Lazăr Şăineanu
Encyclopedia
Lazăr Şăineanu (ˈlazər ʃəjˈne̯anu, also spelled Şeineanu, born Eliezer Schein; Francisized
Lazare Sainéan, lazaʁ sa.ine.ɑ̃, or Sainéanu; April 23, 1859 – May 11, 1934) was a Romania
n-born philologist
, linguist
, folklorist
and cultural historian. A specialist in Oriental
and Romance studies
, as well as a Hebraist
and a Germanist
, he was primarily known for his contribution to Yiddish
and Romanian
philology, his work in evolutionary linguistics
, and his activity as a literary
and philological comparatist
. Şăineanu also had innovative contributions to the investigation and anthologizing of Romanian folklore
, placed in relation to Balkan
and East Central European traditions, as well as to the historical evolution
of Romanian in a larger Balkan context, and was a celebrated early contributor to Romanian lexicography
. His main initiatives in these fields are a large corpus of collected fairy tale
s and the 1896 Dicţionarul universal al limbii române ("The Universal Dictionary of the Romanian Language"), which have endured among the most popular Romanian scientific works.
A member of the non-emancipated
Jewish-Romanian community
, Lazăr Şăineanu stood for the Haskalah
ideas, and opted in favor of Jewish assimilation
into the Romanian mainstream. His repeated requests for naturalization
were eventually unsuccessful, but propelled him to the center of a political conflict which opposed the antisemitic current to the advocates of tolerance. In 1901, Şăineanu and his family quit the Kingdom of Romania
and resettled in France
, where the scholar lived until his death. Becoming known for his pioneering work to the study of Middle French
and his investigations into the origins of argot
, as well as for his critical essays on 16th century writer François Rabelais
, he was a recipient of the Institut de France
's Volney Prize
for 1908. The son in law of publisher Ralian Samitca, Şăineanu was survived by his brother Constantin, a noted lexicographer, journalist and polemicist.
to impoverished Jewish-Romanian residents. His father, Moisi, was a house painter and amateur artist, who, by the time his son was sixteen, had left to work in the United States
. Eliezer studied with private tutors from the age of 5, and was admitted into regular school at the age of 10, when he entered second grade. Moisi Schein died shortly after returning to Romania, leaving Eliezer the sole provider for his mother and six siblings. He was however able to pass his Baccalaurate
, with a thesis on writer and theorist Ion Heliade Rădulescu
: Ioan Eliad Rădulescu ca grămătic şi filolog ("Ioan Eliad Rădulescu as a Grammarian and Philologist").
By 1881, having been exempted from his compulsory term in the Romanian Land Forces
as the eldest son of a widow, the young man went on to study at the University of Bucharest
's Faculty of Letters. Taught and regarded with admiration by academic Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu
, Şăineanu was primarily a student of etymology
, stylistics
and semantics
(which formed the basis of his first three studies, published in 1882 and 1887). He published his first study, the 1883 Câteva specimene de etimologie populară română ("A Few Samples of Romanian Folk Etymology"), in Hasdeu's magazine Columna lui Traian. By then, Şăineanu had begun contributing to Anuar pentru Israeliţi ("The Yearbook for Israelites"), the Hebraist magazine edited by his friends and fellow scholars Moses Gaster
and Moses Schwartzfeld, which mainly published articles on Jewish history
and espoused a moderate assimilationist
agenda (Haskalah
). Gaster also sent Şăineanu's various studies on folklore and linguistics also published in Revista pentru Istorie, Arheologie şi Filologie, a review founded and led by Romanian historian Grigore Tocilescu
. The direct contacts between the two scholars ended in 1885, when Gaster was expelled from Romania for protesting against the antisemitic measures condoned by the National Liberal Party
cabinet of Ion Brătianu
.
The 1887 Încercare asupra semasiologiei române ("Essay on Romanian Semasiology
"), presented by Schein as his graduation paper, was retrospectively commended by ethnologist
Iordan Datcu for its innovative value, and argued by the same commentator to have attracted universally positive reactions from "objective critics". According to Şăineanu's account, it followed closely after semasiology itself had been established as an independent branch by the French academic Michel Bréal
. It reportedly earned him the praise of a future adversary the Education Minister and National Liberal politician Dimitrie Sturdza
, who allegedly recommended him to study abroad, reassuring him that, unlike in Gaster's case, "we will receive you back with open arms." Printed by the Romanian Academy
's press and prefaced by Hasdeu, Încercare earned Şăineanu the Manoah Hillel scholarship
, amounting to 5,000 lei
in gold.
Using this grant, he furthered his studies in France, at the University of Paris
, under Bréal, Gaston Paris
and Wilhelm Meyer-Lübke
, and later at the École Spéciale des Langues Orientales
, where he specialized in the study of Oriental languages. He received his Ph. D. at the University of Leipzig
, in the German Empire
, his dissertation receiving an award from the Institut de France
. According to historian Lucian Nastasă, the scholar's choice was confirming a common practice of Romanians, who opted to bridge the gap between Francophilia and Germanophilia by frequenting venues in both countries. As Şăineanu wrote to Gaster, he had decided in favor of the "intellectual center" Leipzig
because Karl Brugmann
, "the leading representative of present-day linguistics", worked and taught there. He studied with both Brugmann and August Leskien
, earning much praise for his work and the right to take his diploma under special circumstances (which took into consideration his previous works, and did not require him to research a full-sized new thesis). Şăineanu was pleased with the scientific rigor of his German teachers, but believed the system to suffer greatly in the matter of pedagogy
, and considered French academics much more talented in this respect. The young scholar published two works during the interval: Legenda Meşterului Manole la grecii moderni ("The Meşterul Manole
Legend among the Modern Greeks
") and his Ph. D. thesis on Romanian folklore
, Les Jours d'emprunt ou les jours de la vieille ("The Borrowed Days or The Old Woman's Days"). The latter was hosted by Gaston Paris' journal Romania.
and Romanian, pursuing a career path which eventually earned him a position at Bucharest University. He was given employment as a high school teacher, and obtained an unpaid university position as assistant to Hasdeu, head of the Department of Letters. Nastasă, who notes Şăineanu's enthusiasm for his work, writes: "His opening lecture for the Comparative Philology course—like all of his work—is a proof of erudition more or less unparalleled within the areas of Romania."
Despite his qualifications, Şăineanu was unable to advance professionally because of his non-citizen status. The young researcher was also appointed substitute teacher of Latin in Bucharest
Gheorghe Lazăr High School by an administrative decision of the Education Ministry, taken despite the antisemitic protestations of Undersecretary Ştefan Michăilescu. His assignment to the post followed the intercession of his friend and former teacher, the writer and archeologist Alexandru Odobescu
, and inaugurated a short period during which Şăineanu focused on writing textbooks.
Shortly afterward, Conservative Minister Titu Maiorescu
, leader of the influential literary club Junimea
and himself one of Lazăr Şăineanu's former professors, appointed him to a position at the University, within the History and Literature Department of V. A. Urechia
. The latter, an outspoken antisemite and prominent member of the opposition National Liberal group, reacted strongly against the measure, launching that claim that, unlike an ethnic Romanian
, a Jew "could never awaken in the mind and heart of the young generation the image of our past laden with lessons for the future". According to Şăineanu's own recollection, he had not himself asked for the university appointment, and suspected that it was offered to him in the first place so that the Gheorghe Lazăr position would be assigned to "a favorite of the day, the former tutor of Prince Ferdinand
." He nevertheless noted that Urechia had a conflict of interest
when opposing his appointment, given that he had designed the department around his own chairmanship, and that, with the aid of University of Iaşi academic Alexandru D. Xenopol, he had set in motion a set of "miserable intrigues" to maintain his hold on the faculty.
Şăineanu also commented on the alleged oscillations of Tocilescu, who, after agreeing to lead the History section upon its recommended division, and supporting his Jewish colleague for chairmanship of the Letters section, threw his support behind Urechia. Nastasă, who mentions the scheming on the part of Urechia and Tocilescu, cites Moses Gaster's letter to Şăineanu, which defined Tocilescu as a double-crosser, "a filthy twicer and a bloodsucker". The complications eventually led Şăineanu to present his resignation, and Maiorescu to accept it. He recalled: "Every reasonable man would doubtlessly assume that [...] the resentment Mr. Urechia held against this unfortunate nomination would have been appeased. To assume thus would mean not to know the person or the Romanian social environment well enough, for barely two months had passed before grandiose patriotism
again displayed the effects of its hatred."
The young linguist also contributed to Convorbiri Literare, a magazine edited by Junimea. It was there that, in 1887, he published his study on the Khazars
' possible presence in Romanian folklore: Jidovii sau Tătarii sau Uriaşii ("The Jews or the Tatars
or the Uriaşi"). Produced on the basis of folkloric surveys in Muntenia
n and Oltenia
n localities such as Dragoslavele
, Schitu Goleşti
and Radomir, the study was later used against him by his political adversaries, who resented the implications it seemed to carry for the traditional relations between Jews and Romanians.
and Ottoman Turkish
on the mainly Romance
Aromanian language
, producing the 1885 study ("Turkish Elements
in the Aromanian Language"). In 1889, he published his innovative work on the links between German
and Yiddish, ("A Dialectologic
Study on Judeo-German Speech"). His recognized field of expertise, Nastasă notes, was by then the widest in Romania, comprising not just Yiddish and Romance linguistics, but also the study Proto-Indo-European
, Proto-Slavic
and various other languages and dialects.
Also in 1889, Şăineanu applied for naturalization
, which, according to the 1866 Constitution
, a Jew could only receive by special act of the Romanian Parliament
and in exchange for exceptional merits. The effort, which consumed some 12 years of his life, pitted him against the antisemitic current in politics and the scientific community: among the most vocal adversaries of his naturalization were two prominent National Liberals, Urechia and Sturdza, both of whom had a following among nationalist
sections of the electorate. As head of the parliamentary commission on legal integration, Sturdza signed a recommendation to reject the proposed law, which had been previously approved by Justice Minister George D. Vernescu
, on grounds that Şăineanu lacked qualifications. Their campaign, which depicted Şăineanu as an adversary of Romania, culminated when Senate
voted 79 to 2 against the naturalization request.
The resistance to his application was a surprise for Şăineanu, who wrote: "I was not aware that this path [...] is the more thorny as the [person's] merits are more real." He also accused the political establishment of endemic corruption
, writing: "any banker who demanded naturalization received it without the least of difficulties". During the following interval, Şăineanu's cause reportedly won the support of King
Carol I
, Conservative Premier
Lascăr Catargiu
and moderate National Liberal politico Mihail Kogălniceanu
. Reviewing the situation, Şăineanu cited an unusual incident in neighboring Austria–Hungary, where local Romanians were demanding increased group rights as part of the Memorandum
movement. Their arguments about cultural repression where met with the reply of Hungarian intellectuals, who cited the Şăineanu issue as proof that Austria–Hungary had more to offer than Romania: "He had all of Romania on his case, but he had rendered [the country] as many services as most Romanian demigods." In 1893, the naturalization request came before the lower chamber
, resulting in a vote of 76 in favor to 20 against. According to the scholar's recollections, his only adversary in this forum was his former Convorbiri Literare colleague, writer Iacob Negruzzi, who reportedly stated the unsupported claim that Şăineanu had campaigned against Romania "in English" (Şăineanu believed that this was "doubtlessly" stated "because [English] was completely unfamiliar to the majority of Chamber members").
and Logic
"), written on the basis of his university lectures, comprised his thoughts on the origin of language
and was among volumes pioneering the study of logical aspects within natural language
. Datcu notes this contribution, alongside the 1892 Istoria filologiei române ("History of Romanian Philology"), for the "up to date information" provided. The latter was explained by the author as "destined to encourage the new generation to work, and come to its aid through useful advice." The two volumes were accompanied by a printed expansion of his earliest thesis on Heliade Rădulescu.
In 1895, Şăineanu completed work on one of his major contributions to folkloristics in general and the study of Romania folklore
in particular: Basmele române în comparaţiune cu legendele antice clasice şi în legătură cu basmele popoarelor învecinate şi ale tuturor popoarelor romanice ("Romanian Fairy Tales as Compared to the Legends of Classical Antiquity
and Those of All Romance Peoples
"). An exhaustive monograph
, it comprised some 1,000 pages of main text and 100 pages of index
. The volume was presented anonymously to the Romanian Academy (in accordance with its regulations), and received its Heliade Rădulescu Award. Consternation ensued once the author revealed his name, prompting Sturdza and Negruzzi to ask, unsuccessfully, for the Academy's decision to be overturned. On the occasion, Urechia (himself an Academy member) publicly stated that his adversary had purchased the award, but, Şăineanu noted, never presented proof for this assertion.
That same year, the matter of his citizenship was returned to the Senate. By then, Şăineanu's file had been further enriched with the award certificate, a guarantee of good conduct from Bucharest City Hall
, and several favorable reports from Hasdeu (an exception to the latter's own antisemitic discourse). Hasdeu also arranged him interviews with Romanian Orthodox
Metropolitan
Ghenadie (who was also president of the commission on naturalization), while Alexandru Odobescu
brought the case to the attention of Gheorghe Grigore Cantacuzino, the Conservative President of the Senate
. There followed a major Senate debate, during which Urechia stood out for his repeated criticism of his former competitor, likening him to a Trojan Horse
and demanding from fellow parliamentarians not to let "a foreigner" slide into "the Romanian citadel" (statements to which many responded with applause). Listing his various claims alongside his and Hasdeu's replies, the Jewish scholar himself recounted that Urechia eventually came to state, at the Senate tribune, that "Mr. Şăineanu did not publish anything against the country, but neither did he write in favor of the national question".
The early vote gave 33 to 26 against Şăineanu's naturalization, short of the supermajority
required, but a second take resulted in 61 against to 12 in favor. The antisemitic segment of the board celebrated this victory with loud cheers, as witnessed by Odobescu, who recorded feeling himself confronted with the image of "cannibals who rejoiced like beasts over having slashed and devoured a civilized man". Another voice from academia to speak unfavorably of the opposition met by Şăineanu was Alexandru Philippide, who wrote: "I am not philosemitic
, but if there ever was a kike deserving of naturalization, that would be Şăineanu." Shortly after this incident, the new National Liberal Minister Spiru Haret
reshuffled the teaching posts, and Şăineanu, who was holding a new teacher's position at Bucharest's Şcoala Normală Superioară, found himself unemployed, and opted to seek employment outside Romania, in Paris
and Berlin
.
. That same year, he completed his fundamental work in lexicography, Dicţionarul universal al limbii române, which codified the Romanian lexis
from archaism
s and dialectical varieties to neologisms and modern jargon
, comprising around 30,000 entries and 80,000 definitions. The first extensive project of its kind in the history of the local philological school, it was to prove his most popular contribution from its first edition, circumstances themselves described by writer Ion Luca Caragiale
as a phenomenon in Romanian culture
. Caragiale, who deemed Lazăr Şăineanu "a genuine talent in popularization", opined on the book's originality: "[Şăineanu] sought to embrace the entire manifestations in the life of a modern people [...]. Therefore, this universal dictionary provides a reduced, but precise image of our present-day culture, as it is reflected in the language." In contrast to this positive appraisal, nationalists such as Urechia's son Alceu publicly mocked the book and claimed that it lacked merit.
In parallel, the volume consecrated Şăineanu's collaboration with the Craiova
-based printing house of Jewish entrepreneur Iosif Samitca (Institutul Samitca), where the scholar also published Mitologia clasică ("Classical Mythology"), the 1895 Romanian literature
anthology Autori români moderni. Bucăţi alese în versuri şi proză din principalii scriitori ai sec. al XIX-lea ("Modern Romanian Authors. Verse and Prose Samples Collected from the Main Writers of the 19th Century"), and an 1897 biographical essay on English
author William Shakespeare
. The business connection turned into family relations, after Şăineanu married the daughter of Ralian Samitca, Iosif's son, associate and eventual successor. They had a daughter, Elisabeth.
Şăineanu followed up with a comprehensive study regarding Levant
ine presences in the vocabulary and society alike, published by Editura Socec in 1900 (as , "The Oriental Influence on Romanian Language and Culture") and being made into a French-language
edition in 1901. It received attention from the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres
, and consequently a nomination for the Institut de France's Volney Prize
. However, in what has been seen as proof of the author's isolation in Romania, it was ignored by the Romanian Academy, which presented its prize for that year to a volume on the history of horses. The book was also a cause for conflict between Şăineanu and Nicolae Iorga
, an established historian and nationalist politician. The heated debate, carried out in Constantin Rădulescu-Motru
's periodical Noua Revistă Română, was sparked by Iorga's review, which claimed to provide some necessary amends. Şăineanu found the objections outlined by Iorga frivolous, and the overall text, in which his opponent had cited himself some 15 times, egocentric.
This reaction was met with a virulent reply by Iorga, whose renewed accusations borrowed from antisemitic discourse: "[Şăineanu wrote] about many things that he does not comprehend. He was crafting with his clumsy hands manuals, grammars, anthologies, dictionaries for speculative profit. I however had an explanation for such defects. We all know that Mr. Şăineanu is not a Romanian, and we know that which he is. His people has many traits that are very elevated and noble, but also many defects that are low and ungainly. These, I had been telling myself, are in his blood; he could never get rid of them. I wish to talk about the passion for high praise and multiple earnings, without much investment". In 1907, Iorga and his Neamul Românesc journal also retorted against Caragiale's praise for Şăineanu, calling Caragiale one who "deals with the Jews", and prompting Caragiale to satirize Iorga's own scholarly ambitions.
and accepted baptism in the Romanian Orthodox Church. His godfather
was Take Ionescu
, at the time a rising figure within the Conservative Party ranks. Ionescu himself served as Minister of Education, appreciating the scholar's insight and enjoying his company before taking his distance from him for reasons unknown. Şăineanu's case was again presented for Senate approval in December 1899, this time with a favorable review from the special parliamentary commission, and the motion for his naturalization was carried with 37 to 2 votes (or, according to Şăineanu, a 39 vote unanimity). Although the result was positive, the scientist was informed that a new procedure had just been passed with support from across the floor, specifying that naturalization could only be enforced by vote in a common session of the two chambers. The dossier was therefore submitted to another vote, on the last session of 1899, which again enlisted attacks from the antisemitic groups, before being canceled due to lack of quorum
.
