LXIV Series Historica 2025

Abstract: Towards the middle of the 19th century, just like other European national languages, the Romanian language, too, was in a process of becoming a modern written, litterary and academic language, process accomplished at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. Before 1850 the Romanian language used mainly two types of both handwriting and typewriting, namely with Cyrillic letters (slove, buchii) and with Latin letters (litere), joined occasionally by printings using combined Cyrillic and Latin letters of the so-called „alphabet of transition”. As a matter of fact, the Roman idea sustaining the Romanians’ origins, history and language was intentionally transferred to the programmatic fight for adoption of the Romanian spelling using the Latin alphabet.

We illustrate the fight for Latin letters on the case studies offered by the scripts and prints of several Transylvanian forerunners of the Romanian national movement: general commander of the Transylvanian Romanian folk army during the 1848–1849 revolution and war, lawyer Avram Iancu; lawyer and historian Alexandru Papiu Ilarian; polyglot encyclopedist Timotei Cipariu, considered to be the „first Romanian philologist” and also the first Romanian orientalist; historian and philologist August Treboniu Laurian; historian George Barițiu, founder of the Romanian press in Transylvania. All these Transylvanian Romanian militants contributed to the creation of the Romanian scientific vocabulary and language needed for the development of various social and human studies (history, law, journalism, philosophy, philology a.o.), as well as to the spelling rules adopted by the Romanian Academy from București in the last decades of the 19th century, definitely imposing the Romanian spelling with Latin letters.

Thus the Latin alphabet became the vehicle and means by which the Latinist current, even if often artificially promoted between 1847–1876 by the Transylvanian scholars in the field of Romanian language, eventually determined the adoption of the etymological principle as an academic norm. However, it was exactly the etymologist re-Latinization of Romanian which later, in 1883–1895, formed the basis for a new vision upon the writing of the living language, and in the 20th century a process of natural language modernization began, grounded on the principle of phonetics.

Keywords: Romanian language, Latin letters, Avram Iancu, Timotei Cipariu, August Treboniu Laurian, Alexandru Papiu Ilarian, George Barițiu.