The first mathematics textbook printed in Moldavia. Elementi aritmetice arătate firești (Iași, 1795)
Affiliations
Faculty of Letters, University of Pitești, Str. Gh. Doja 41, 110253 Pitești, Romania
History
Received September 15, 2021
Accepted October 7, 2021
Published December 12, 2021
Abstract
The first mathematics textbook printed in Moldavia (Iași, 1795) was not sufficiently examined, although the translation offers us valuable information on the Italian influence on the Romanian language and a precious linguistic material as regards both the configuration of the Romanian literary language in Moldavia at the end of the 18th century and the constitution of mathematical terminology. The linguistic material excerpted reflects phonetic and morphologic norms specific of the author’s dialect, sometimes going beyond the criteria illustrated by the local tradition, especially in the morphosyntax field. The lack of a terminological tradition is to be observed in the high number of un-adapted terms, semantic loans and old terms. Amfilohie’s intense activity of translating from Italian (the scholar being a genuine forerunner of the Italianate movement in Moldavia) is proof of the depths of the cultural contacts with the western world, resulting in the intensification of the renewing of the Romanian vocabulary by assimilating Latin-Romance borrowings in general and Italian ones, in particular.
Copyright
© 2021 The Authors. Publishing rights belong to the Journal. The article is freely accessible under the terms and conditions of the CC-BY Open Access licence.