Some Reflections on Linguistic Calques Appearing in Old Romanian

Old Romanian texts are analyzed for semantic calques, investigating the causes & patterns of their formation. A list of calques is compiled, differentiating between translations no longer found in Modern Romanian & formations still in use today. Calques competing with borrowings & paraphrases are also identified. It is concluded that religious writings constituted the bulk of Old Romanian texts, & the tradition of exact, word-for-word translation, necessitated the calquing of words & syntagmas encountered in the original; the target language's lexical impoverishment forced translators to resort to both borrowing & calquing. Slavic, Greek, & Hungarian, in that order, were the languages that influenced Old Romanian the most, & the quantitative ratios of the sources & models utilized for calquing support this. It is concluded that most of these formations had only ephemeral existence, as they were ad-hoc creations to meet particular designative or expressive needs, however, those calques that survived, mostly of Latin model, enriched the lexicon & expressive potential of Contemporary Romanian. Z. Dubiel