europeanist, together with Florentina Visan, Bogdan Hincu and Cristina Halichias. All four represented the "golden graduation" of Professor Wald's doctoral students.
We should also add the fact that many of these articles and studies suggested to the professor the potential for development in scientific research and constituted topics given later to his doctoral students. In fact, this was a guiding principle in the selection of doctoral topics for his students. They started from research undertaken once, at least tangentially, by himself. Regardless of whether or not he managed to return to an interesting theme, he waited for the right young man to appear to take it over and develop it, if it seemed useful, fertile and, of course, accessible to the new generation. In the present volume I retained, for example, the study "Logical bases of syntactic conditionality", published relatively late in the visible form now. The topic was then entrusted, as productive, to Olimpiei Varga, computer scientist, current associate professor at "Ovidius" University in Constanta. The themes "call each other", as we all know, so historical semantics and logical semantics naturally followed each other, especially against the background of the old and constant concern for antonymic structures. From here, we naturally reached the logic of syntax, so that, years later, another doctoral student was entrusted with the task of treating syntactic and transphrastic connectors in the Romanian New Testament versions. Moreover, the grammar and lexico-semantics of the Romanian versions of the Bible was a constant preoccupation of P. Gh. Barlea, so that, beyond his own studies, we find theses of his doctoral students dedicated to the pronominal, adverbial, adjectival system, then to the structures interrogative and exclamatory questions from these texts, subsumed into a large project - which awaits its fulfillment. Our own thesis and recurrent research topic, regarding the delocative forms in ancient and modern Romanian, started from an old preoccupation of the Professor. For other such samples of transfer between generations, you can consult the books written by students such as Camelia Ciurescu, Raluca-Felicia Toma, Alina Jercan, Simona Palasca, Yusuke Sumi, Firdes Musledin, Icbal Anefi s.a. or the studies published in collaboration with Ana Maria Pantu and many others.
In a certain sense, the present collection represents the mirror of a coherent vision about the science and art of the word in the thinking of one of the devoted servants of this field in Romania.

M. V. Constantin

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