>******GK: This is another area worthy of exploration.
>After all no matter what the vernacular the
>ecclesiastical and liturgical language of the
>Romanians WAS Slavic for hundreds and hundreds of
>years. And there would be no reason to avoid the
>terminology conveyed in these texts. They just had to
>be current.
Slavisms of this kind have been current. I mean they
are current. But only those that are current. In other
words: we should accept what the grass roots
people selected over the centuries. I.e. to keep in
mind that the selection, in such, popular, conditions,
can't occur under the auspicies of and severe control
by a royal Academy of linguistics. I'm almost sure that
many terms (not only of religion) that were borrowed
from Slavic can be seen by a Slav as inappropriately
used. (The Romanian version of the Bible itself is one
of the best texts to see how Slavic loans harmonize
with the rest of the vocabulary. And they harmonize:
anyone with no linguistic education has no idea that
this word is Latin, that one Slavic or that one Greek
and had had a Slavic "carrier.")
>I take it that the translation
>of Christian texts into Romanian earnestly begun in
>the 17th century tended to avoid Slavicisms as much as
>possible?? I am not very versed on this. *******
It began earlier. The so-called Maramuresh church
texts. According to some researchers they could've
been written under the influence of Hussite refugees.
OTOH, the Bible of 1688 (the so-called Bucharest
Bible) already contains a style that is easily understood
by anyone, without too footnotes. But the earlier texts,
Maramuresh Bible fragments contain a more archaic
language, with many terms that then disappeared
(even some Romanian words of Latin origin that were
unknown to much later Romanian generations; after all,
language purity thoughts and preoccupation with the
"purity" of the vocabulary evolved only with nationalism
all over Europe; in this respect, the Middle Ages were
thoroughly... cosmopolitic. ;)
George