Reflecting on the early result, which had left him "submerged into complete happiness", and on the new vote, which he believed was a mere technicality introduced on purpose by Justice Minister Constantin Dissescu, he recalled: "for 24 hours I was politically [Şăineanu's italics] within the Romanian nationhood!" He recalled having been received by King Carol, who reportedly agreed with his belief that the action was abusive. By then, Şăineanu also lost the support of Hasdeu, who, like Take Ionescu, gave his approval to a restructuring of the University, which stripped the Jewish scholar of his honorary position. He sought instead backing from Petre P. Carp
, the Conservative doyen, who reportedly answered his request with the ambiguous Latin adage Gutta cavat lapidem ("The water drop will drill through stone"). On the other side of the divide, the attacks on Şăineanu had come to be led by the antisemitic paper Apărarea Naţională, whose articles, the scholar argued, "reached the summit of stupidity and ridiculousness".
On December 14, 1900, the issue of Lazăr Şăineanu's naturalization was also revisited by the lower chamber, and the proposal defeated with 44 votes to 31 (from an insufficient quorum of 75), followed by a definitive vote on December 15, at which 48 out of 95 deputies voted against. This outcome was celebrated by Apărarea Naţională, which published editorial comments such as "All Romanian hearts have jumped up with immense glee" and "Our ancestors have shuddered with joy in their graves". Among those who expressed condemnation of the decision were La Roumanie journal and aristocrat Alexandru Bibescu. In 1901, frustrated by the political reaction and feeling uncomfortable in Romania, the scholar and his family resettled in Paris, where he primarily used a Francization
of his Romanian name, signing as Lazare Sainéan.
, with focus on the Neogrammarian
approach, ethnolinguistics
and psycholinguistics
. He also added to his interests the groundbreaking investigation of French argot
, and published a short memoir
(Une carrière philologique en Roumanie, "A Philologist's Career in Romania"). Şăineanu's studies also focused on a comparative research of building rituals as found in Balkan literature, and notably the Romanian Meşterul Manole
myth (the book saw print in French, as the 1902 Les rites de la construction d'après la poésie populaire de l'Europe Orientale). By then, he was in correspondence with fellow linguist Alfred Landau, with whom he discussed the history of Yiddish.
Şăineanu's parallel investigations into the history of French
included his 1905-1907 La Création métaphorique en français et en roman: images tirées du monde des animaux domestiques ("The Metaphoric Creation in French and Romance Languages: Images from the World of Domestic Animals"), which was structured into several tomes, respectively dedicated to the principal household companions. He also began work on major syntheses on French vocabulary, L'Argot ancien ("Ancient Argot") and its companion Les Sources de l'argot ancien ("The Sources of Ancient Argot", 1907). The former earned him the Volney Prize
for 1908. Writing in 1999, historian Joan Leopold argued that this was a significant achievement, since the Volney Commission "seemed to fear direct competition by foreigners"—other exceptions to this rule being Liu Bannong
, Wilhelm Schmidt and Marie-Louise Sjoestedt
. According to Leopold, Şăineanu was among the Volney prizewinners, "particularly foreigners", who "were never elected to an affiliation with the French Académies
." However, she also notes that "there were no titles honored [during 1900-1909] which are now remembered as significant in the history of linguistics". She places the fact that Şăineanu "did not achieve major university positions in France" in connection with a tendency of awarding the prize to scholars who mainly did field work (Schmidt, Adolphe de Calassanti-Motylinski, George Abraham Grierson
, Leo Reinisch and others). Literary critic Laszlo Alexandru passed a similar judgment: "Lazăr Şăineanu's disappearance from the Romanian cultural space was received with an almost unanimous silence; but the emergence of Lazare Sainéan in Parisian scientific research would not itself result, for the rest of his days, in the much coveted and entirely deserved university chair."
Between 1912 and 1922, Şăineanu worked with the Société des Études rabelaisiennes on publishing the annotated edition of Rabelais' complete works. His career was not interrupted by World War I
, and, in 1915, he published a report on the special language of French soldiers entrenched on the Western Front
(L'Argot des tranchés, "Trench Argot"). His 1920 volume on the evolution of argot in Parisian French
, was again nominated for a Volney Prize.
In 1922, Şăineanu published Manuel de phonétique latin ("Manual of Latin Phonetics
"), the last of his contributions to be shortlisted for a Volney. By then, he had also become interested in researching the work of French Renaissance
author François Rabelais
, primarily focusing on his use of Middle French
—an account published between 1920 and 1923 as La Langue de Rabelais ("Rabelais' Language"). Between 1925 and 1930, he published the volumes of a large-scale project, Les Sources indigènes de l'étymologie française ("The Indigenous Sources of French Etymology"), which was reputedly the result of three decades in specialized research. In 1930, Şăineanu followed up with another book on Rabelais, mainly dedicated to his critical reception and cultural legacy (L'Influence et la réputation de Rabelais, "Rabelais' Influence and Reputation"). He died four years later at a hospital in Paris, after complications from surgery.
ic and [Jewish] philological traditions" within modern science. His Jewish identity, literary historian George Călinescu
noted in 1933, went in tandem with an exceptional familiarity with Romanian language and culture; like other of his fellow Jewish Romanian intellectuals (among whom Călinescu cited philologists Gaster and Barbu Lăzăreanu, Marxist
theorist Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea
and dramatist Ronetti Roman), Şăineanu possessed "an amazingly rich Romanian lexis
".
During his time in Romania, the scientist was involved in cultural debates surrounding the Romanian ethos
. As a disciple of Moses Gaster
and contributor to Anuar pentru Israeliţi, Şăineanu implicitly stood for a Haskalah
ideology, supporting Jewish integration into the cultural mainstream, and favored the scientific approach to Jewish history
akin to the Wissenschaft des Judentums
methods. Laszlo Alexandru refers to his "fundamental program" as being "the assimilationist thesis", and explains that, for this reason, the scholar changed Schein to Şăineanu. The same commentator notes that Şăineanu disregarded Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu
's publicized antisemitism when he became a "fervent disciple" of Hasdeu in scholarly matters. In reference to his own patriotic
sentiment, Şăineanu once defined the country as "twice sacred to my eyes—the land where I was born and where my parents sleep their eternal slumber." After his departure to France, he further stated that he bore "not even the shadow of a grudge" on the Romanian people as a whole. According to literary historian Eugen Lovinescu
, the scholar's subsequent correspondence stands as "proof of sincere adherence, prolonged over decades and perils, to his country of origin". However, according to one account, when Şăineanu happened to meet Nicolae Iorga
in Paris some decades after their polemic, he made a point of addressing him in French, which was interpreted as a statement of disgust with the Romanian cultural environment.
Şăineanu also made himself known for the points of view which he expressed in relation to the debates over the Latin alphabet and orthography
, within the context of linguistic evolution
. Overall, Şăineanu argued that early Romanian history as taught in his lifetime was better covered by philologists, since, before the time of Michael the Brave, it had "more of an ethnographic
and philological character". He reacted against the politicization of research and accusations that his own works did not support popular views of "the national question". At a time when the Cyrillic version
had been discarded but the new spelling was still largely unregulated, he joined the outspoken critics of attempts to modify the shape of words so as to suggest their Latin origins. The "Latinist" approach, experimented in the lexicographic work of I. C. Massim
and August Treboniu Laurian
and originating with the Transylvanian School
, was favored for a while by the Romanian Academy
, but had become widely ridiculed by the 1880s. According to the scholar's own words, "Latinomaniac tendencies" were nevertheless present with National Liberals such as Sturdza, and formed a background theme in the party's conflict with Moses Gaster. While approaching the Junimea
society's tenets on this matter, Şăineanu also shared Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu
's criticism of Junimist Germanophilia. In 1897, the two scholars published Eine Trilogie (German
for "A Trilogy"), criticizing a perceived Conservative and Junimist monopoly on the Romanian literary scene
in general, and, in particular, the officially condoned historical overview by Wilhelm Rudow, Gheorghe Bogdan-Duică and Iacob Negruzzi, which seemed to omit mention of any politically inconvenient literary contribution.
. Aiming to be "a genuine corpus of Romanian oral literature", Basmele române aimed at introducing the major themes in local spoken tradition
, listing and transcribing some 500 stories. Lazăr Şăineanu took additional care in preserving the integrity of the oral level
of Romanian literature in printed versions, and urged other folklorists interviewing storytellers to keep notes on the latter's special talents. Such preoccupations in preserving context were also found in his lexicographic work; according to Caragiale, Dicţionarul universal was groundbreaking because its author took care "to support with authentic testimonies the words and the nuances of meanings."
A special section of Şăineanu's research in the same area was dedicated to comparative mythology
. His contributions have led folklorist Linda Dégh to deem him "one of the pioneers in classifying folktales according to their types". This method was employed in Basmele române, whose content was structured into both types and "cycles". In Basmele române, arguing in favor of applying the principles introduced by Hasdeu, Şăineanu analyzed Romanian folktales in their native and national content. Nevertheless, he followed the conclusions of other folklorists on the universality of folklore, suggesting that the world's entire folkloric literature was structured into some tens of groups. With Studii folclorice, the researcher tested an anthropological
investigation into the characteristics and supposed origins of each myth, in particular Meşterul Manole
, Baba Dochia
and the iele
creatures. In Les rites de la construction, Şăineanu focused on a set of ballad
s with a similar construction- and immurement
-related subject, present throughout East Central or Eastern Europe
, likening the Romanian Meşterul Manole legend to its counterparts in Serbian
(Zidanje Skadra), Hungarian
(Kőműves Kelemen) and other regional folkloric traditions. According to critics John Neubauer and Marcel Cornis-Pope, he was "the first author to attempt a synthetic treatment of the immurement motif in Eastern Europe". The two also note that Şăineanu, who believed that the motif reached its potential significance only in Eastern Europe, stayed clear of the controversy surrounding the geographic and ethnic sources of the ballad (while specifying his belief that the Hungarian version followed a Romanian source), and discussed Zidanje Skadra and Meşterul Manole as the most crafted variants of the myth.
One portion of Şăineanu's studies in Romanian folklore bordered on his investigation of Jewish history. The scholar noticed recurring characteristic among antagonist
s in Romanian fairy tales, particularly the uriaşi—occasionally known as jidovi, "Jews", or tătari, "Tatars
". He attributed such traits to a possible conflictual encounter, taking place at some point in the early medieval period
, between Romanians (or Vlachs
) and the Khazars
, a Turkic
tribe that had adopted Judaism. His interpretation, as paraphrased by the scholar himself, concluded: "Was there in the past a people about which one could claim with certainty that it was both Tatar and Jewish at the same time? My answer to this question is that such a people existed, and it is known in history under the name of Khazars [...]. After spreading its domination over Eastern Europe, these Jewish-Tatars suddenly disappeared from the stage of history. What became of them? A part of these Khazars will have looked early on for a shelter in Transylvania
, from where they crossed to the Danubian countries
, especially in Muntenia
, particularly in Muscel and Romanaţi
districts where the traditional memories regarding them seem to be concentrated. [...] The settlements and their dwellings left important traces that took on colossal proportions in people's imagination. People of a supernatural size seemed to have lived [...] in an ancient time, which the old can hardly remember, and our peasants call those giant people Jews or Tatars." The scholar referred to various constants in folkloric accounts: peasants' testimonies which attributed large stone ruins to the Jews (whom they occasionally referred to as giants or supernaturally powerful people) and the "red" antagonist
s in fairy tales such as Ion Creangă
's Harap Alb
(the "Red Emperor", the "Red Man" and people with red-colored facial markings, all placed by Şăineanu in connection to the "Red Jews
" myth). Şăineanu's political adversaries, including V. A. Urechia
, saw in this theory evidence of a Jewish historiographical attempt at overriding the Romanian presence in the area—an interpretation since defined as "in bad faith" and "slanderous" by Laszlo Alexandru.
researcher Jerold C. Frakes, he is one of the "major scholars of the late nineteenth century" to have studied the Yiddish language, his contribution ranking him alongside Maks Erik, Solomon Birnbaum
, Chone Shmeruk, Max
and Uriel Weinreich
. According to Hebraist Robert D. King, such contributions rank Şăineanu, Alfred Landau and Matisyohu Mieses "among the first scholars to take Yiddish seriously, to force others [King's italics] to take it seriously, to move conceptually beyond the stupid position that Yiddish was 'bad German' or 'jargon', a second-rate excuse of a language." His inquiry into medieval structures connecting Yiddish and German is seen by Germanists Dagmar C. G. Lorenz
and Neil G. Jacobs as a substantial discovery, Şăineanu being the first to indicate "that the German component of Yiddish traces back to Middle High German
sources" (meaning that "Yiddish was no longer to be evaluated in terms of New High German
"). The scholar was also reportedly the discoverer of a direct link between Yiddish and Aramaic
; this allowed the conclusion that the Jewish German dialect originated among Aramaic-speaking and pre-Ashkenazi Jews
, who originally settled further east than the Askhenazi home in the Rhineland
.
In his studies of Turkish
and Turkic
borrowings into the Romanian lexis, Lazăr Şăineanu looked back on historical events leading back to the Age of Migrations, such as in highlighting the possible Pecheneg
origin of relatively common Romanian words such as buzdugan ("mace"), duium ("multitude"), duşman ("enemy"), caia ("horseshoe nail"), colibă ("hut") and fotă ("skirt"). However, one of his primary focuses was on Ottoman Turkish
as a mediator between Romanian and other languages: the Romanian word giuvaier ("jewel"), borrowed from the Turkish cevahir, but originating with a Persian
source; trampă ("barter"), taken from the Turkish trampa, but sourced to the Italian
tramutare ("to transform"); talaz ("high wave"), identical to the Turkish intermediary, and through it borrowed from the Greek
Θάλασσα (thalassa
, "sea"). Additionally, the scholar documented the distant impression of Levant
ine territories, as first introduced through Ottoman culture
—as illustrated by the original references to Egypt
as Misir, from the Arabic
مصر (Miṣr), as opposed to the more modern . He also discussed the professional suffix
es -giu and -angiu, both of Turkish origin and present in words borrowed during the early modern
and Phanariote
eras. Main examples include barcagiu ("boater" or "ferryman"), bragagiu ("boza
maker"), geamgiu ("window fitter"), toptangiu ("wholesale vendor") etc., but the suffix is also applied ironically in various other contexts—for example, mahalagiu ("inhabitant of the mahala
", "suburbanite" or "uncouth person") and duelgiu ("dueler"). Şăineanu's texts followed the evolutions of similar words ending in -liu (such as hazliu, "funny", from haz, "laughter"), of popular figures of speech
directly translated from their Turkish original (a bea tutun, "to drink tobacco", or the question în ce ape te scalzi?, "what waters do you bathe in?", figurative for "how are you feeling?"), and of strong obscenities
reflecting Oriental sources. In general, Şăineanu concluded, such appropriation from an area mediated by Islam
and Islamic culture was not present in areas directed related to Christian practice
and intellectual life.
Especially in his , Şăineanu evidenced the spread of Turkish borrowings throughout the Balkans, and concluded that they had a more significant presence in Aromanian than in Romanian. His contemporary, philologist Vasile Bogrea, referred to the volume as a "Bible
of Oriental elements in Romanian", while the author himself deemed it a "supreme testimony of my love for the Romanian language and people". According to writer and critic Alexandru Muşina
, Şăineanu was foremost among the linguists who challenged a linear take on the origin of the Romanians, evidencing, like Alexandru Al. Philippide and Alexandru Cihac, the "heterogeneous, plurilingual
and multicultural character of our Romanity
", with the underlying "processes of acculturation
". In particular, Muşina notes, it was Şăineanu's study of Turkish words and expressions settled in the everyday language that uncovered "a forma mentis, common Oriental, Turco-Romanian mentality."
s as icons of arrogance, pigs as symbols of gluttony etc. The books notably showed the traditional semantic parallelisms between cats, monkeys and apes, as codified in several Romance languages
, and investigated the animals' respective roles within popular demonology
and metaphors of drunkenness. With Les Sources indigènes de l'étymologie française, Şăineanu offered clues on the obscure origin of various French words. Şăineanu thus sourced the French and English harlequin
beyond the Italian-language
arlechino in Commedia dell'arte
, and back to a medieval legend in Middle French
.
A number of Şăineanu's texts focused on the language patterns covered by "argot" and the original meaning of "jargon", in relation to French and Parisian social history
, discussing the language of the gueux (marginalized and destitute migrants), the obscene nature of some medieval performances, the linguistic codes used by brigands during the Hundred Years' War
, and the impact of argot in the work of poet François Villon
or other French Renaissance
writers. discussed in part the emergence of what Şăineanu himself defined as ("the lowly Parisian language"), a mix of argots emerging from 19th century urbanization
. His studies in the area were part of a phenomenon in French linguistics: at roughly the same time as Şăineanu, argot studies were becoming the main subject of works by researchers such as Arnold van Gennep
and Raoul De La Grasserie. A disagreement occurred between Şăineanu and Gennep over the origins and age of argot: Gennep criticized his colleague's claim that "no European argot has sources beyond the 15th century", arguing that such statements were not verifiable, and that they presumed "some kind of spontaneous generation". Also according to Gennep, Şăineanu was among those Eurocentric
scholars who offered a "teratological
" view of argot as an "aberrant creation".
As part of his efforts to advance the study of Middle French, Şăineanu dedicated himself to an applied study of François Rabelais
and his role in French literature
. Called "remarkable and abundantly documented" by Russia
n semiotician
Mikhail Bakhtin
, La Langue de Rabelais outlines the use, context and origin of some 3,770 individual words in Rabelaisian vocabulary. It was especially noted for its details on various contributions to Rabelais' means of expression, including staples of French folklore
such as the so-called Cris de Paris (chants traditionally produced by Parisian street vendors). Some of his other contributions to the study of Rabelais' work, as described by Bakhtin, include the inventory of culinary metaphors found throughout Gargantua and Pantagruel
, and evidence that Rabelais had an unitigated familiarity with the maritime trade. La Langue de Rabelais also offered clues into 16th century views of homosexuality
, discussing the origin of archaisms such as bardachiser ("to sodomize") or the link between Rabelais' maritime terminology and medieval reactions to homoeroticism
.
