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.