On some Hungarian and general aspects of an 18th-century Romanian grammar written in Latin

摘要

This paper deals with issues concerning the general and Hungarian-related history of grammar writing on the basis of the first Latin grammar of the Romanian language recently published in two versions, due to the separate work of two scholars. It emphasises some important ways in which that grammar has a bearing on Romanian literature in the Cyrillic script and explores its essential similarities with the rudimenta of morphology and syntax in Alvares’ textbook. It mentions certain recognisable connections with Alvares’ and a few other humanistic Latin grammars, medieval language descriptions, and grammars of Hungarian in Latin. The author considers this grammar an important work of Romance philology in the Carpathian Basin, among other reasons, because it was the first to demonstrate, in the relevant literature of the area, the Latin origin of Romanian on the basis of grammatical correspondences-unlike in the Hungarian literature of the period where the same point was merely made on the basis of correspondences within the word stocks of the two languages.