In his work on the subject, Şăineanu also stood out as one of those rejecting the notion that Rabelais' writings have a special anticlerical meaning, arguing instead that his mockery of clerical society was merely a rendition of common and folkloric attitudes—a conclusion quoted in agreement by Annales School
historian Lucien Febvre
in his own The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century. Also cited by Febvre are Şăineanu's views on Islam
ic and "Saracen
" echos in Gargantua and Pantagruel (such as the depiction of Fierabras
), as well as on Rabelais' references to miraculous cures as being borrowed from earlier romance fiction
. In a parallel series of articles, the Romanian scholar also discussed the link between Ancient Roman
thinker Pliny the Elder
and the Renaissance writer, commenting on the similarity between Rabelais' description of medical practices and statements found in Natural History.
from the moment of its publication. In tandem, Şăineanu's request that his peers publish details on the individual storytellers providing the folkloric accounts was respected by some, including Alexandru Vasiliu, collector of Poveşti şi legende ("Stories and Legends", 1928). Two years after Şăineanu's death, his brother Constantin collected and edited his correspondence, publishing it in Bucharest.
Much interest in Şăineanu's work was sparked during the interwar period
, shortly before and after the scholar's death, when new generations of critics came to reclaim his work as an important contribution to the field of science. Outside of Romania and France, Şăineanu's contribution of Rabelais left an observable trace in Finnegans Wake
, a 1939 modernist
novel by Irish
novelist James Joyce
: while Joyce's text holds transparent allusions to Rabelais' writings, the writer himself claimed to have never read the originals, and to have instead relied solely on a scientific study (in turn identified by research Claude Jacquet as La Langue de Rabelais).
Interwar Romanian intellectuals, primarily George Călinescu and Eugen Lovinescu, played a part in reevaluating and bringing to attention Şăineanu's contribution within its Romanian and international context. Şăineanu's correspondence was itself a topic of controversy between the two rival critics: after Lovinescu showed himself impressed by a letter in which Şăineanu stated E. Lovinescu m'impose ("E. Lovinescu impresses me"), Călinescu noted that his competitor had a tendency to quote "all things flattering him, no matter how cheap." During the same decade, the maverick writer Panait Istrati
, himself a voluntary exile to France, explained that Dicţionarul universal was "the holy book" of his Romanian adolescence. However, Lucian Nastasă notes, the antisemitic background beyond Şăineanu's rejection (as well as the similar affair involving Solomon Schechter
) continued to make itself felt throughout those years, with other Jewish scholars (Leon Feraru or Alexandru Graur
) being actively prevented from seeking employment in their field. Braving the violently antisemitic and authoritarian
regime of Conducător
Ion Antonescu
, in place during most of World War II
, Călinescu commented favorably on the contributions of Jewish figures to Romanian cultural life in his main synthesis, the 1941 History of Romanian Literature. It included a reference to Jewish linguists Şăineanu, Gaster, Ion Aurel Candrea, as scholars whose merits would be "regrettable to deny".
In contrast, the Romanian far right
and fascist
groups continued to regard Şăineanu's marginalization as justified. The 1930s witnessed a controversy which, according to Laszlo Alexandru, recalled the confrontation between Hasdeu and Lazăr Şăineanu: Hasdeu's place was held by academic Nae Ionescu
, who moved toward fascism and antisemitism, while Şăineanu's position was assumed by Ionescu's Jewish disciple, writer Mihail Sebastian
. Writing for Azi
during the Sebastian scandal of 1934, journalist N. Roşu, an affiliate of the fascist Iron Guard
, claimed that "Romanian culture will go on living" irrespective of Jewish absences such as Şăineanu and Gaster, that one's creativity depended on one's "Romanianness", and that philology studies reflected one's "sensitivity". In 1936, a Guardist named Vasile Gârcineanu called Dicţionarul universal "a characteristically Jewish work, superficially and poorly crafted". While cultivating an ambiguous relationship with fascism, which eventually brought him into the ranks of the Iron Guard, philosopher Mircea Eliade
, one of Ionescu's other known disciples, publicly deplored Şăineanu's social relegation and Gaster's expulsion.
The communist period
witnessed a long hiatus in respect to the critical assessment of Şăineanu's work: in 1962, linguist Dumitru Macrea referred to his predecessor as an "all but forgotten" figure, and none of Şăineanu's volumes were printed between the 1947 edition of his dictionary and the 1978 version of Basmele române. This reticence was however contrasted by the appreciation of various academics: Iorgu Iordan
commented on his "extraordinary erudition", recommended his disciples to study his work, and referred to his repudiation by the Romanian state as "a real stain on our public life of the late [19th] century". During that time, Iordan and his colleagues Perpessicius
and Alexandru Rosetti published renewed commentary on Şăineanu's work, being later joined by philosopher Constantin Noica
, folklorist Ovidiu Bârlea and various other intellectuals.
A new edition of Dicţionarul universal saw print after the 1989 Revolution
and the end of communism. According to writer and researcher Rodica Marian, this reissue "without interventions" constitutes proof of a return to the "past parameters" of lexicography, at the end of a deterioration of standards. It was followed by several other initiatives, which notably resulted in reprints of Studii folclorice and Încercare asupra semasiologiei române. Writing in 2003, Alexandru Muşina
referred to Şăineanu as a "great", "mistreated" and "unrecognized" linguist, defining as "his valuable work, as yet unchallenged and still relevant". In 2008, the case surrounding Şăineanu's naturalization bid was the subject of a biographical study, written by historian George Voicu and published by the Elie Wiesel National Institute for Studying the Holocaust in Romania
. Şăineanu's works have also been the subject of reprints in France, and have continued to be recommended secondary sources by academic institutions in the United States
more than a century after they were first published. His posthumously published writings include a 1991 edition of Une carrière philologique en Roumanie.
, available through the Gallica digital library:
Francization
Francization or Gallicization is a process of cultural assimilation that gives a French character to a word, an ethnicity or a person.-French Colonial Empire:-Francization in the World:...
Lazare Sainéan, lazaʁ sa.ine.ɑ̃, or Sainéanu; April 23, 1859 – May 11, 1934) was a Romania
Romania
Romania is a country located at the crossroads of Central and Southeastern Europe, on the Lower Danube, within and outside the Carpathian arch, bordering on the Black Sea...
n-born philologist
Philology
Philology is the study of language in written historical sources; it is a combination of literary studies, history and linguistics.Classical philology is the philology of Greek and Classical Latin...
, linguist
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
, folklorist
Folkloristics
Folkloristics is the formal academic study of folklore. The term derives from a nineteenth century German designation of folkloristik to distinguish between folklore as the content and folkloristics as its study, much as language is distinguished from linguistics...
and cultural historian. A specialist in Oriental
Oriental studies
Oriental studies is the academic field of study that embraces Near Eastern and Far Eastern societies and cultures, languages, peoples, history and archaeology; in recent years the subject has often been turned into the newer terms of Asian studies and Middle Eastern studies...
and Romance studies
Romance studies
Romance studies is an umbrella academic discipline that covers the study of the languages, literatures, and cultures of areas that speak a Romance language. Romance studies departments usually include the study of Spanish, French, Italian, and Portuguese...
, as well as a Hebraist
Hebraist
A Hebraist is a specialist in Hebrew and Hebraic studies. Specifically, British and German scholars of the 18th and 19th centuries who were involved in the study of Hebrew language and literature were commonly known by this designation, at a time when Hebrew was little understood outside practicing...
and a Germanist
German studies
German studies is the field of humanities that researches, documents, and disseminates German language and literature in both its historic and present forms. Academic departments of German studies often include classes on German culture, German history, and German politics in addition to the...
, he was primarily known for his contribution to Yiddish
Yiddish language
Yiddish is a High German language of Ashkenazi Jewish origin, spoken throughout the world. It developed as a fusion of German dialects with Hebrew, Aramaic, Slavic languages and traces of Romance languages...
and Romanian
Romanian language
Romanian Romanian Romanian (or Daco-Romanian; obsolete spellings Rumanian, Roumanian; self-designation: română, limba română ("the Romanian language") or românește (lit. "in Romanian") is a Romance language spoken by around 24 to 28 million people, primarily in Romania and Moldova...
philology, his work in evolutionary linguistics
Evolutionary linguistics
Evolutionary linguistics is the scientific study of the origins and development of language. The main challenge in this research is the lack of empirical data: spoken language leaves practically no traces. This led to an abandonment of the field for more than a century...
, and his activity as a literary
Comparative literature
Comparative literature is an academic field dealing with the literature of two or more different linguistic, cultural or national groups...
and philological comparatist
Comparative linguistics
Comparative linguistics is a branch of historical linguistics that is concerned with comparing languages to establish their historical relatedness....
. Şăineanu also had innovative contributions to the investigation and anthologizing of Romanian folklore
Folklore of Romania
A feature of Romanian culture is the special relationship between folklore and the learned culture, determined by two factors. First, the rural character of the Romanian communities resulted in an exceptionally vital and creative traditional culture. Folk creations were the main literary genre...
, placed in relation to Balkan
Balkans
The Balkans is a geopolitical and cultural region of southeastern Europe...
and East Central European traditions, as well as to the historical evolution
History of the Romanian language
-Dacia and Romanization:The Romanian territory was inhabited in ancient times by the Dacians, an Indo-European people. They were defeated by the Roman Empire in 106 and part of Dacia became a Roman province...
of Romanian in a larger Balkan context, and was a celebrated early contributor to Romanian lexicography
Lexicography
Lexicography is divided into two related disciplines:*Practical lexicography is the art or craft of compiling, writing and editing dictionaries....
. His main initiatives in these fields are a large corpus of collected fairy tale
Fairy tale
A fairy tale is a type of short story that typically features such folkloric characters, such as fairies, goblins, elves, trolls, dwarves, giants or gnomes, and usually magic or enchantments. However, only a small number of the stories refer to fairies...
s and the 1896 Dicţionarul universal al limbii române ("The Universal Dictionary of the Romanian Language"), which have endured among the most popular Romanian scientific works.
A member of the non-emancipated
Jewish Emancipation
Jewish emancipation was the external and internal process of freeing the Jewish people of Europe, including recognition of their rights as equal citizens, and the formal granting of citizenship as individuals; it occurred gradually between the late 18th century and the early 20th century...
Jewish-Romanian community
History of the Jews in Romania
The history of Jews in Romania concerns the Jews of Romania and of Romanian origins, from their first mention on what is nowadays Romanian territory....
, Lazăr Şăineanu stood for the Haskalah
Haskalah
Haskalah , the Jewish Enlightenment, was a movement among European Jews in the 18th–19th centuries that advocated adopting enlightenment values, pressing for better integration into European society, and increasing education in secular studies, Hebrew language, and Jewish history...
ideas, and opted in favor of Jewish assimilation
Jewish assimilation
Jewish assimilation refers to the cultural assimilation and social integration of Jews in their surrounding culture. Assimilation became legally possible in Europe during the Age of Enlightenment.-Background:Judaism forbids the worship of other gods...
into the Romanian mainstream. His repeated requests for naturalization
Naturalization
Naturalization is the acquisition of citizenship and nationality by somebody who was not a citizen of that country at the time of birth....
were eventually unsuccessful, but propelled him to the center of a political conflict which opposed the antisemitic current to the advocates of tolerance. In 1901, Şăineanu and his family quit the Kingdom of Romania
Kingdom of Romania
The Kingdom of Romania was the Romanian state based on a form of parliamentary monarchy between 13 March 1881 and 30 December 1947, specified by the first three Constitutions of Romania...
and resettled in France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
, where the scholar lived until his death. Becoming known for his pioneering work to the study of Middle French
Middle French
Middle French is a historical division of the French language that covers the period from 1340 to 1611. It is a period of transition during which:...
and his investigations into the origins of argot
Argot
An Argot is a secret language used by various groups—including, but not limited to, thieves and other criminals—to prevent outsiders from understanding their conversations. The term argot is also used to refer to the informal specialized vocabulary from a particular field of study, hobby, job,...
, as well as for his critical essays on 16th century writer François Rabelais
François Rabelais
François Rabelais was a major French Renaissance writer, doctor, Renaissance humanist, monk and Greek scholar. He has historically been regarded as a writer of fantasy, satire, the grotesque, bawdy jokes and songs...
, he was a recipient of the Institut de France
Institut de France
The Institut de France is a French learned society, grouping five académies, the most famous of which is the Académie française.The institute, located in Paris, manages approximately 1,000 foundations, as well as museums and chateaux open for visit. It also awards prizes and subsidies, which...
's Volney Prize
Volney prize
The Prix Volney is awarded by the Institute of France after proposition by the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres to a work of comparative philology....
for 1908. The son in law of publisher Ralian Samitca, Şăineanu was survived by his brother Constantin, a noted lexicographer, journalist and polemicist.
Early life
Eliezer Schein (whose name was originally rendered in Romanian as Lazăr Şain or Shain) was born in the city of PloieştiPloiesti
Ploiești is the county seat of Prahova County and lies in the historical region of Wallachia in Romania. The city is located north of Bucharest....
to impoverished Jewish-Romanian residents. His father, Moisi, was a house painter and amateur artist, who, by the time his son was sixteen, had left to work in the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
. Eliezer studied with private tutors from the age of 5, and was admitted into regular school at the age of 10, when he entered second grade. Moisi Schein died shortly after returning to Romania, leaving Eliezer the sole provider for his mother and six siblings. He was however able to pass his Baccalaurate
Romanian Baccalaureate
The Bacalaureat is an exam held in Romania when one graduates high school .Unlike the French Baccalaureate, the Romanian one has a single degree...
, with a thesis on writer and theorist Ion Heliade Rădulescu
Ion Heliade Radulescu
Ion Heliade Rădulescu or Ion Heliade was a Wallachian-born Romanian academic, Romantic and Classicist poet, essayist, memoirist, short story writer, newspaper editor and politician...
: Ioan Eliad Rădulescu ca grămătic şi filolog ("Ioan Eliad Rădulescu as a Grammarian and Philologist").
By 1881, having been exempted from his compulsory term in the Romanian Land Forces
Romanian Land Forces
The Romanian Land Forces is the army of Romania, and the main component of the Romanian Armed Forces. In recent years, full professionalisation and a major equipment overhaul have transformed the nature of the force.The Romanian Land Forces were founded on...
as the eldest son of a widow, the young man went on to study at the University of Bucharest
University of Bucharest
The University of Bucharest , in Romania, is a university founded in 1864 by decree of Prince Alexander John Cuza to convert the former Saint Sava Academy into the current University of Bucharest.-Presentation:...
's Faculty of Letters. Taught and regarded with admiration by academic Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu
Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu
Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu was a Romanian writer and philologist, who pioneered many branches of Romanian philology and history. Hasdeu is considered to have been able to understand 26 languages .-Life:...
, Şăineanu was primarily a student of etymology
Etymology
Etymology is the study of the history of words, their origins, and how their form and meaning have changed over time.For languages with a long written history, etymologists make use of texts in these languages and texts about the languages to gather knowledge about how words were used during...
, stylistics
Stylistics
Stylistics might apply to:* The Stylistics, a Philadelphia soul group* Stylistics , the study of language and its context...
and semantics
Semantics
Semantics is the study of meaning. It focuses on the relation between signifiers, such as words, phrases, signs and symbols, and what they stand for, their denotata....
(which formed the basis of his first three studies, published in 1882 and 1887). He published his first study, the 1883 Câteva specimene de etimologie populară română ("A Few Samples of Romanian Folk Etymology"), in Hasdeu's magazine Columna lui Traian. By then, Şăineanu had begun contributing to Anuar pentru Israeliţi ("The Yearbook for Israelites"), the Hebraist magazine edited by his friends and fellow scholars Moses Gaster
Moses Gaster
Moses Gaster was a Romanian-born Jewish-British scholar, the Hakham of the Spanish and Portuguese congregation, London, and a Hebrew linguist. He was also the son-in-law of Michael Friedländer, principal of Jews' College. The surname Gaster is taken from Spanish Castro, indicating his Sephardic...
and Moses Schwartzfeld, which mainly published articles on Jewish history
Jewish history
Jewish history is the history of the Jews, their religion and culture, as it developed and interacted with other peoples, religions and cultures. Since Jewish history is over 4000 years long and includes hundreds of different populations, any treatment can only be provided in broad strokes...
and espoused a moderate assimilationist
Jewish assimilation
Jewish assimilation refers to the cultural assimilation and social integration of Jews in their surrounding culture. Assimilation became legally possible in Europe during the Age of Enlightenment.-Background:Judaism forbids the worship of other gods...
agenda (Haskalah
Haskalah
Haskalah , the Jewish Enlightenment, was a movement among European Jews in the 18th–19th centuries that advocated adopting enlightenment values, pressing for better integration into European society, and increasing education in secular studies, Hebrew language, and Jewish history...
). Gaster also sent Şăineanu's various studies on folklore and linguistics also published in Revista pentru Istorie, Arheologie şi Filologie, a review founded and led by Romanian historian Grigore Tocilescu
Grigore Tocilescu
Grigore George Tocilescu was a Romanian historian, archaeologist, epigrapher and folkorist, member of Romanian Academy....
. The direct contacts between the two scholars ended in 1885, when Gaster was expelled from Romania for protesting against the antisemitic measures condoned by the National Liberal Party
National Liberal Party (Romania)
The National Liberal Party , abbreviated to PNL, is a centre-right liberal party in Romania. It is the third-largest party in the Romanian Parliament, with 53 seats in the Chamber of Deputies and 22 in the Senate: behind the centre-right Democratic Liberal Party and the centre-left Social...
cabinet of Ion Brătianu
Ion Bratianu
Ion C. Brătianu was one of the major political figures of 19th century Romania. He was the younger brother of Dimitrie, as well as the father of Ionel, Dinu, and Vintilă Brătianu...
.
The 1887 Încercare asupra semasiologiei române ("Essay on Romanian Semasiology
Semasiology
Semasiology is a discipline within linguistics concerned with the question "what does the word X mean?". It studies the meaning of words regardless of their phonetic expression. Semasiology departs from a word or lexical expression and asks for its meaning, its different senses, i.e. polysemy...
"), presented by Schein as his graduation paper, was retrospectively commended by ethnologist
Ethnology
Ethnology is the branch of anthropology that compares and analyzes the origins, distribution, technology, religion, language, and social structure of the ethnic, racial, and/or national divisions of humanity.-Scientific discipline:Compared to ethnography, the study of single groups through direct...
Iordan Datcu for its innovative value, and argued by the same commentator to have attracted universally positive reactions from "objective critics". According to Şăineanu's account, it followed closely after semasiology itself had been established as an independent branch by the French academic Michel Bréal
Michel Bréal
"Breal" redirects here. For the Rapper see B-RealMichel Jules Alfred Bréal , French philologist, was born at Landau in Rhenish Bavaria. He is often identified as a founder of modern semantics....
