(...) The Slavs, as is well known, had a significant influence on the Romanian language, as well as on early Romanian institutions and culture. In fact the appreciation of their role has also swung between extremes, according to the changing ideological and political conjuncture. In the Latinist phase, and in nineteenth-century historiography in general until quite late on, the Slav factor was eliminated or drastically minimized. The tendency is easily explained in the context of the process of modernization of Romanian society and the desperate attempt (with partial and temporary success) to escape from the Slav space of the continent. It is worth noting that up to B. P. Hasdeu, modern Romanian historians did not even know Slavonic or the various Slav languages, a paradoxical situation given the Slavonic packaging of medieval Romanian culture. Hasdeu himself, who was educated in a Slav environment and who could be considered the first Romanian Slavicist, did not prove to be an upholder of Slav influence. While he sought to moderate Latinism by recourse to the Dacian substratum, where the Slavs were concerned he strove to limit their impact on the Romanian synthesis. Hasdeu considered that the Romanian people had been fully formed when it entered into relations with the Slavs. Slav words had come into the Romanian language not by ethnic contact but through political, religious, and cultural links over some seven centuries, up to the time of Matei Basarab and Vasile Lupu. The reaction towards rehabilitating the Slavs and Slavonic culture in Romanian history came from the Junimists of the late nineteenth century as a reply to Latinism and, in a sense, as an exercise in rising above national complexes. I have already mentioned Panu’s suggestions in this direction. What caused a sensation, however, was the Etymological Dictionary (1870-1879) of Alexandru Cihac, a close associate of Junimea. The etymologies established by Cihac led to the unexpected conclusion that the lexical base of the Romanian language was more Slav (and of other origins) than Latin: two-fifths Slav elements, one-fifth Turkish, and likewise one-fifth Latin. Romanian became a mixed language in which Turkisms and words of Latin origin had about the same weight. The almost simultaneous publication of the dictionaries of Laurian and Cihac illustrates the extremes between which the interpretation of the Romanian language, and of origins and influences in general, was evolving (with the necessary observation that Cihac’s work is appreciated by specialists as being far superior to Laurian’s linguistic fantasies). This etymological Gordian knot was cut by Hasdeu with his seductive theory of the circulation of words. The structure of a language—Hasdeu shows—is not given by the mere number of words but by their circulation. Some words are almost forgotten, preserved only in dictionaries, while others are in constant use. Their value is thus very different. “It is true that Slavisms and even Turkisms exist in no small numbers among the Romanians; in circulation, however—that is, in the most vital activity of Romanian speech, in its most organic movement—they lose out almost completely in comparison with Latinisms.” It is possible to formulate complete sentences only with words of Latin origin, but no sentence is possible using exclusively words of other origins. Hasdeu’s demonstration turned the relationship round again, away from the emphasis on Slav influence. The Slav factor, however, was forcefully highlighted by Ioan Bogdan. For him, the Slavs became a constituent element of the Romanian synthesis: “The influence of the Slav element in the formation of our nation is so evident that we may say without exaggeration that we cannot even speak of a Romanian people before the absorption of Slav elements by the native Roman population in the course of the sixth to tenth centuries." In the Romanian language there are “an enormous number of Slav elements”, adopted either directly, through cohabitation, or through political and literary contacts. The Slavonic language was used in the church and the state, and even in “the day-to-day business of the Romanians” until the sixteenth or seventeenth century; and in the life of the state “almost all our old institutions are either of Slav origin or contain, alongside a few elements inherited from the Romans, a greater number of Slav elements”. Romanian-Bulgarian relations in particular are treated by Ioan Bogdan in a manner which Romanian nationalism could not fail to find disagreeable. While we, the Romanians, “were departing more and more from Roman culture and becoming savage”, the Bulgarians, “who came like barbarians over us, took from their Byzantine neighbors, under the protective wings of an organized and powerful state, a civilization which was then advanced, that of Byzantium, which was none other than the continuation, in a Greek form with oriental influences, of the old Roman civilization”. For three centuries the Bulgarian tsardom ruled north of the Danube; this is the period in which many Slav elements of culture and political organization penetrated Romanian society. (...)
