Continuité vs. discontinuité formelle et sémantico-stylistique dans la Romania : à propos de quelques termes religieux hérités du latin (I)

A corpus which includes words having a narrow diffusion in a particular linguistic area (such as Romania) puts the problem of linguistic fragmentation / discontinuity within the limits of this area. Narrow is in this case most frequently opposed to large and even to pan-romance, which directs the search towards finding the linguistic means used by most idioms in a certain aria for expressing the same concepts (religious concepts in our case). That kind of corpus implies also a search into the reasons of different lexical realisations in genetically related languages. In this first part of our study, we focused our attention on the theoretical aspects, namely the terminological and conceptual issues (for example, defining such notions as 'religious term with narrow diffusion in the Romance area', 'continuity', 'discontinuity' etc.), and on seven Latin terms with narrow diffusion in the Romance area', generally accepted as direct etymons of certain Romance types.