. It reportedly earned him the praise of a future adversary the Education Minister and National Liberal politician Dimitrie Sturdza
Dimitrie Sturdza
Dimitrie Sturdza was a Romanian statesman of the late 19th century, and president of the Romanian Academy between 1882 and 1884.-Biography:Born in Iaşi, Moldavia, and educated there at the Academia Mihăileană, he continued his studies in Germany, took part in the political movements of the time,...
, who allegedly recommended him to study abroad, reassuring him that, unlike in Gaster's case, "we will receive you back with open arms." Printed by the Romanian Academy
Romanian Academy
The Romanian Academy is a cultural forum founded in Bucharest, Romania, in 1866. It covers the scientific, artistic and literary domains. The academy has 181 acting members who are elected for life....
's press and prefaced by Hasdeu, Încercare earned Şăineanu the Manoah Hillel scholarship
Scholarship
A scholarship is an award of financial aid for a student to further education. Scholarships are awarded on various criteria usually reflecting the values and purposes of the donor or founder of the award.-Types:...
, amounting to 5,000 lei
Romanian leu
The leu is the currency of Romania. It is subdivided into 100 bani . The name of the currency means "lion". On 1 July 2005, Romania underwent a currency reform, switching from the previous leu to a new leu . 1 RON is equal to 10,000 ROL...
in gold.
Using this grant, he furthered his studies in France, at the University of Paris
University of Paris
The University of Paris was a university located in Paris, France and one of the earliest to be established in Europe. It was founded in the mid 12th century, and officially recognized as a university probably between 1160 and 1250...
, under Bréal, Gaston Paris
Gaston Paris
Bruno Paulin Gaston Paris , known as Gaston Paris, was a French writer and scholar.He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1901, 1902 and 1903.-Biography:Paris was born at Avenay...
and Wilhelm Meyer-Lübke
Wilhelm Meyer-Lübke
Wilhelm Meyer-Lübke was a Swiss philologist of the Neogrammarian school of linguistics.Born in Dübendorf, he performed several comparative studies of the Romance languages...
, and later at the École Spéciale des Langues Orientales
Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales
The Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales is located in Paris, France. It was founded in 1795 after the French Revolution and is now one of the country's Grands établissements with a specialization in African, Asian, East European, Oceanian languages and civilisations...
, where he specialized in the study of Oriental languages. He received his Ph. D. at the University of Leipzig
University of Leipzig
The University of Leipzig , located in Leipzig in the Free State of Saxony, Germany, is one of the oldest universities in the world and the second-oldest university in Germany...
, in the German Empire
German Empire
The German Empire refers to Germany during the "Second Reich" period from the unification of Germany and proclamation of Wilhelm I as German Emperor on 18 January 1871, to 1918, when it became a federal republic after defeat in World War I and the abdication of the Emperor, Wilhelm II.The German...
, his dissertation receiving an award from the Institut de France
Institut de France
The Institut de France is a French learned society, grouping five académies, the most famous of which is the Académie française.The institute, located in Paris, manages approximately 1,000 foundations, as well as museums and chateaux open for visit. It also awards prizes and subsidies, which...
. According to historian Lucian Nastasă, the scholar's choice was confirming a common practice of Romanians, who opted to bridge the gap between Francophilia and Germanophilia by frequenting venues in both countries. As Şăineanu wrote to Gaster, he had decided in favor of the "intellectual center" Leipzig
Leipzig
Leipzig Leipzig has always been a trade city, situated during the time of the Holy Roman Empire at the intersection of the Via Regia and Via Imperii, two important trade routes. At one time, Leipzig was one of the major European centres of learning and culture in fields such as music and publishing...
because Karl Brugmann
Karl Brugmann
Karl Brugmann was a German linguist. He is a towering figure in Indo-European linguistics.-Biography:He was educated at Halle and Leipzig. He was instructor in the gymnasium at Wiesbaden and at Leipzig, and in 1872-77 was assistant at the Russian Institute of Classical Philology at the latter place...
, "the leading representative of present-day linguistics", worked and taught there. He studied with both Brugmann and August Leskien
August Leskien
August Leskien was a German linguist active in the field of comparative linguistics, particularly relating to the Baltic and Slavic languages.-Biography:...
, earning much praise for his work and the right to take his diploma under special circumstances (which took into consideration his previous works, and did not require him to research a full-sized new thesis). Şăineanu was pleased with the scientific rigor of his German teachers, but believed the system to suffer greatly in the matter of pedagogy
Pedagogy
Pedagogy is the study of being a teacher or the process of teaching. The term generally refers to strategies of instruction, or a style of instruction....
, and considered French academics much more talented in this respect. The young scholar published two works during the interval: Legenda Meşterului Manole la grecii moderni ("The Meşterul Manole
Mesterul Manole
In Romanian mythology, Meșterul Manole was the chief architect of the Curtea de Argeș Monastery in Wallachia...
Legend among the Modern Greeks
Greeks
The Greeks, also known as the Hellenes , are a nation and ethnic group native to Greece, Cyprus and neighboring regions. They also form a significant diaspora, with Greek communities established around the world....
") and his Ph. D. thesis on Romanian folklore
Folklore of Romania
A feature of Romanian culture is the special relationship between folklore and the learned culture, determined by two factors. First, the rural character of the Romanian communities resulted in an exceptionally vital and creative traditional culture. Folk creations were the main literary genre...
, Les Jours d'emprunt ou les jours de la vieille ("The Borrowed Days or The Old Woman's Days"). The latter was hosted by Gaston Paris' journal Romania.
Beginnings as a teacher
He returned to Romania as a teacher of LatinLatin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
and Romanian, pursuing a career path which eventually earned him a position at Bucharest University. He was given employment as a high school teacher, and obtained an unpaid university position as assistant to Hasdeu, head of the Department of Letters. Nastasă, who notes Şăineanu's enthusiasm for his work, writes: "His opening lecture for the Comparative Philology course—like all of his work—is a proof of erudition more or less unparalleled within the areas of Romania."
Despite his qualifications, Şăineanu was unable to advance professionally because of his non-citizen status. The young researcher was also appointed substitute teacher of Latin in Bucharest
Bucharest
Bucharest is the capital municipality, cultural, industrial, and financial centre of Romania. It is the largest city in Romania, located in the southeast of the country, at , and lies on the banks of the Dâmbovița River....
Gheorghe Lazăr High School by an administrative decision of the Education Ministry, taken despite the antisemitic protestations of Undersecretary Ştefan Michăilescu. His assignment to the post followed the intercession of his friend and former teacher, the writer and archeologist Alexandru Odobescu
Alexandru Odobescu
Alexandru Ioan Odobescu was a Romanian author, archaeologist and politician.-Biography:He was born in Bucharest, the second child of General Ioan Odobescu and his wife Ecaterina. After attending Saint Sava College and, from 1850, a Paris lycée, he took the baccalauréat in 1853 and studied...
, and inaugurated a short period during which Şăineanu focused on writing textbooks.
Shortly afterward, Conservative Minister Titu Maiorescu
Titu Maiorescu
Titu Liviu Maiorescu was a Romanian literary critic and politician, founder of the Junimea Society. As a literary critic, he was instrumental in the development of Romanian culture in the second half of the 19th century....
, leader of the influential literary club Junimea
Junimea
Junimea was a Romanian literary society founded in Iaşi in 1863, through the initiative of several foreign-educated personalities led by Titu Maiorescu, Petre P. Carp, Vasile Pogor, Theodor Rosetti and Iacob Negruzzi...
and himself one of Lazăr Şăineanu's former professors, appointed him to a position at the University, within the History and Literature Department of V. A. Urechia
V. A. Urechia
V. A. Urechia was a Moldavian-born Romanian historian, Romantic author of historical fiction and plays, academic and politician...
. The latter, an outspoken antisemite and prominent member of the opposition National Liberal group, reacted strongly against the measure, launching that claim that, unlike an ethnic Romanian
Romanians
The Romanians are an ethnic group native to Romania, who speak Romanian; they are the majority inhabitants of Romania....
, a Jew "could never awaken in the mind and heart of the young generation the image of our past laden with lessons for the future". According to Şăineanu's own recollection, he had not himself asked for the university appointment, and suspected that it was offered to him in the first place so that the Gheorghe Lazăr position would be assigned to "a favorite of the day, the former tutor of Prince Ferdinand
Ferdinand I of Romania
Ferdinand was the King of Romania from 10 October 1914 until his death.-Early life:Born in Sigmaringen in southwestern Germany, the Roman Catholic Prince Ferdinand Viktor Albert Meinrad of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, later simply of Hohenzollern, was a son of Leopold, Prince of...
." He nevertheless noted that Urechia had a conflict of interest
Conflict of interest
A conflict of interest occurs when an individual or organization is involved in multiple interests, one of which could possibly corrupt the motivation for an act in the other....
when opposing his appointment, given that he had designed the department around his own chairmanship, and that, with the aid of University of Iaşi academic Alexandru D. Xenopol, he had set in motion a set of "miserable intrigues" to maintain his hold on the faculty.
Şăineanu also commented on the alleged oscillations of Tocilescu, who, after agreeing to lead the History section upon its recommended division, and supporting his Jewish colleague for chairmanship of the Letters section, threw his support behind Urechia. Nastasă, who mentions the scheming on the part of Urechia and Tocilescu, cites Moses Gaster's letter to Şăineanu, which defined Tocilescu as a double-crosser, "a filthy twicer and a bloodsucker". The complications eventually led Şăineanu to present his resignation, and Maiorescu to accept it. He recalled: "Every reasonable man would doubtlessly assume that [...] the resentment Mr. Urechia held against this unfortunate nomination would have been appeased. To assume thus would mean not to know the person or the Romanian social environment well enough, for barely two months had passed before grandiose patriotism
Patriotism
Patriotism is a devotion to one's country, excluding differences caused by the dependencies of the term's meaning upon context, geography and philosophy...
again displayed the effects of its hatred."
The young linguist also contributed to Convorbiri Literare, a magazine edited by Junimea. It was there that, in 1887, he published his study on the Khazars
Khazars
The Khazars were semi-nomadic Turkic people who established one of the largest polities of medieval Eurasia, with the capital of Atil and territory comprising much of modern-day European Russia, western Kazakhstan, eastern Ukraine, Azerbaijan, large portions of the northern Caucasus , parts of...
' possible presence in Romanian folklore: Jidovii sau Tătarii sau Uriaşii ("The Jews or the Tatars
Tatars
Tatars are a Turkic speaking ethnic group , numbering roughly 7 million.The majority of Tatars live in the Russian Federation, with a population of around 5.5 million, about 2 million of which in the republic of Tatarstan.Significant minority populations are found in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan,...
or the Uriaşi"). Produced on the basis of folkloric surveys in Muntenia
Muntenia
Muntenia is a historical province of Romania, usually considered Wallachia-proper . It is situated between the Danube , the Carpathian Mountains and Moldavia , and the Olt River to the west...
n and Oltenia
Oltenia
Oltenia is a historical province and geographical region of Romania, in western Wallachia. It is situated between the Danube, the Southern Carpathians and the Olt river ....
n localities such as Dragoslavele
Dragoslavele
Dragoslavele is a commune in the northern part of Argeş County, Romania, located by the former border between Wallachia and Transylvania, on the Wallachian side. It is a relatively important location for boarding house tourism...
, Schitu Goleşti
Schitu Golesti
Schitu Goleşti is a commune in Argeş County, in southern central Romania. It is composed of six villages: Burneşti, Costiţă, Lăzăreşti, Loturi, Schitu Goleşti and Valea Pechii....
and Radomir, the study was later used against him by his political adversaries, who resented the implications it seemed to carry for the traditional relations between Jews and Romanians.
Scholarly prominence and early naturalization efforts
By that moment in his career, Şăineanu was also publishing several books on comparative linguistics. Initially, he focused on assessing the impact of TurkishTurkish language
Turkish is a language spoken as a native language by over 83 million people worldwide, making it the most commonly spoken of the Turkic languages. Its speakers are located predominantly in Turkey and Northern Cyprus with smaller groups in Iraq, Greece, Bulgaria, the Republic of Macedonia, Kosovo,...
and Ottoman Turkish
Ottoman Turkish language
The Ottoman Turkish language or Ottoman language is the variety of the Turkish language that was used for administrative and literary purposes in the Ottoman Empire. It borrows extensively from Arabic and Persian, and was written in a variant of the Perso-Arabic script...
on the mainly Romance
Romance languages
The Romance languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family, more precisely of the Italic languages subfamily, comprising all the languages that descend from Vulgar Latin, the language of ancient Rome...
Aromanian language
Aromanian language
Aromanian , also known as Macedo-Romanian, Arumanian or Vlach is an Eastern Romance language spoken in Southeastern Europe...
, producing the 1885 study ("Turkish Elements
Turkish vocabulary
This article is a companion to Turkish grammar and contains some information that might be considered grammatical. The purpose of this article is mainly to show the use of some of the yapım ekleri "structural suffixes" of the Turkish language, as well as to give some of the structurally important...
in the Aromanian Language"). In 1889, he published his innovative work on the links between German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
and Yiddish, ("A Dialectologic
Dialectology
Dialectology is the scientific study of linguistic dialect, a sub-field of sociolinguistics. It studies variations in language based primarily on geographic distribution and their associated features...
Study on Judeo-German Speech"). His recognized field of expertise, Nastasă notes, was by then the widest in Romania, comprising not just Yiddish and Romance linguistics, but also the study Proto-Indo-European
Proto-Indo-European language
The Proto-Indo-European language is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans...
, Proto-Slavic
Proto-Slavic language
Proto-Slavic is the proto-language from which Slavic languages later emerged. It was spoken before the seventh century AD. As with most other proto-languages, no attested writings have been found; the language has been reconstructed by applying the comparative method to all the attested Slavic...
and various other languages and dialects.
Also in 1889, Şăineanu applied for naturalization
Naturalization
Naturalization is the acquisition of citizenship and nationality by somebody who was not a citizen of that country at the time of birth....
, which, according to the 1866 Constitution
1866 Constitution of Romania
The 1866 Constitution of Romania was the fundamental law that capped a period of nation-building in the Danubian Principalities, which had united in 1859. Drafted in a short time and using as its model the 1831 Constitution of Belgium, then considered Europe's most liberal, it was substantially...
, a Jew could only receive by special act of the Romanian Parliament
Parliament of Romania
The Parliament of Romania is made up of two chambers:*The Chamber of Deputies*The SenatePrior to the modifications of the Constitution in 2003, the two houses had identical attributes. A text of a law had to be approved by both houses...
and in exchange for exceptional merits. The effort, which consumed some 12 years of his life, pitted him against the antisemitic current in politics and the scientific community: among the most vocal adversaries of his naturalization were two prominent National Liberals, Urechia and Sturdza, both of whom had a following among nationalist
Nationalism
Nationalism is a political ideology that involves a strong identification of a group of individuals with a political entity defined in national terms, i.e. a nation. In the 'modernist' image of the nation, it is nationalism that creates national identity. There are various definitions for what...
sections of the electorate. As head of the parliamentary commission on legal integration, Sturdza signed a recommendation to reject the proposed law, which had been previously approved by Justice Minister George D. Vernescu
George D. Vernescu
George D. Vernescu was a Romanian politician and jurist who served as the Minister of Administration and Interior from April 27, 1876 until January 27, 1876, Minister of Justice from November 12, 1888 until March 22, 1889, as the Minister of Finance from March 29, 1889 until November 3, 1889 and...
, on grounds that Şăineanu lacked qualifications. Their campaign, which depicted Şăineanu as an adversary of Romania, culminated when Senate
Senate of Romania
The Senate of Romania is the upper house in the bicameral Parliament of Romania. It has 137 seats , to which members are elected by direct popular vote, using Mixed member proportional representation in 42 electoral districts , to serve four-year terms.-Former location:After the Romanian...
voted 79 to 2 against the naturalization request.
The resistance to his application was a surprise for Şăineanu, who wrote: "I was not aware that this path [...] is the more thorny as the [person's] merits are more real." He also accused the political establishment of endemic corruption
Political corruption
Political corruption is the use of legislated powers by government officials for illegitimate private gain. Misuse of government power for other purposes, such as repression of political opponents and general police brutality, is not considered political corruption. Neither are illegal acts by...
, writing: "any banker who demanded naturalization received it without the least of difficulties". During the following interval, Şăineanu's cause reportedly won the support of King
King of Romania
King of the Romanians , rather than King of Romania , was the official title of the ruler of the Kingdom of Romania from 1881 until 1947, when Romania was proclaimed a republic....
Carol I
Carol I of Romania
Carol I , born Prince Karl of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen was reigning prince and then King of Romania from 1866 to 1914. He was elected prince of Romania on 20 April 1866 following the overthrow of Alexandru Ioan Cuza by a palace coup...
, Conservative Premier
Prime Minister of Romania
The Prime Minister of Romania is the head of the Government of Romania. Initially, the office was styled President of the Council of Ministers , when the term "Government" included more than the Cabinet, and the Cabinet was called The Council of Ministers...
Lascăr Catargiu
Lascar Catargiu
Lascăr Catargiu was a Romanian conservative statesman born in Moldavia. He belonged to an ancient Wallachian family, one of whose members had been banished in the 17th century by Prince Matei Basarab, and had settled in Moldavia.-Biography:...
and moderate National Liberal politico Mihail Kogălniceanu
Mihail Kogalniceanu
Mihail Kogălniceanu was a Moldavian-born Romanian liberal statesman, lawyer, historian and publicist; he became Prime Minister of Romania October 11, 1863, after the 1859 union of the Danubian Principalities under Domnitor Alexander John Cuza, and later served as Foreign Minister under Carol I. He...
. Reviewing the situation, Şăineanu cited an unusual incident in neighboring Austria–Hungary, where local Romanians were demanding increased group rights as part of the Memorandum
Transylvanian Memorandum
The Transylvanian Memorandum was a petition sent in 1892 by the leaders of the Romanians of Transylvania to the Austro-Hungarian Emperor-King Franz Joseph, asking for equal ethnic rights with the Hungarians, and demanding an end to persecutions and Magyarization attempts.-Status:After the Ausgleich...
movement. Their arguments about cultural repression where met with the reply of Hungarian intellectuals, who cited the Şăineanu issue as proof that Austria–Hungary had more to offer than Romania: "He had all of Romania on his case, but he had rendered [the country] as many services as most Romanian demigods." In 1893, the naturalization request came before the lower chamber
Chamber of Deputies of Romania
The Chamber of Deputies is the lower house in Romania's bicameral parliament. It has 315 seats, to which deputies are elected by direct popular vote on a proportional representation basis to serve four-year terms...
