Romeno antico e lingua della poesia popolare: il problema degli arcaismi

Abstract

The language of Romanian oral poetry, especially that of narrative genres like wintersolstice songs (colinde) and epic songs (cîntece batrînesti), is marked by a large number of lexical and morphological archaisms. In this paper we analyse some lexical items (mohorît, pelita, a se nadai, a se mîneca, etc.) and a morphological phenomenon (the inversion of the auxiliary and the participle), to point out the relationship between the folk texts and the most ancient documents of Romanian (principally religious texts of the 16th and 17th century).