Bojadschi, between the Vernacular and the Linguistic Fantasy

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to honor Bojadschi’s efforts to build an Aromanian grammar addressed to several types of public and having an appropriate goal for each of them, thereby clarifying his role and his attitude toward language. Generally speaking, since Dunke (1895), and despite Papahagi’s (1915) expedited demonstration, it has been believed that Bojadschi was lexically inconsistent. However, browsing the 228 pages of his grammar, we find that the author uses the usual Aromanian common words, the so-called vernacular, along with neologisms and a few words which appear to have been built by his linguistic fantasy.
In the early nineteenth century the Aromanians had already established settlements in the cities of Austria and Hungary. In 1809, in Buda, the young Aromanian doctor G. Roja published his book about the mastery of reading Romanian with Latin characters, initiating Romanians and Aromanians readers into using the Latin alphabet for their language. In 1813, in Vienna, M. Bojadschi, professor of Modern Greek, published his Aromanian grammar.
From the variety of Bojadschi’s public(s) and from his attitude towards the Aromanian language, it follows that his grammar becomes one with a pragmatic importance, because it gives a picture of the language as used in communication in his lifetime, putting to work all vocabulary layers. At the same time, Bojadschi enriches the vocabulary using neologisms, alternating words from the vernacular with new words, without any pretention or intention to eliminate non-Latin words. His open linguistic attitude would not be perpetuated by his successors who tried to “purify” the Aromanian language in order to bring it closer to the literary Dacoromanian.