, resulting in a vote of 76 in favor to 20 against. According to the scholar's recollections, his only adversary in this forum was his former Convorbiri Literare colleague, writer Iacob Negruzzi, who reportedly stated the unsupported claim that Şăineanu had campaigned against Romania "in English" (Şăineanu believed that this was "doubtlessly" stated "because [English] was completely unfamiliar to the majority of Chamber members").
Parallel controversies and 1895 Senate vote
Despite his involvement in a political scandal, Lazăr Şăineanu did not interrupt his work in linguistics. His 1891 book, ("The Relations between GrammarGrammar
In linguistics, grammar is the set of structural rules that govern the composition of clauses, phrases, and words in any given natural language. The term refers also to the study of such rules, and this field includes morphology, syntax, and phonology, often complemented by phonetics, semantics,...
and Logic
Logic
In philosophy, Logic is the formal systematic study of the principles of valid inference and correct reasoning. Logic is used in most intellectual activities, but is studied primarily in the disciplines of philosophy, mathematics, semantics, and computer science...
"), written on the basis of his university lectures, comprised his thoughts on the origin of language
Origin of language
The origin of language is the emergence of language in the human species. This is a highly controversial topic. Empirical evidence is so limited that many regard it as unsuitable for serious scholars. In 1866, the Linguistic Society of Paris went so far as to ban debates on the subject...
and was among volumes pioneering the study of logical aspects within natural language
Natural language
In the philosophy of language, a natural language is any language which arises in an unpremeditated fashion as the result of the innate facility for language possessed by the human intellect. A natural language is typically used for communication, and may be spoken, signed, or written...
. Datcu notes this contribution, alongside the 1892 Istoria filologiei române ("History of Romanian Philology"), for the "up to date information" provided. The latter was explained by the author as "destined to encourage the new generation to work, and come to its aid through useful advice." The two volumes were accompanied by a printed expansion of his earliest thesis on Heliade Rădulescu.
In 1895, Şăineanu completed work on one of his major contributions to folkloristics in general and the study of Romania folklore
Folklore of Romania
A feature of Romanian culture is the special relationship between folklore and the learned culture, determined by two factors. First, the rural character of the Romanian communities resulted in an exceptionally vital and creative traditional culture. Folk creations were the main literary genre...
in particular: Basmele române în comparaţiune cu legendele antice clasice şi în legătură cu basmele popoarelor învecinate şi ale tuturor popoarelor romanice ("Romanian Fairy Tales as Compared to the Legends of Classical Antiquity
Classical mythology
Classical mythology or Greco-Roman mythology is the cultural reception of myths from the ancient Greeks and Romans. Along with philosophy and political thought, mythology represents one of the major survivals of classical antiquity throughout later Western culture.Classical mythology has provided...
and Those of All Romance Peoples
Latin Europe
Latin Europe is a loose term for the region of Europe with an especially strong Latin cultural heritage inherited from the Roman Empire.-Application:...
"). An exhaustive monograph
Monograph
A monograph is a work of writing upon a single subject, usually by a single author.It is often a scholarly essay or learned treatise, and may be released in the manner of a book or journal article. It is by definition a single document that forms a complete text in itself...
, it comprised some 1,000 pages of main text and 100 pages of index
Index (publishing)
An index is a list of words or phrases and associated pointers to where useful material relating to that heading can be found in a document...
. The volume was presented anonymously to the Romanian Academy (in accordance with its regulations), and received its Heliade Rădulescu Award. Consternation ensued once the author revealed his name, prompting Sturdza and Negruzzi to ask, unsuccessfully, for the Academy's decision to be overturned. On the occasion, Urechia (himself an Academy member) publicly stated that his adversary had purchased the award, but, Şăineanu noted, never presented proof for this assertion.
That same year, the matter of his citizenship was returned to the Senate. By then, Şăineanu's file had been further enriched with the award certificate, a guarantee of good conduct from Bucharest City Hall
Mayor of Bucharest
The Mayor of Bucharest , sometimes known as the General Mayor, is the head of the Bucharest City Hall in Bucharest, Romania, which is responsible for city-wide affairs, such as the water system, the transport system and the main boulevards...
, and several favorable reports from Hasdeu (an exception to the latter's own antisemitic discourse). Hasdeu also arranged him interviews with Romanian Orthodox
Romanian Orthodox Church
The Romanian Orthodox Church is an autocephalous Eastern Orthodox church. It is in full communion with other Eastern Orthodox churches, and is ranked seventh in order of precedence. The Primate of the church has the title of Patriarch...
Metropolitan
Patriarch of All Romania
The Patriarch of All Romania is the title of the head of the Romanian Orthodox Church. As of September 12, 2007, the chair is occupied by Daniel Ciobotea.-Metropolitans of Ungro-Wallachia:* Maxim * Macarie II * Ilarion II...
Ghenadie (who was also president of the commission on naturalization), while Alexandru Odobescu
Alexandru Odobescu
Alexandru Ioan Odobescu was a Romanian author, archaeologist and politician.-Biography:He was born in Bucharest, the second child of General Ioan Odobescu and his wife Ecaterina. After attending Saint Sava College and, from 1850, a Paris lycée, he took the baccalauréat in 1853 and studied...
brought the case to the attention of Gheorghe Grigore Cantacuzino, the Conservative President of the Senate
President of the Senate of Romania
The President of the Senate of Romania is the senator elected to preside over the Senate meetings. He is also the president of the Standing Bureau of the Senate, and the second leader of the State.-Election:...
. There followed a major Senate debate, during which Urechia stood out for his repeated criticism of his former competitor, likening him to a Trojan Horse
Trojan Horse
The Trojan Horse is a tale from the Trojan War about the stratagem that allowed the Greeks finally to enter the city of Troy and end the conflict. In the canonical version, after a fruitless 10-year siege, the Greeks constructed a huge wooden horse, and hid a select force of men inside...
and demanding from fellow parliamentarians not to let "a foreigner" slide into "the Romanian citadel" (statements to which many responded with applause). Listing his various claims alongside his and Hasdeu's replies, the Jewish scholar himself recounted that Urechia eventually came to state, at the Senate tribune, that "Mr. Şăineanu did not publish anything against the country, but neither did he write in favor of the national question".
The early vote gave 33 to 26 against Şăineanu's naturalization, short of the supermajority
Supermajority
A supermajority or a qualified majority is a requirement for a proposal to gain a specified level or type of support which exceeds a simple majority . In some jurisdictions, for example, parliamentary procedure requires that any action that may alter the rights of the minority has a supermajority...
required, but a second take resulted in 61 against to 12 in favor. The antisemitic segment of the board celebrated this victory with loud cheers, as witnessed by Odobescu, who recorded feeling himself confronted with the image of "cannibals who rejoiced like beasts over having slashed and devoured a civilized man". Another voice from academia to speak unfavorably of the opposition met by Şăineanu was Alexandru Philippide, who wrote: "I am not philosemitic
Philo-Semitism
Philo-Semitism or Judeophilia is an interest in, respect for, and appreciation of the Jewish people, their historical significance and the positive impacts of Judaism in the history of the western world, in particular, generally on the part of a gentile...
, but if there ever was a kike deserving of naturalization, that would be Şăineanu." Shortly after this incident, the new National Liberal Minister Spiru Haret
Spiru Haret
Spiru C. Haret was a Romanian mathematician, astronomer and politician. He made a fundamental contribution to the n-body problem in celestial mechanics by proving that using a third degree approximation for the disturbing forces implies instability of the major axes of the orbits, and by...
reshuffled the teaching posts, and Şăineanu, who was holding a new teacher's position at Bucharest's Şcoala Normală Superioară, found himself unemployed, and opted to seek employment outside Romania, in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
and Berlin
Berlin
Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...
.
Late 1890s works and ramifications of the scandal
Without ceasing to publish works for the Junimea periodical Convorbiri Literare, Şăineanu continued to frequent its adversary Hasdeu, and contributed some of his other essays to Hasdeu's magazine Revista Nouă. Basmele române was followed in 1896 by Studii folclorice ("Studies in Folklore"), a collection of short writings on comparative mythologyComparative mythology
Comparative mythology is the comparison of myths from different cultures in an attempt to identify shared themes and characteristics. Comparative mythology has served a variety of academic purposes...
. That same year, he completed his fundamental work in lexicography, Dicţionarul universal al limbii române, which codified the Romanian lexis
Romanian lexis
The lexis of the Romanian language , a Romance language, has changed over the centuries as the language evolved from Vulgar Latin, to Proto-Romanian, to medieval, modern and contemporary Romanian.-Medieval Romanian:...
from archaism
Archaism
In language, an archaism is the use of a form of speech or writing that is no longer current. This can either be done deliberately or as part of a specific jargon or formula...
s and dialectical varieties to neologisms and modern jargon
Jargon
Jargon is terminology which is especially defined in relationship to a specific activity, profession, group, or event. The philosophe Condillac observed in 1782 that "Every science requires a special language because every science has its own ideas." As a rationalist member of the Enlightenment he...
, comprising around 30,000 entries and 80,000 definitions. The first extensive project of its kind in the history of the local philological school, it was to prove his most popular contribution from its first edition, circumstances themselves described by writer Ion Luca Caragiale
Ion Luca Caragiale
Ion Luca Caragiale was a Wallachian-born Romanian playwright, short story writer, poet, theater manager, political commentator and journalist...
as a phenomenon in Romanian culture
Culture of Romania
Romania has a unique culture, which is the product of its geography and of its distinct historical evolution. Like Romanians themselves, it is defined as the meeting point of three regions: Central Europe, Eastern Europe, and the Balkans, but cannot be truly included in any of them...
. Caragiale, who deemed Lazăr Şăineanu "a genuine talent in popularization", opined on the book's originality: "[Şăineanu] sought to embrace the entire manifestations in the life of a modern people [...]. Therefore, this universal dictionary provides a reduced, but precise image of our present-day culture, as it is reflected in the language." In contrast to this positive appraisal, nationalists such as Urechia's son Alceu publicly mocked the book and claimed that it lacked merit.
In parallel, the volume consecrated Şăineanu's collaboration with the Craiova
Craiova
Craiova , Romania's 6th largest city and capital of Dolj County, is situated near the east bank of the river Jiu in central Oltenia. It is a longstanding political center, and is located at approximately equal distances from the Southern Carpathians and the River Danube . Craiova is the chief...
-based printing house of Jewish entrepreneur Iosif Samitca (Institutul Samitca), where the scholar also published Mitologia clasică ("Classical Mythology"), the 1895 Romanian literature
Literature of Romania
Romanian literature is literature written by Romanian authors, although the term may also be used to refer to all literature written in the Romanian language.Eugène Ionesco is one of the foremost playwrights of the Theatre of the Absurd....
anthology Autori români moderni. Bucăţi alese în versuri şi proză din principalii scriitori ai sec. al XIX-lea ("Modern Romanian Authors. Verse and Prose Samples Collected from the Main Writers of the 19th Century"), and an 1897 biographical essay on English
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
author William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...
. The business connection turned into family relations, after Şăineanu married the daughter of Ralian Samitca, Iosif's son, associate and eventual successor. They had a daughter, Elisabeth.
Şăineanu followed up with a comprehensive study regarding Levant
Levant
The Levant or ) is the geographic region and culture zone of the "eastern Mediterranean littoral between Anatolia and Egypt" . The Levant includes most of modern Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel, the Palestinian territories, and sometimes parts of Turkey and Iraq, and corresponds roughly to the...
ine presences in the vocabulary and society alike, published by Editura Socec in 1900 (as , "The Oriental Influence on Romanian Language and Culture") and being made into a French-language
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
edition in 1901. It received attention from the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres
Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres
The Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres is a French learned society devoted to the humanities, founded in February 1663 as one of the five academies of the Institut de France.-History:...
, and consequently a nomination for the Institut de France's Volney Prize
Volney prize
The Prix Volney is awarded by the Institute of France after proposition by the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres to a work of comparative philology....
. However, in what has been seen as proof of the author's isolation in Romania, it was ignored by the Romanian Academy, which presented its prize for that year to a volume on the history of horses. The book was also a cause for conflict between Şăineanu and Nicolae Iorga
Nicolae Iorga
Nicolae Iorga was a Romanian historian, politician, literary critic, memoirist, poet and playwright. Co-founder of the Democratic Nationalist Party , he served as a member of Parliament, President of the Deputies' Assembly and Senate, cabinet minister and briefly as Prime Minister...
, an established historian and nationalist politician. The heated debate, carried out in Constantin Rădulescu-Motru
Constantin Radulescu-Motru
Constantin Rădulescu-Motru was a Romanian philosopher, psychologist, sociologist, logician, academic, dramatist, as well as centre-left nationalist politician with a noted anti-fascist discourse...
's periodical Noua Revistă Română, was sparked by Iorga's review, which claimed to provide some necessary amends. Şăineanu found the objections outlined by Iorga frivolous, and the overall text, in which his opponent had cited himself some 15 times, egocentric.
This reaction was met with a virulent reply by Iorga, whose renewed accusations borrowed from antisemitic discourse: "[Şăineanu wrote] about many things that he does not comprehend. He was crafting with his clumsy hands manuals, grammars, anthologies, dictionaries for speculative profit. I however had an explanation for such defects. We all know that Mr. Şăineanu is not a Romanian, and we know that which he is. His people has many traits that are very elevated and noble, but also many defects that are low and ungainly. These, I had been telling myself, are in his blood; he could never get rid of them. I wish to talk about the passion for high praise and multiple earnings, without much investment". In 1907, Iorga and his Neamul Românesc journal also retorted against Caragiale's praise for Şăineanu, calling Caragiale one who "deals with the Jews", and prompting Caragiale to satirize Iorga's own scholarly ambitions.
1899 parliamentary vote and self-exile
In order to facilitate the naturalization procedures, Lazăr Şăineanu eventually renounced JudaismJudaism
Judaism ) is the "religion, philosophy, and way of life" of the Jewish people...
and accepted baptism in the Romanian Orthodox Church. His godfather
Godparent
A godparent, in many denominations of Christianity, is someone who sponsors a child's baptism. A male godparent is a godfather, and a female godparent is a godmother...
was Take Ionescu
Take Ionescu
Take or Tache Ionescu was a Romanian centrist politician, journalist, lawyer and diplomat, who also enjoyed reputation as a short story author. Starting his political career as a radical member of the National Liberal Party , he joined the Conservative Party in 1891, and became noted as a social...
, at the time a rising figure within the Conservative Party ranks. Ionescu himself served as Minister of Education, appreciating the scholar's insight and enjoying his company before taking his distance from him for reasons unknown. Şăineanu's case was again presented for Senate approval in December 1899, this time with a favorable review from the special parliamentary commission, and the motion for his naturalization was carried with 37 to 2 votes (or, according to Şăineanu, a 39 vote unanimity). Although the result was positive, the scientist was informed that a new procedure had just been passed with support from across the floor, specifying that naturalization could only be enforced by vote in a common session of the two chambers. The dossier was therefore submitted to another vote, on the last session of 1899, which again enlisted attacks from the antisemitic groups, before being canceled due to lack of quorum
Quorum
A quorum is the minimum number of members of a deliberative assembly necessary to conduct the business of that group...
.
Reflecting on the early result, which had left him "submerged into complete happiness", and on the new vote, which he believed was a mere technicality introduced on purpose by Justice Minister Constantin Dissescu, he recalled: "for 24 hours I was politically [Şăineanu's italics] within the Romanian nationhood!" He recalled having been received by King Carol, who reportedly agreed with his belief that the action was abusive. By then, Şăineanu also lost the support of Hasdeu, who, like Take Ionescu, gave his approval to a restructuring of the University, which stripped the Jewish scholar of his honorary position. He sought instead backing from Petre P. Carp
Petre P. Carp
Petre P. Carp , commonly rendered as P. P. Carp, was a Romanian conservative politician and literary critic who served as a Prime Minister of Romania for two terms...
, the Conservative doyen, who reportedly answered his request with the ambiguous Latin adage Gutta cavat lapidem ("The water drop will drill through stone"). On the other side of the divide, the attacks on Şăineanu had come to be led by the antisemitic paper Apărarea Naţională, whose articles, the scholar argued, "reached the summit of stupidity and ridiculousness".
On December 14, 1900, the issue of Lazăr Şăineanu's naturalization was also revisited by the lower chamber, and the proposal defeated with 44 votes to 31 (from an insufficient quorum of 75), followed by a definitive vote on December 15, at which 48 out of 95 deputies voted against. This outcome was celebrated by Apărarea Naţională, which published editorial comments such as "All Romanian hearts have jumped up with immense glee" and "Our ancestors have shuddered with joy in their graves". Among those who expressed condemnation of the decision were La Roumanie journal and aristocrat Alexandru Bibescu. In 1901, frustrated by the political reaction and feeling uncomfortable in Romania, the scholar and his family resettled in Paris, where he primarily used a Francization
Francization
Francization or Gallicization is a process of cultural assimilation that gives a French character to a word, an ethnicity or a person.-French Colonial Empire:-Francization in the World:...
of his Romanian name, signing as Lazare Sainéan.
French career and final years
His main interest for the following period were the theories of evolutionary linguisticsEvolutionary linguistics
Evolutionary linguistics is the scientific study of the origins and development of language. The main challenge in this research is the lack of empirical data: spoken language leaves practically no traces. This led to an abandonment of the field for more than a century...
, with focus on the Neogrammarian
Neogrammarian
The Neogrammarians were a German school of linguists, originally at the University of Leipzig, in the late 19th century who proposed the Neogrammarian hypothesis of the regularity of sound change...
approach, ethnolinguistics
Ethnolinguistics
Ethnolinguistics is a field of linguistics which studies the relationship between language and culture, and the way different ethnic groups perceive the world. It is the combination between ethnology and linguistics. The former refers to the way of life of an entire community i.e...
and psycholinguistics
Psycholinguistics
Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, comprehend and produce language. Initial forays into psycholinguistics were largely philosophical ventures, due mainly to a lack of cohesive data on how the...
