Comparative Philology

The social  evolution of  zoon  politikon  throughout  history and, more particularly  in recent  days, that  of  the  European  homo  sapiens  at  the  outset  of  the  third  millennium  has  brought  in its  wake  the  switch-over  from an  intraidiomatic  to  an  interidiomatic  modus  vivendi,  in other  words from  “living-within-a-language”  to “ living-between-the-languages”. This is  precisely  where  contrastive linguistics – a  province  which  both  Romanian  and  international  research  have  kept  away  from  for  too  long  -  comes  into  its  own. Although,   admittedly,  promoted  in  recent  years  from a backup-strategy-position  to  a   “must”  of  worldwide  research,  comparative  techniques  unfortunately  are  still   keeping  an  embarrassingly  low  profile.  And  even  when  sporadically  resorted  to,  researchers  warily  confine  their  application  to  two  or  three  languages  at  the  most.
The  chief  novelty  of  the  present  project  resides  in  the  fact  that  comparative  research  is  being  conducted  on  no  less  than  5  languages  of  different  lineage :  three  of  them  descended  from  Latin (Italian, Romanian, Spanish) and  the  other  two  from  old  German  ( English , German). Enhancing the complexity of the approach is also the double focus of the contrastive analysis : on the languages as members of a particular family, and furthermore, on the Romance and Germanic families as descended from the larger European stem.
 
Posted by: MyGuide2 Admin on 20 December 2009

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