The Carpathians [antikvár]

the land of infectious smile umanian folklore is not only a thing of dances, music, ballads, tales, dance-cails, and the most varied decorations with a wonderful sense of shape, coiour and nuance - the dyes being prepared from wiid plants and roots by the ciever hands of the viilage women - ranging from the decoration of eggs to the embroideries on their dresses in wool, natural silk, hemp, and cotton. There is alsó the vast domain of the names of mountains and rivers, valieys and villages, still unexplored by philology. But once the decision is taken and the hurdles come down from around the didactic fold and the road lies open to these virgin herds of vocables - and when the scholars set out to follow these words along the path that leads through thorns and brambles to unexpected ends, then perhaps they will find the secret mechanism of the language and at the same time an unsuspected poetry. Indeed our people have an exceptional faculty for synthesis in their ability to transform verbs and adjectives into substantives and vice versa, spontaneously transferring them to the vocabulary of proper names. Amongst other problems connected with this faculty - and here inspiration and spontaneity must not be excluded - the frequent preference for piurals in place names, which is common in French as well, is one that ought to be studied : Pitestii, Ploestii, Bucurestii, Calarasii and Mehedintii, are all of them plural names in Rumanian. This is a kind of chemistry, a process of osmosis that has not yet been sufficiently observed in our language and which creates hosts of vague analogies. Somé aspects of this kind of folklore are of quite remarkable interest, a richly satisfying food for the mind. We have an old saying - a saying of Alecsandri's, the Bard of Mircesti, uttered quite without irony- that every Rumanian is born a poet. And it is true that in their songs, their tales and their proverbs our people have a very rich and varied folk tradition going back to the times when the peasant could neither read nor write, and kept his accounts in notches on a stick nicked with a knife that he drew from his girdle or his beit. We are not exaggerating at all if we add that the level reached in the inspiration and expression of oral literature, passed on from generation to generation through the centuries, has not been surpassed in our written literature of the last two centuries although the latter have produced writers equal even to the best in the rest of the world. It is a pity that a language that is the offspring of the most unexpected associations should circulate only within the limits of the frontiers of this country.