. He also added to his interests the groundbreaking investigation of French argot
Argot
An Argot is a secret language used by various groups—including, but not limited to, thieves and other criminals—to prevent outsiders from understanding their conversations. The term argot is also used to refer to the informal specialized vocabulary from a particular field of study, hobby, job,...
, and published a short memoir
Memoir
A memoir , is a literary genre, forming a subclass of autobiography – although the terms 'memoir' and 'autobiography' are almost interchangeable. Memoir is autobiographical writing, but not all autobiographical writing follows the criteria for memoir set out below...
(Une carrière philologique en Roumanie, "A Philologist's Career in Romania"). Şăineanu's studies also focused on a comparative research of building rituals as found in Balkan literature, and notably the Romanian Meşterul Manole
Mesterul Manole
In Romanian mythology, Meșterul Manole was the chief architect of the Curtea de Argeș Monastery in Wallachia...
myth (the book saw print in French, as the 1902 Les rites de la construction d'après la poésie populaire de l'Europe Orientale). By then, he was in correspondence with fellow linguist Alfred Landau, with whom he discussed the history of Yiddish.
Şăineanu's parallel investigations into the history of French
History of French
French is a Romance language that evolved out of the Gallo-Romance dialects spoken in northern France....
included his 1905-1907 La Création métaphorique en français et en roman: images tirées du monde des animaux domestiques ("The Metaphoric Creation in French and Romance Languages: Images from the World of Domestic Animals"), which was structured into several tomes, respectively dedicated to the principal household companions. He also began work on major syntheses on French vocabulary, L'Argot ancien ("Ancient Argot") and its companion Les Sources de l'argot ancien ("The Sources of Ancient Argot", 1907). The former earned him the Volney Prize
Volney prize
The Prix Volney is awarded by the Institute of France after proposition by the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres to a work of comparative philology....
for 1908. Writing in 1999, historian Joan Leopold argued that this was a significant achievement, since the Volney Commission "seemed to fear direct competition by foreigners"—other exceptions to this rule being Liu Bannong
Liu Bannong
Liu Bannong or Liu Fu was a Chinese linguist and poet.A native of Jiangsu, he was an important contributor to the influential magazine La Jeunesse during the May Fourth Movement...
, Wilhelm Schmidt and Marie-Louise Sjoestedt
Marie-Louise Sjoestedt
Marie-Louise Sjoestedt-Jonval was a French linguist and literary scholar who specialized in Celtic studies, especially Irish mythology...
. According to Leopold, Şăineanu was among the Volney prizewinners, "particularly foreigners", who "were never elected to an affiliation with the French Académies
French art salons and academies
From the seventeenth century to the early part of the twentieth century, artistic production in France was controlled by artistic academies which organized official exhibitions called salons...
." However, she also notes that "there were no titles honored [during 1900-1909] which are now remembered as significant in the history of linguistics". She places the fact that Şăineanu "did not achieve major university positions in France" in connection with a tendency of awarding the prize to scholars who mainly did field work (Schmidt, Adolphe de Calassanti-Motylinski, George Abraham Grierson
George Abraham Grierson
Sir George Abraham Grierson OM KCIE was born to a prominent Dublin family in 1851. His father and grandfather, both also named George, were well-known printers and publishers.-Biography:Educated at St...
, Leo Reinisch and others). Literary critic Laszlo Alexandru passed a similar judgment: "Lazăr Şăineanu's disappearance from the Romanian cultural space was received with an almost unanimous silence; but the emergence of Lazare Sainéan in Parisian scientific research would not itself result, for the rest of his days, in the much coveted and entirely deserved university chair."
Between 1912 and 1922, Şăineanu worked with the Société des Études rabelaisiennes on publishing the annotated edition of Rabelais' complete works. His career was not interrupted by World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
, and, in 1915, he published a report on the special language of French soldiers entrenched on the Western Front
Western Front (World War I)
Following the outbreak of World War I in 1914, the German Army opened the Western Front by first invading Luxembourg and Belgium, then gaining military control of important industrial regions in France. The tide of the advance was dramatically turned with the Battle of the Marne...
(L'Argot des tranchés, "Trench Argot"). His 1920 volume on the evolution of argot in Parisian French
Standard French
Standard French is an unofficial term for a standard variety of the French language...
, was again nominated for a Volney Prize.
In 1922, Şăineanu published Manuel de phonétique latin ("Manual of Latin Phonetics
Latin spelling and pronunciation
Latin spelling or orthography refers to the spelling of Latin words written in the scripts of all historical phases of Latin from Old Latin to the present. They all use some phase of the same alphabet even though conventional spellings may vary from phase to phase...
"), the last of his contributions to be shortlisted for a Volney. By then, he had also become interested in researching the work of French Renaissance
French Renaissance
French Renaissance is a recent term used to describe a cultural and artistic movement in France from the late 15th century to the early 17th century. It is associated with the pan-European Renaissance that many cultural historians believe originated in northern Italy in the fourteenth century...
author François Rabelais
François Rabelais
François Rabelais was a major French Renaissance writer, doctor, Renaissance humanist, monk and Greek scholar. He has historically been regarded as a writer of fantasy, satire, the grotesque, bawdy jokes and songs...
, primarily focusing on his use of Middle French
Middle French
Middle French is a historical division of the French language that covers the period from 1340 to 1611. It is a period of transition during which:...
—an account published between 1920 and 1923 as La Langue de Rabelais ("Rabelais' Language"). Between 1925 and 1930, he published the volumes of a large-scale project, Les Sources indigènes de l'étymologie française ("The Indigenous Sources of French Etymology"), which was reputedly the result of three decades in specialized research. In 1930, Şăineanu followed up with another book on Rabelais, mainly dedicated to his critical reception and cultural legacy (L'Influence et la réputation de Rabelais, "Rabelais' Influence and Reputation"). He died four years later at a hospital in Paris, after complications from surgery.
Background and tenets
The diverse cultural background on which Lazăr Şăineanu relied and his early familiarity with several traditions are occasionally credited as sources for his scholarly achievements. Joan Leopold noted that the Romanian-born scholar was among the fourteen or fifteen Jews of various nationalities whose work was taken into consideration by the Volney Committee during the 19th century, pointing to the legacy of "TalmudTalmud
The Talmud is a central text of mainstream Judaism. It takes the form of a record of rabbinic discussions pertaining to Jewish law, ethics, philosophy, customs and history....
ic and [Jewish] philological traditions" within modern science. His Jewish identity, literary historian George Călinescu
George Calinescu
George Călinescu was a Romanian literary critic, historian, novelist, academician and journalist, and a writer of classicist and humanist tendencies...
noted in 1933, went in tandem with an exceptional familiarity with Romanian language and culture; like other of his fellow Jewish Romanian intellectuals (among whom Călinescu cited philologists Gaster and Barbu Lăzăreanu, Marxist
Marxism
Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...
theorist Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea
Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea
Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea was a Romanian Marxist theorist, politician, sociologist, literary critic, and journalist....
and dramatist Ronetti Roman), Şăineanu possessed "an amazingly rich Romanian lexis
Romanian lexis
The lexis of the Romanian language , a Romance language, has changed over the centuries as the language evolved from Vulgar Latin, to Proto-Romanian, to medieval, modern and contemporary Romanian.-Medieval Romanian:...
".
During his time in Romania, the scientist was involved in cultural debates surrounding the Romanian ethos
Ethos
Ethos is a Greek word meaning "character" that is used to describe the guiding beliefs or ideals that characterize a community, nation, or ideology. The Greeks also used this word to refer to the power of music to influence its hearer's emotions, behaviors, and even morals. Early Greek stories of...
. As a disciple of Moses Gaster
Moses Gaster
Moses Gaster was a Romanian-born Jewish-British scholar, the Hakham of the Spanish and Portuguese congregation, London, and a Hebrew linguist. He was also the son-in-law of Michael Friedländer, principal of Jews' College. The surname Gaster is taken from Spanish Castro, indicating his Sephardic...
and contributor to Anuar pentru Israeliţi, Şăineanu implicitly stood for a Haskalah
Haskalah
Haskalah , the Jewish Enlightenment, was a movement among European Jews in the 18th–19th centuries that advocated adopting enlightenment values, pressing for better integration into European society, and increasing education in secular studies, Hebrew language, and Jewish history...
ideology, supporting Jewish integration into the cultural mainstream, and favored the scientific approach to Jewish history
Jewish history
Jewish history is the history of the Jews, their religion and culture, as it developed and interacted with other peoples, religions and cultures. Since Jewish history is over 4000 years long and includes hundreds of different populations, any treatment can only be provided in broad strokes...
akin to the Wissenschaft des Judentums
Wissenschaft des Judentums
Wissenschaft des Judentums , refers to a nineteenth-century movement premised on the critical investigation of Jewish literature and culture, including rabbinic literature, using scientific methods to analyze the origins of Jewish traditions.-The Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden:The ...
methods. Laszlo Alexandru refers to his "fundamental program" as being "the assimilationist thesis", and explains that, for this reason, the scholar changed Schein to Şăineanu. The same commentator notes that Şăineanu disregarded Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu
Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu
Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu was a Romanian writer and philologist, who pioneered many branches of Romanian philology and history. Hasdeu is considered to have been able to understand 26 languages .-Life:...
's publicized antisemitism when he became a "fervent disciple" of Hasdeu in scholarly matters. In reference to his own patriotic
Patriotism
Patriotism is a devotion to one's country, excluding differences caused by the dependencies of the term's meaning upon context, geography and philosophy...
sentiment, Şăineanu once defined the country as "twice sacred to my eyes—the land where I was born and where my parents sleep their eternal slumber." After his departure to France, he further stated that he bore "not even the shadow of a grudge" on the Romanian people as a whole. According to literary historian Eugen Lovinescu
Eugen Lovinescu
Eugen Lovinescu was a Romanian modernist literary historian, literary critic, academic, and novelist, who in 1919 established the Sburătorul literary club. He was the father of Monica Lovinescu, and the uncle of Horia Lovinescu, Vasile Lovinescu, and Anton Holban...
, the scholar's subsequent correspondence stands as "proof of sincere adherence, prolonged over decades and perils, to his country of origin". However, according to one account, when Şăineanu happened to meet Nicolae Iorga
Nicolae Iorga
Nicolae Iorga was a Romanian historian, politician, literary critic, memoirist, poet and playwright. Co-founder of the Democratic Nationalist Party , he served as a member of Parliament, President of the Deputies' Assembly and Senate, cabinet minister and briefly as Prime Minister...
in Paris some decades after their polemic, he made a point of addressing him in French, which was interpreted as a statement of disgust with the Romanian cultural environment.
Şăineanu also made himself known for the points of view which he expressed in relation to the debates over the Latin alphabet and orthography
Romanian alphabet
The Romanian alphabet is a modification of the Latin alphabet and consists of 31 letters:The letters Q , W , and Y were officially introduced in the Romanian alphabet in 1982, although they had been used earlier...
, within the context of linguistic evolution
History of the Romanian language
-Dacia and Romanization:The Romanian territory was inhabited in ancient times by the Dacians, an Indo-European people. They were defeated by the Roman Empire in 106 and part of Dacia became a Roman province...
. Overall, Şăineanu argued that early Romanian history as taught in his lifetime was better covered by philologists, since, before the time of Michael the Brave, it had "more of an ethnographic
Ethnography
Ethnography is a qualitative method aimed to learn and understand cultural phenomena which reflect the knowledge and system of meanings guiding the life of a cultural group...
and philological character". He reacted against the politicization of research and accusations that his own works did not support popular views of "the national question". At a time when the Cyrillic version
Romanian Cyrillic alphabet
The Romanian Cyrillic alphabet was used to write the Romanian language before 1860–1862, when it was officially replaced by a Latin-based Romanian alphabet. Cyrillic remained in occasional use until circa 1920...
had been discarded but the new spelling was still largely unregulated, he joined the outspoken critics of attempts to modify the shape of words so as to suggest their Latin origins. The "Latinist" approach, experimented in the lexicographic work of I. C. Massim
I. C. Massim
I.C. Massim was a Romanian linguist and a founding member of the Romanian Academy . According to Theodor Massim his great grand son, I. C. Massim as born Ion Floricel in the village of Maxineni, near the Danube port of Braila as the son of a country priest...
and August Treboniu Laurian
August Treboniu Laurian
August Treboniu Laurian was a Transylvanian Romanian politician, historian and linguist. He was born in the village of Fofeldea in Nocrich. He was a participant at the 1848 revolution, an organizer of the Romanian school and one of the founding members of the Romanian Academy.Laurian was a member...
and originating with the Transylvanian School
Transylvanian School
The Transylvanian School was a cultural movement which was founded after part of the Romanian Orthodox Church in Habsburg-ruled Transylvania accepted the leadership of the Pope and became the Greek-Catholic Church . The links with Rome brought to the Romanian Tranylvanians the ideas of the Age of...
, was favored for a while by the Romanian Academy
Romanian Academy
The Romanian Academy is a cultural forum founded in Bucharest, Romania, in 1866. It covers the scientific, artistic and literary domains. The academy has 181 acting members who are elected for life....
, but had become widely ridiculed by the 1880s. According to the scholar's own words, "Latinomaniac tendencies" were nevertheless present with National Liberals such as Sturdza, and formed a background theme in the party's conflict with Moses Gaster. While approaching the Junimea
Junimea
Junimea was a Romanian literary society founded in Iaşi in 1863, through the initiative of several foreign-educated personalities led by Titu Maiorescu, Petre P. Carp, Vasile Pogor, Theodor Rosetti and Iacob Negruzzi...
society's tenets on this matter, Şăineanu also shared Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu
Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu
Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu was a Romanian writer and philologist, who pioneered many branches of Romanian philology and history. Hasdeu is considered to have been able to understand 26 languages .-Life:...
's criticism of Junimist Germanophilia. In 1897, the two scholars published Eine Trilogie (German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
for "A Trilogy"), criticizing a perceived Conservative and Junimist monopoly on the Romanian literary scene
Literature of Romania
Romanian literature is literature written by Romanian authors, although the term may also be used to refer to all literature written in the Romanian language.Eugène Ionesco is one of the foremost playwrights of the Theatre of the Absurd....
in general, and, in particular, the officially condoned historical overview by Wilhelm Rudow, Gheorghe Bogdan-Duică and Iacob Negruzzi, which seemed to omit mention of any politically inconvenient literary contribution.
Work in Romanian folklore
Much of Lazăr Şăineanu earliest contributions connected his linguistic research with his interest in Romanian folkloreFolklore of Romania
A feature of Romanian culture is the special relationship between folklore and the learned culture, determined by two factors. First, the rural character of the Romanian communities resulted in an exceptionally vital and creative traditional culture. Folk creations were the main literary genre...
. Aiming to be "a genuine corpus of Romanian oral literature", Basmele române aimed at introducing the major themes in local spoken tradition
Oral tradition
Oral tradition and oral lore is cultural material and traditions transmitted orally from one generation to another. The messages or testimony are verbally transmitted in speech or song and may take the form, for example, of folktales, sayings, ballads, songs, or chants...
, listing and transcribing some 500 stories. Lazăr Şăineanu took additional care in preserving the integrity of the oral level
Oral literature
Oral literature corresponds in the sphere of the spoken word to literature as literature operates in the domain of the written word. It thus forms a generally more fundamental component of culture, but operates in many ways as one might expect literature to do...
of Romanian literature in printed versions, and urged other folklorists interviewing storytellers to keep notes on the latter's special talents. Such preoccupations in preserving context were also found in his lexicographic work; according to Caragiale, Dicţionarul universal was groundbreaking because its author took care "to support with authentic testimonies the words and the nuances of meanings."
A special section of Şăineanu's research in the same area was dedicated to comparative mythology
Comparative mythology
Comparative mythology is the comparison of myths from different cultures in an attempt to identify shared themes and characteristics. Comparative mythology has served a variety of academic purposes...
. His contributions have led folklorist Linda Dégh to deem him "one of the pioneers in classifying folktales according to their types". This method was employed in Basmele române, whose content was structured into both types and "cycles". In Basmele române, arguing in favor of applying the principles introduced by Hasdeu, Şăineanu analyzed Romanian folktales in their native and national content. Nevertheless, he followed the conclusions of other folklorists on the universality of folklore, suggesting that the world's entire folkloric literature was structured into some tens of groups. With Studii folclorice, the researcher tested an anthropological
Anthropology
Anthropology is the study of humanity. It has origins in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. The term "anthropology" is from the Greek anthrōpos , "man", understood to mean mankind or humanity, and -logia , "discourse" or "study", and was first used in 1501 by German...
investigation into the characteristics and supposed origins of each myth, in particular Meşterul Manole
Mesterul Manole
In Romanian mythology, Meșterul Manole was the chief architect of the Curtea de Argeș Monastery in Wallachia...
, Baba Dochia
Baba Dochia
In Romanian mythology, Baba Dochia, or The Old Dokia, is a figure identified with the return of spring. She is sometimes imagined as “an old woman who insults the month of March when she goes out with a herd of sheep or goats.” Her name probably originates from the Byzantine calendar, which...
and the iele
Iele
The Iele are feminine mythical creatures In Romanian mythology. There are several differing descriptions of their characteristics. Often they are described as virgin fairies , with great seductive power over men, with magic skills and attributes similar to the Ancient Greek Nymphs, Naiads and...
creatures. In Les rites de la construction, Şăineanu focused on a set of ballad
Ballad
A ballad is a form of verse, often a narrative set to music. Ballads were particularly characteristic of British and Irish popular poetry and song from the later medieval period until the 19th century and used extensively across Europe and later the Americas, Australia and North Africa. Many...
s with a similar construction- and immurement
Immurement
Immurement is a form of execution where a person is walled up within a building and left to die from starvation or dehydration. This is distinct from being buried alive, in which the victim typically dies of asphyxiation.-In legend and folklore:...
-related subject, present throughout East Central or Eastern Europe
Eastern Europe
Eastern Europe is the eastern part of Europe. The term has widely disparate geopolitical, geographical, cultural and socioeconomic readings, which makes it highly context-dependent and even volatile, and there are "almost as many definitions of Eastern Europe as there are scholars of the region"...
, likening the Romanian Meşterul Manole legend to its counterparts in Serbian
Serbian folklore
Serbian folklore is the folk traditions among ethnic Serbs. The earliest examples of Serbian folklore are seen in the pre-Christian Slavic customs transformed into Christianity.-Folklore:...
