EPIGRAPHIC LEXICON OF DACIA

2011-English

2011-Romanian

2012-English

2012-Romanian

2013-English

2014-English

2014-Romanian

2015-English

2015-Romanian

2016-English

2016-Romanian

2011-2016 English

2011-2016 Romanian

The Latin language used in Dacia, parent of today Romanian language, and the most important proof of the integration of this territory in the great Roman civilization, was always in the attention of the researchers, both historians and philologists. The Latin used in Dacia provides important data and arguments for different fields of knowledge, and yet, until today, we have no complete repertoire of all the Latin words documented in this part of the Roman world. As we have no literary sources from this province, the only primary sources we can use are its inscriptions, whose content and message must be wholly analyzed and interpreted at a modern and competitive European level.
The project’s aim is to create a complete lexicon of the Latin language documented in Dacia, an efficient and neutral tool, whose existence will make manipulations and partial interpretations of the historical sources if not impossible, at least more difficult. The lexicon, elaborated at a modern scientific level and on a European scale, will thus have an important contribution to the study and understanding of the Vulgar Latin, as it was used in Dacia.
The linguistic value of the ancient inscriptions, their considerable importance to the study of spoken Latin and its phonetic, morphological and lexical tendencies is generally acknowledged. Different studies dedicated to the Latin language of Dacia are known, but they did not use all the ancient inscriptions, whose number increases all the time; and so the old results must be revised taking into account the contemporary knowledge and the modern methods of scientific research. Only the gathering of all inscriptions, accompanied by the philological and historical analysis of the data found in these sources can give us the necessary foundation for an effective and complex research of the language used in this province. The rigorous investigation of the linguistic material gathered from the epigraphic sources gives us useful information for reconstructing not only the provincial Latin, but also the social and economical life of this period, as well as the mental and cultural frame of the Daco-Roman society.
And so the elaboration and publication of a lexicon thus devised as to be useful not only to researchers and teachers, but also to students, a lexicon who includes all the words attested in the inscriptions found in Dacia – together with the explanation (written in Romanian) of all their meanings and of the differences to what constitute the norm of literary Latin (where the need presents itself) – constitute an important and necessary step for all the researches in this field.