Complete Roumanian-English Dictionary [antikvár]

THE ROUMANIAN LANGUAGE AND ITS ORTHOGRAPHY. Roumanian is spoken in Greater Roumania, comprising the Old Kingdom and the regained territories of Transylvania, Bukovina and Bessarabia and some communities of the Pindus in Macedonia. It is one of the group of languages remaining as relics of the great Roman empire. It is, in the main, derived from Latin, and this, the principal constituent of the vocabulary, has been strengthened in the literary language by borrowings from French. Beside the Latin element there are many Slavonic roots, a number of Albanian (the ultimate source of which is doubtful) and many words borrowed from Tirrkish, Modern Greek and Hungarian. The first task that confronted the Roumanian Academy at its foundation in 1866, was to establish the orthography of the Roumanian language. This gave rise in its first three years of activity (1867-1869) to long heated discussions, which did not cease with the completion of the orthographical system in September, 1869. When Laurian and Maxim, two determined Latinists, became leaders of the young institution, the Roumanian orthography and also the language were more and more latinized. The literary world, writers and the public did not follow this direction. The Roumanian Academy, reconstituted and promoted to the rank of a national institution through a law of 1879, resuming its debates upon orthography, abandoned the excessively latinized spellings in 1881 and established