(Zidanje Skadra), Hungarian
Hungarian mythology
Hungarian mythology includes the myths, legends, folk tales, fairy tales and gods of the Hungarians. Many parts of it are thought to be lost, i.e. only some texts remained which can be classified as a myth. However, a significant amount of Hungarian mythology was successfully recovered in the last...
(Kőműves Kelemen) and other regional folkloric traditions. According to critics John Neubauer and Marcel Cornis-Pope, he was "the first author to attempt a synthetic treatment of the immurement motif in Eastern Europe". The two also note that Şăineanu, who believed that the motif reached its potential significance only in Eastern Europe, stayed clear of the controversy surrounding the geographic and ethnic sources of the ballad (while specifying his belief that the Hungarian version followed a Romanian source), and discussed Zidanje Skadra and Meşterul Manole as the most crafted variants of the myth.
One portion of Şăineanu's studies in Romanian folklore bordered on his investigation of Jewish history. The scholar noticed recurring characteristic among antagonist
Antagonist
An antagonist is a character, group of characters, or institution, that represents the opposition against which the protagonist must contend...
s in Romanian fairy tales, particularly the uriaşi—occasionally known as jidovi, "Jews", or tătari, "Tatars
Tatars
Tatars are a Turkic speaking ethnic group , numbering roughly 7 million.The majority of Tatars live in the Russian Federation, with a population of around 5.5 million, about 2 million of which in the republic of Tatarstan.Significant minority populations are found in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan,...
". He attributed such traits to a possible conflictual encounter, taking place at some point in the early medieval period
Romania in the Early Middle Ages
The Early Middle Ages in Romania spans the period from the withdrawal of the Roman administration from the province of Dacia in the 271–275 AD, thenceforward modern Romania's territories were to be crisscrossed by migrating populations for almost 1,000 years...
, between Romanians (or Vlachs
Vlachs
Vlach is a blanket term covering several modern Latin peoples descending from the Latinised population in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe. English variations on the name include: Walla, Wlachs, Wallachs, Vlahs, Olahs or Ulahs...
) and the Khazars
Khazars
The Khazars were semi-nomadic Turkic people who established one of the largest polities of medieval Eurasia, with the capital of Atil and territory comprising much of modern-day European Russia, western Kazakhstan, eastern Ukraine, Azerbaijan, large portions of the northern Caucasus , parts of...
, a Turkic
Turkic peoples
The Turkic peoples are peoples residing in northern, central and western Asia, southern Siberia and northwestern China and parts of eastern Europe. They speak languages belonging to the Turkic language family. They share, to varying degrees, certain cultural traits and historical backgrounds...
tribe that had adopted Judaism. His interpretation, as paraphrased by the scholar himself, concluded: "Was there in the past a people about which one could claim with certainty that it was both Tatar and Jewish at the same time? My answer to this question is that such a people existed, and it is known in history under the name of Khazars [...]. After spreading its domination over Eastern Europe, these Jewish-Tatars suddenly disappeared from the stage of history. What became of them? A part of these Khazars will have looked early on for a shelter in Transylvania
Transylvania
Transylvania is a historical region in the central part of Romania. Bounded on the east and south by the Carpathian mountain range, historical Transylvania extended in the west to the Apuseni Mountains; however, the term sometimes encompasses not only Transylvania proper, but also the historical...
, from where they crossed to the Danubian countries
Danubian Principalities
Danubian Principalities was a conventional name given to the Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, which emerged in the early 14th century. The term was coined in the Habsburg Monarchy after the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca in order to designate an area on the lower Danube with a common...
, especially in Muntenia
Muntenia
Muntenia is a historical province of Romania, usually considered Wallachia-proper . It is situated between the Danube , the Carpathian Mountains and Moldavia , and the Olt River to the west...
, particularly in Muscel and Romanaţi
Romanați County
Romanaṭi was a county in the Kingdom of Romania, in southern Oltenia. The county seat was Caracal.-Administrative organization:Administratively, Romanaṭi County was divided into five districts :# Plasa Câmpu# Plasa Dunărea...
districts where the traditional memories regarding them seem to be concentrated. [...] The settlements and their dwellings left important traces that took on colossal proportions in people's imagination. People of a supernatural size seemed to have lived [...] in an ancient time, which the old can hardly remember, and our peasants call those giant people Jews or Tatars." The scholar referred to various constants in folkloric accounts: peasants' testimonies which attributed large stone ruins to the Jews (whom they occasionally referred to as giants or supernaturally powerful people) and the "red" antagonist
Antagonist
An antagonist is a character, group of characters, or institution, that represents the opposition against which the protagonist must contend...
s in fairy tales such as Ion Creangă
Ion Creanga
Ion Creangă was a Moldavian-born Romanian writer, raconteur and schoolteacher. A main figure in 19th century Romanian literature, he is best known for his Childhood Memories volume, his novellas and short stories, and his many anecdotes...
's Harap Alb
Harap Alb
"Harap Alb" or "Harap-Alb" , known in full as Povestea lui Harap Alb , is a Romanian-language fairy tale. Based on traditional themes found in Romanian folklore, it was recorded and reworked in 1877 by writer Ion Creangă, becoming one of his main contributions to fantasy and Romanian literature...
(the "Red Emperor", the "Red Man" and people with red-colored facial markings, all placed by Şăineanu in connection to the "Red Jews
Red Jews
The Red Jews were a legendary Jewish nation that appear in vernacular sources in Germany during the medieval era until about 1600. According to these texts, the Red Jews were an epochal threat to Christendom, and would invade Europe during the tribulations leading to the end of the world.Andrew...
" myth). Şăineanu's political adversaries, including V. A. Urechia
V. A. Urechia
V. A. Urechia was a Moldavian-born Romanian historian, Romantic author of historical fiction and plays, academic and politician...
, saw in this theory evidence of a Jewish historiographical attempt at overriding the Romanian presence in the area—an interpretation since defined as "in bad faith" and "slanderous" by Laszlo Alexandru.
Yiddish and Romanian linguistics
The scholar earned much recognition for his parallel work in Yiddish linguistics. According to AmericanUnited States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
researcher Jerold C. Frakes, he is one of the "major scholars of the late nineteenth century" to have studied the Yiddish language, his contribution ranking him alongside Maks Erik, Solomon Birnbaum
Solomon Birnbaum
Solomon Birnbaum, also Salomo, Solomon A or Solomon Asher, was a Yiddish linguist and Hebrew paleographer.-Career:...
, Chone Shmeruk, Max
Max Weinreich
Max Weinreich was a linguist, specializing in the Yiddish language, and the father of the linguist Uriel Weinreich, who edited the Modern Yiddish-English English-Yiddish Dictionary.- Biography :Max Weinreich began his studies in a German school in Kuldiga,...
and Uriel Weinreich
Uriel Weinreich
Uriel Weinreich was a linguist at Columbia University. Born in Vilnius , he earned his Ph.D. from Columbia, and went on to teach there, specializing in Yiddish studies, sociolinguistics, and dialectology...
. According to Hebraist Robert D. King, such contributions rank Şăineanu, Alfred Landau and Matisyohu Mieses "among the first scholars to take Yiddish seriously, to force others [King's italics] to take it seriously, to move conceptually beyond the stupid position that Yiddish was 'bad German' or 'jargon', a second-rate excuse of a language." His inquiry into medieval structures connecting Yiddish and German is seen by Germanists Dagmar C. G. Lorenz
Dagmar C. G. Lorenz
Dagmar C. G. Lorenz is Professor of Germanic Studies and Director of Jewish Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She teaches and publishes on Austrian, German and German-Jewish literature and culture, and Holocaust Studies. She was born in Goslar, West Germany and began her studies at...
and Neil G. Jacobs as a substantial discovery, Şăineanu being the first to indicate "that the German component of Yiddish traces back to Middle High German
Middle High German
Middle High German , abbreviated MHG , is the term used for the period in the history of the German language between 1050 and 1350. It is preceded by Old High German and followed by Early New High German...
sources" (meaning that "Yiddish was no longer to be evaluated in terms of New High German
New High German
New High German is the term used for the most recent period in the history of the German language. It is a translation of the German Neuhochdeutsch...
"). The scholar was also reportedly the discoverer of a direct link between Yiddish and Aramaic
Aramaic language
Aramaic is a group of languages belonging to the Afroasiatic language phylum. The name of the language is based on the name of Aram, an ancient region in central Syria. Within this family, Aramaic belongs to the Semitic family, and more specifically, is a part of the Northwest Semitic subfamily,...
; this allowed the conclusion that the Jewish German dialect originated among Aramaic-speaking and pre-Ashkenazi Jews
Ashkenazi Jews
Ashkenazi Jews, also known as Ashkenazic Jews or Ashkenazim , are the Jews descended from the medieval Jewish communities along the Rhine in Germany from Alsace in the south to the Rhineland in the north. Ashkenaz is the medieval Hebrew name for this region and thus for Germany...
, who originally settled further east than the Askhenazi home in the Rhineland
Rhineland
Historically, the Rhinelands refers to a loosely-defined region embracing the land on either bank of the River Rhine in central Europe....
.
In his studies of Turkish
Turkish language
Turkish is a language spoken as a native language by over 83 million people worldwide, making it the most commonly spoken of the Turkic languages. Its speakers are located predominantly in Turkey and Northern Cyprus with smaller groups in Iraq, Greece, Bulgaria, the Republic of Macedonia, Kosovo,...
and Turkic
Turkic languages
The Turkic languages constitute a language family of at least thirty five languages, spoken by Turkic peoples across a vast area from Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean to Siberia and Western China, and are considered to be part of the proposed Altaic language family.Turkic languages are spoken...
borrowings into the Romanian lexis, Lazăr Şăineanu looked back on historical events leading back to the Age of Migrations, such as in highlighting the possible Pecheneg
Pecheneg language
Pecheneg language is the extinct Turkic language spoken by the Pechenegs in Eastern Europe.It is most likely a member of the Oghuz branch of the Turkic family, but the poor documentation to it and the absence of any descendant languages of Pecheneg has prevented linguists from making a definite...
origin of relatively common Romanian words such as buzdugan ("mace"), duium ("multitude"), duşman ("enemy"), caia ("horseshoe nail"), colibă ("hut") and fotă ("skirt"). However, one of his primary focuses was on Ottoman Turkish
Ottoman Turkish language
The Ottoman Turkish language or Ottoman language is the variety of the Turkish language that was used for administrative and literary purposes in the Ottoman Empire. It borrows extensively from Arabic and Persian, and was written in a variant of the Perso-Arabic script...
as a mediator between Romanian and other languages: the Romanian word giuvaier ("jewel"), borrowed from the Turkish cevahir, but originating with a Persian
Persian language
Persian is an Iranian language within the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages. It is primarily spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and countries which historically came under Persian influence...
source; trampă ("barter"), taken from the Turkish trampa, but sourced to the Italian
Italian language
Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...
tramutare ("to transform"); talaz ("high wave"), identical to the Turkish intermediary, and through it borrowed from the Greek
Greek language
Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...
Θάλασσα (thalassa
Thalassa (mythology)
In Greek mythology, Thalassa is a primordial sea goddess, daughter of Aether and Hemera. With sea god Pontus, she was the mother of the nine Telchines and Halia. Sometimes, she was thought of as the mother of Aphrodite with Uranus or with Zeus. She is the personification of the Mediterranean Sea....
, "sea"). Additionally, the scholar documented the distant impression of Levant
Levant
The Levant or ) is the geographic region and culture zone of the "eastern Mediterranean littoral between Anatolia and Egypt" . The Levant includes most of modern Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel, the Palestinian territories, and sometimes parts of Turkey and Iraq, and corresponds roughly to the...
ine territories, as first introduced through Ottoman culture
Culture of the Ottoman Empire
The culture of the Ottoman Empire evolved over several centuries as the ruling administration of the Turks absorbed, adapted and modified the cultures of conquered lands and their peoples...
—as illustrated by the original references to Egypt
Egypt
Egypt , officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, Arabic: , is a country mainly in North Africa, with the Sinai Peninsula forming a land bridge in Southwest Asia. Egypt is thus a transcontinental country, and a major power in Africa, the Mediterranean Basin, the Middle East and the Muslim world...
as Misir, from the Arabic
Arabic language
Arabic is a name applied to the descendants of the Classical Arabic language of the 6th century AD, used most prominently in the Quran, the Islamic Holy Book...
مصر (Miṣr), as opposed to the more modern . He also discussed the professional suffix
Suffix
In linguistics, a suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns or adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs...
es -giu and -angiu, both of Turkish origin and present in words borrowed during the early modern
Early Modern Romania
Early Modern Romania is the portion of Romanian history that falls in the early modern period, roughly from the end of the 15th century to the end of the 18th century...
and Phanariote
Phanariotes
Phanariots, Phanariotes, or Phanariote Greeks were members of those prominent Greek families residing in Phanar , the chief Greek quarter of Constantinople, where the Ecumenical Patriarchate is situated.For all their cosmopolitanism and often Western education, the Phanariots were...
eras. Main examples include barcagiu ("boater" or "ferryman"), bragagiu ("boza
Boza
Boza, also bosa , is a popular fermented beverage in Kazakhstan, Turkey, Kyrgyzstan, Albania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, parts of Romania, Serbia, Ukraine and also Poland and Lithuania...
maker"), geamgiu ("window fitter"), toptangiu ("wholesale vendor") etc., but the suffix is also applied ironically in various other contexts—for example, mahalagiu ("inhabitant of the mahala
Mahala
Mahala is a Balkan word for "neighbourhood" or "quarter", a section of a rural or urban settlement, dating to the times of the Ottoman Empire. It was brought to the area through Ottoman Turkish mahalle, but it originates in Arabic mähallä, from the root meaning "to settle", "to occupy"...
", "suburbanite" or "uncouth person") and duelgiu ("dueler"). Şăineanu's texts followed the evolutions of similar words ending in -liu (such as hazliu, "funny", from haz, "laughter"), of popular figures of speech
Figures of Speech
Figures of Speech is a hip hop group consisting of MCs Eve and Jyant. They performed at the Good Life Cafe in the early 1990s and were featured on the Project Blowed compilation....
directly translated from their Turkish original (a bea tutun, "to drink tobacco", or the question în ce ape te scalzi?, "what waters do you bathe in?", figurative for "how are you feeling?"), and of strong obscenities
Romanian profanity
Romanian profanity refers to a set of words considered blasphemous or inflammatory in the Romanian language.Romanian is considered to have a huge set of inflammatory terms and phrases...
reflecting Oriental sources. In general, Şăineanu concluded, such appropriation from an area mediated by Islam
Islam
Islam . The most common are and . : Arabic pronunciation varies regionally. The first vowel ranges from ~~. The second vowel ranges from ~~~...
and Islamic culture was not present in areas directed related to Christian practice
History of Christianity in Romania
The history of Christianity in Romania began within the Roman province of Lower Moesia where many Christians suffered martyrdom at the end of the 3rd century. Nevertheless, Christian communities have been attested in several locations on the territory of modern Romania by over a hundred...
and intellectual life.
Especially in his , Şăineanu evidenced the spread of Turkish borrowings throughout the Balkans, and concluded that they had a more significant presence in Aromanian than in Romanian. His contemporary, philologist Vasile Bogrea, referred to the volume as a "Bible
Bible
The Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...
of Oriental elements in Romanian", while the author himself deemed it a "supreme testimony of my love for the Romanian language and people". According to writer and critic Alexandru Muşina
Alexandru Musina
Alexandru Muşina is a Romanian poet, essayist, and editor born in Sibiu.He studied literature at the University of Bucharest in the late 1970s and published poetry in the 1980s beginning with Cinci in 1982....
, Şăineanu was foremost among the linguists who challenged a linear take on the origin of the Romanians, evidencing, like Alexandru Al. Philippide and Alexandru Cihac, the "heterogeneous, plurilingual
Multilingualism
Multilingualism is the act of using, or promoting the use of, multiple languages, either by an individual speaker or by a community of speakers. Multilingual speakers outnumber monolingual speakers in the world's population. Multilingualism is becoming a social phenomenon governed by the needs of...
and multicultural character of our Romanity
Romanization (cultural)
Romanization or latinization indicate different historical processes, such as acculturation, integration and assimilation of newly incorporated and peripheral populations by the Roman Republic and the later Roman Empire...
", with the underlying "processes of acculturation
Acculturation
Acculturation explains the process of cultural and psychological change that results following meeting between cultures. The effects of acculturation can be seen at multiple levels in both interacting cultures. At the group level, acculturation often results in changes to culture, customs, and...
". In particular, Muşina notes, it was Şăineanu's study of Turkish words and expressions settled in the everyday language that uncovered "a forma mentis, common Oriental, Turco-Romanian mentality."
Studies of French language and civilization
With La Création métaphorique, the researcher inventoried the representations of animals in the late medieval imaginary: lions and cocks as representations of courage, hunting dogHunting dog
A hunting dog refers to any dog who assists humans in hunting. There are several types of hunting dogs developed for various tasks. The major categories of hunting dogs include hounds, terriers, dachshunds, cur type dogs, and gun dogs...
s as icons of arrogance, pigs as symbols of gluttony etc. The books notably showed the traditional semantic parallelisms between cats, monkeys and apes, as codified in several Romance languages
Romance languages
The Romance languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family, more precisely of the Italic languages subfamily, comprising all the languages that descend from Vulgar Latin, the language of ancient Rome...
, and investigated the animals' respective roles within popular demonology
Demonology
Demonology is the systematic study of demons or beliefs about demons. It is the branch of theology relating to superhuman beings who are not gods. It deals both with benevolent beings that have no circle of worshippers or so limited a circle as to be below the rank of gods, and with malevolent...
and metaphors of drunkenness. With Les Sources indigènes de l'étymologie française, Şăineanu offered clues on the obscure origin of various French words. Şăineanu thus sourced the French and English harlequin
Harlequin
Harlequin or Arlecchino in Italian, Arlequin in French, and Arlequín in Spanish is the most popularly known of the zanni or comic servant characters from the Italian Commedia dell'arte and its descendant, the Harlequinade.-Origins:...
beyond the Italian-language
Italian language
Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...
arlechino in Commedia dell'arte
Commedia dell'arte
Commedia dell'arte is a form of theatre characterized by masked "types" which began in Italy in the 16th century, and was responsible for the advent of the actress and improvised performances based on sketches or scenarios. The closest translation of the name is "comedy of craft"; it is shortened...
, and back to a medieval legend in Middle French
Middle French
Middle French is a historical division of the French language that covers the period from 1340 to 1611. It is a period of transition during which:...
.
A number of Şăineanu's texts focused on the language patterns covered by "argot" and the original meaning of "jargon", in relation to French and Parisian social history
History of Paris
The history of Paris, France, spans over 2,000 years, during which time the city grew from a small Gallic settlement to the multicultural capital of a modern European state, and one of the world's major global cities.-Ancient place:...
, discussing the language of the gueux (marginalized and destitute migrants), the obscene nature of some medieval performances, the linguistic codes used by brigands during the Hundred Years' War
Hundred Years' War
The Hundred Years' War was a series of separate wars waged from 1337 to 1453 by the House of Valois and the House of Plantagenet, also known as the House of Anjou, for the French throne, which had become vacant upon the extinction of the senior Capetian line of French kings...
, and the impact of argot in the work of poet François Villon
François Villon
François Villon was a French poet, thief, and vagabond. He is perhaps best known for his Testaments and his Ballade des Pendus, written while in prison...
or other French Renaissance
French Renaissance
French Renaissance is a recent term used to describe a cultural and artistic movement in France from the late 15th century to the early 17th century. It is associated with the pan-European Renaissance that many cultural historians believe originated in northern Italy in the fourteenth century...
writers. discussed in part the emergence of what Şăineanu himself defined as ("the lowly Parisian language"), a mix of argots emerging from 19th century urbanization
Urbanization
Urbanization, urbanisation or urban drift is the physical growth of urban areas as a result of global change. The United Nations projected that half of the world's population would live in urban areas at the end of 2008....
. His studies in the area were part of a phenomenon in French linguistics: at roughly the same time as Şăineanu, argot studies were becoming the main subject of works by researchers such as Arnold van Gennep
Arnold van Gennep
Arnold van Gennep was a noted French ethnographer and folklorist.-Biography:He was born in Ludwigsburg, Kingdom of Württemberg...
and Raoul De La Grasserie. A disagreement occurred between Şăineanu and Gennep over the origins and age of argot: Gennep criticized his colleague's claim that "no European argot has sources beyond the 15th century", arguing that such statements were not verifiable, and that they presumed "some kind of spontaneous generation". Also according to Gennep, Şăineanu was among those Eurocentric
Eurocentrism
Eurocentrism is the practice of viewing the world from a European perspective and with an implied belief, either consciously or subconsciously, in the preeminence of European culture...
scholars who offered a "teratological
Teratology
Teratology is the study of abnormalities of physiological development. It is often thought of as the study of human birth defects, but it is much broader than that, taking in other non-birth developmental stages, including puberty; and other non-human life forms, including plants.- Etymology :The...
" view of argot as an "aberrant creation".
As part of his efforts to advance the study of Middle French, Şăineanu dedicated himself to an applied study of François Rabelais
François Rabelais
François Rabelais was a major French Renaissance writer, doctor, Renaissance humanist, monk and Greek scholar. He has historically been regarded as a writer of fantasy, satire, the grotesque, bawdy jokes and songs...
and his role in French literature
French literature
French literature is, generally speaking, literature written in the French language, particularly by citizens of France; it may also refer to literature written by people living in France who speak traditional languages of France other than French. Literature written in French language, by citizens...
. Called "remarkable and abundantly documented" by Russia
Russia
Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
n semiotician
Semiotics
Semiotics, also called semiotic studies or semiology, is the study of signs and sign processes , indication, designation, likeness, analogy, metaphor, symbolism, signification, and communication...
Mikhail Bakhtin
Mikhail Bakhtin
Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin was a Russian philosopher, literary critic, semiotician and scholar who worked on literary theory, ethics, and the philosophy of language...
, La Langue de Rabelais outlines the use, context and origin of some 3,770 individual words in Rabelaisian vocabulary. It was especially noted for its details on various contributions to Rabelais' means of expression, including staples of French folklore
French folklore
French folklore encompasses the fables, folklore and fairy tales and legends of the Gauls, Franks, Normans, Bretons, Occitans, and other peoples living in France.-Folklore from the Middle Ages:...
such as the so-called Cris de Paris (chants traditionally produced by Parisian street vendors). Some of his other contributions to the study of Rabelais' work, as described by Bakhtin, include the inventory of culinary metaphors found throughout Gargantua and Pantagruel
Gargantua and Pantagruel
The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel is a connected series of five novels written in the 16th century by François Rabelais. It is the story of two giants, a father and his son and their adventures, written in an amusing, extravagant, satirical vein...
, and evidence that Rabelais had an unitigated familiarity with the maritime trade. La Langue de Rabelais also offered clues into 16th century views of homosexuality
Homosexuality
Homosexuality is romantic or sexual attraction or behavior between members of the same sex or gender. As a sexual orientation, homosexuality refers to "an enduring pattern of or disposition to experience sexual, affectional, or romantic attractions" primarily or exclusively to people of the same...
, discussing the origin of archaisms such as bardachiser ("to sodomize") or the link between Rabelais' maritime terminology and medieval reactions to homoeroticism
Homoeroticism
Homoeroticism refers to the erotic attraction between members of the same sex, either male–male or female–female , most especially as it is depicted or manifested in the visual arts and literature. It can also be found in performative forms; from theatre to the theatricality of uniformed movements...
.
In his work on the subject, Şăineanu also stood out as one of those rejecting the notion that Rabelais' writings have a special anticlerical meaning, arguing instead that his mockery of clerical society was merely a rendition of common and folkloric attitudes—a conclusion quoted in agreement by Annales School
Annales School
The Annales School is a group of historians associated with a style of historiography developed by French historians in the 20th century. It is named after its scholarly journal Annales d'histoire économique et sociale, which remains the main source of scholarship, along with many books and...
historian Lucien Febvre
Lucien Febvre
Lucien Febvre was a French historian best known for the role he played in establishing the Annales School of history. He has designed the Encyclopédie française together with Anatole de Monzie.-Biography:...
in his own The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century. Also cited by Febvre are Şăineanu's views on Islam
Islam
Islam . The most common are and . : Arabic pronunciation varies regionally. The first vowel ranges from ~~. The second vowel ranges from ~~~...
ic and "Saracen
Saracen
Saracen was a term used by the ancient Romans to refer to a people who lived in desert areas in and around the Roman province of Arabia, and who were distinguished from Arabs. In Europe during the Middle Ages the term was expanded to include Arabs, and then all who professed the religion of Islam...
" echos in Gargantua and Pantagruel (such as the depiction of Fierabras
Fierabras
Fiërabras or Ferumbras is a Saracen knight appearing in several chansons de geste and other material relating to the Matter of France...
), as well as on Rabelais' references to miraculous cures as being borrowed from earlier romance fiction
Romance (genre)
As a literary genre of high culture, romance or chivalric romance is a style of heroic prose and verse narrative that was popular in the aristocratic circles of High Medieval and Early Modern Europe. They were fantastic stories about marvel-filled adventures, often of a knight errant portrayed as...
. In a parallel series of articles, the Romanian scholar also discussed the link between Ancient Roman
Ancient Rome
Ancient Rome was a thriving civilization that grew on the Italian Peninsula as early as the 8th century BC. Located along the Mediterranean Sea and centered on the city of Rome, it expanded to one of the largest empires in the ancient world....
thinker Pliny the Elder
Pliny the Elder
Gaius Plinius Secundus , better known as Pliny the Elder, was a Roman author, naturalist, and natural philosopher, as well as naval and army commander of the early Roman Empire, and personal friend of the emperor Vespasian...
and the Renaissance writer, commenting on the similarity between Rabelais' description of medical practices and statements found in Natural History.
Legacy
Despite the antisemitic campaigns and the voluntary expatriation, Şăineanu's reputation with the Romanian public was largely unharmed, and his works went through new Romanian-language editions: Dicţionarul universal alone was reissued a total of nine times before 2009, and was allegedly a primary target for plagiarismPlagiarism
Plagiarism is defined in dictionaries as the "wrongful appropriation," "close imitation," or "purloining and publication" of another author's "language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions," and the representation of them as one's own original work, but the notion remains problematic with nebulous...
from the moment of its publication. In tandem, Şăineanu's request that his peers publish details on the individual storytellers providing the folkloric accounts was respected by some, including Alexandru Vasiliu, collector of Poveşti şi legende ("Stories and Legends", 1928). Two years after Şăineanu's death, his brother Constantin collected and edited his correspondence, publishing it in Bucharest.
Much interest in Şăineanu's work was sparked during the interwar period
Interwar period
Interwar period can refer to any period between two wars. The Interbellum is understood to be the period between the end of the Great War or First World War and the beginning of the Second World War in Europe....
, shortly before and after the scholar's death, when new generations of critics came to reclaim his work as an important contribution to the field of science. Outside of Romania and France, Şăineanu's contribution of Rabelais left an observable trace in Finnegans Wake
Finnegans Wake
Finnegans Wake is a novel by Irish author James Joyce, significant for its experimental style and resulting reputation as one of the most difficult works of fiction in the English language. Written in Paris over a period of seventeen years, and published in 1939, two years before the author's...
, a 1939 modernist
Modernist literature
Modernist literature is sub-genre of Modernism, a predominantly European movement beginning in the early 20th century that was characterized by a self-conscious break with traditional aesthetic forms...
novel by Irish
Ireland
Ireland is an island to the northwest of continental Europe. It is the third-largest island in Europe and the twentieth-largest island on Earth...
novelist James Joyce
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...
: while Joyce's text holds transparent allusions to Rabelais' writings, the writer himself claimed to have never read the originals, and to have instead relied solely on a scientific study (in turn identified by research Claude Jacquet as La Langue de Rabelais).
Interwar Romanian intellectuals, primarily George Călinescu and Eugen Lovinescu, played a part in reevaluating and bringing to attention Şăineanu's contribution within its Romanian and international context. Şăineanu's correspondence was itself a topic of controversy between the two rival critics: after Lovinescu showed himself impressed by a letter in which Şăineanu stated E. Lovinescu m'impose ("E. Lovinescu impresses me"), Călinescu noted that his competitor had a tendency to quote "all things flattering him, no matter how cheap." During the same decade, the maverick writer Panait Istrati
Panait Istrati
Panait Istrati was a Romanian writer of French and Romanian expression, nicknamed The Maxim Gorky of the Balkans. Istrati was first noted for the depiction of one homosexual character in his work.-Early life:...
, himself a voluntary exile to France, explained that Dicţionarul universal was "the holy book" of his Romanian adolescence. However, Lucian Nastasă notes, the antisemitic background beyond Şăineanu's rejection (as well as the similar affair involving Solomon Schechter
Solomon Schechter
Solomon Schechter was a Moldavian-born Romanian and English rabbi, academic scholar, and educator, most famous for his roles as founder and President of the United Synagogue of America, President of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, and architect of the American Conservative Jewish...
) continued to make itself felt throughout those years, with other Jewish scholars (Leon Feraru or Alexandru Graur
Alexandru Graur
Alexandru Graur was a Romanian linguist.Born into a Jewish family in Botoşani, Graur graduated from the Faculty of Letters of the University of Bucharest and the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris . He obtained a Doctor of Philosophy degree from the Sorbonne...
) being actively prevented from seeking employment in their field. Braving the violently antisemitic and authoritarian
Authoritarianism
Authoritarianism is a form of social organization characterized by submission to authority. It is usually opposed to individualism and democracy...
regime of Conducător
Conducator
Conducător was the title used officially in two instances by Romanian politicians, and earlier by Carol II.-History:...
Ion Antonescu
Ion Antonescu
Ion Victor Antonescu was a Romanian soldier, authoritarian politician and convicted war criminal. The Prime Minister and Conducător during most of World War II, he presided over two successive wartime dictatorships...
, in place during most of World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
, Călinescu commented favorably on the contributions of Jewish figures to Romanian cultural life in his main synthesis, the 1941 History of Romanian Literature. It included a reference to Jewish linguists Şăineanu, Gaster, Ion Aurel Candrea, as scholars whose merits would be "regrettable to deny".
In contrast, the Romanian far right
Far right
Far-right, extreme right, hard right, radical right, and ultra-right are terms used to discuss the qualitative or quantitative position a group or person occupies within right-wing politics. Far-right politics may involve anti-immigration and anti-integration stances towards groups that are...
and fascist
Fascism
Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to rejuvenate their nation based on commitment to the national community as an organic entity, in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood...
groups continued to regard Şăineanu's marginalization as justified. The 1930s witnessed a controversy which, according to Laszlo Alexandru, recalled the confrontation between Hasdeu and Lazăr Şăineanu: Hasdeu's place was held by academic Nae Ionescu
Nae Ionescu
Nae Ionescu was a Romanian philosopher, logician, mathematician, professor, and journalist. Near the end of his career, he became known for his antisemitism and devotion to far right politics, in the years leading up to World War II.-Life:...
, who moved toward fascism and antisemitism, while Şăineanu's position was assumed by Ionescu's Jewish disciple, writer Mihail Sebastian
Mihail Sebastian
-Life:Sebastian was born to a Jewish family in Brăila. After finishing his secondary studies, Sebastian went on to study law in Bucharest, but was soon attracted to the literary life and the exciting ideas of the new generation of Romanian intellectuals, as epitomized by the literary group...
. Writing for Azi
Azi (Romanian newspaper)
Azi is a Romanian daily newspaper published in Bucharest....
during the Sebastian scandal of 1934, journalist N. Roşu, an affiliate of the fascist Iron Guard
Iron Guard
The Iron Guard is the name most commonly given to a far-right movement and political party in Romania in the period from 1927 into the early part of World War II. The Iron Guard was ultra-nationalist, fascist, anti-communist, and promoted the Orthodox Christian faith...
, claimed that "Romanian culture will go on living" irrespective of Jewish absences such as Şăineanu and Gaster, that one's creativity depended on one's "Romanianness", and that philology studies reflected one's "sensitivity". In 1936, a Guardist named Vasile Gârcineanu called Dicţionarul universal "a characteristically Jewish work, superficially and poorly crafted". While cultivating an ambiguous relationship with fascism, which eventually brought him into the ranks of the Iron Guard, philosopher Mircea Eliade
Mircea Eliade
Mircea Eliade was a Romanian historian of religion, fiction writer, philosopher, and professor at the University of Chicago. He was a leading interpreter of religious experience, who established paradigms in religious studies that persist to this day...
, one of Ionescu's other known disciples, publicly deplored Şăineanu's social relegation and Gaster's expulsion.
The communist period
Communist Romania
Communist Romania was the period in Romanian history when that country was a Soviet-aligned communist state in the Eastern Bloc, with the dominant role of Romanian Communist Party enshrined in its successive constitutions...
witnessed a long hiatus in respect to the critical assessment of Şăineanu's work: in 1962, linguist Dumitru Macrea referred to his predecessor as an "all but forgotten" figure, and none of Şăineanu's volumes were printed between the 1947 edition of his dictionary and the 1978 version of Basmele române. This reticence was however contrasted by the appreciation of various academics: Iorgu Iordan
Iorgu Iordan
Iorgu Iordan was a Romanian linguist, philologist, diplomat, journalist, and left-wing agrarian, later communist, politician. The author of works on a large variety of topics, most of them dealing with issues of the Romanian language and Romance languages in general, he was elected a full member...
commented on his "extraordinary erudition", recommended his disciples to study his work, and referred to his repudiation by the Romanian state as "a real stain on our public life of the late [19th] century". During that time, Iordan and his colleagues Perpessicius
Perpessicius
Perpessicius was a Romanian literary historian and critic, poet, essayist and fiction writer. One of the prominent literary chroniclers of the Romanian interwar, he stood apart in his generation for having thrown his support behind the modernist and avant-garde currents of Romanian literature...
and Alexandru Rosetti published renewed commentary on Şăineanu's work, being later joined by philosopher Constantin Noica
Constantin Noica
Constantin Noica was a Romanian philosopher, essayist and poet. His preoccupations were throughout all philosophy, from epistemology, philosophy of culture, axiology and philosophic anthropology to ontology and logics, from the history of philosophy to systematic philosophy, from ancient to...
, folklorist Ovidiu Bârlea and various other intellectuals.
A new edition of Dicţionarul universal saw print after the 1989 Revolution
Romanian Revolution of 1989
The Romanian Revolution of 1989 was a series of riots and clashes in December 1989. These were part of the Revolutions of 1989 that occurred in several Warsaw Pact countries...
and the end of communism. According to writer and researcher Rodica Marian, this reissue "without interventions" constitutes proof of a return to the "past parameters" of lexicography, at the end of a deterioration of standards. It was followed by several other initiatives, which notably resulted in reprints of Studii folclorice and Încercare asupra semasiologiei române. Writing in 2003, Alexandru Muşina
Alexandru Musina
Alexandru Muşina is a Romanian poet, essayist, and editor born in Sibiu.He studied literature at the University of Bucharest in the late 1970s and published poetry in the 1980s beginning with Cinci in 1982....
referred to Şăineanu as a "great", "mistreated" and "unrecognized" linguist, defining as "his valuable work, as yet unchallenged and still relevant". In 2008, the case surrounding Şăineanu's naturalization bid was the subject of a biographical study, written by historian George Voicu and published by the Elie Wiesel National Institute for Studying the Holocaust in Romania
Elie Wiesel National Institute for Studying the Holocaust in Romania
The Elie Wiesel National Institute for Studying the Holocaust in Romania is a public institution established by the Romanian government on August 7, 2005, and officially opened on October 9 of the same year, which is Romania's National Day of Commemorating the Holocaust.The institute is named...
. Şăineanu's works have also been the subject of reprints in France, and have continued to be recommended secondary sources by academic institutions in the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
more than a century after they were first published. His posthumously published writings include a 1991 edition of Une carrière philologique en Roumanie.
External links
Şăineanu's archived texts at the Bibliothèque nationale de FranceBibliothèque nationale de France
The is the National Library of France, located in Paris. It is intended to be the repository of all that is published in France. The current president of the library is Bruno Racine.-History:...
, available through the Gallica digital library:
-
- Une carrière philologique en Roumanie
- La Création métaphorique en français et en roman: Le chien
- La Création métaphorique en français et en roman: Le chat
- L'Argot ancien
- Les Sources de l'argot ancien (I)
- Les Sources de l'argot ancien (II)
- L'Argot des tranchées
- La Langue de Rabelais
- Le Langage parisien au XIXe siècle
- Problèmes littéraires du seizième siècle
- L'Influence et la réputation de Rabelais