Language purism in the mirror. William Barnes and August Treboniu Laurian

Abstract

The article sets out to draw a very brief comparison of the common features shared by the purist attitudes displayed by two 19th-century English and Romanian scholars, William Barnes and August Treboniu Laurian and classifies them according to the set of criteria devised by Thomas (1991). The paper also goes over several concepts regarding purism. The author of the paper analyses the concept of purism in both countries within the intellectual and temporal dimensions of purism. William Barnes was a Victorian reformer, a polymath, a priest, a poet in his Dorset dialect and a utopian prescriptivist linguist capitalizing on the Germanic word stock of English and suggesting the removal of excessive Latin & Greek vocabulary. He wrote several linguistic books and poetry. August Treboniu Laurian was an outstanding Romanian reformer and polymath. He penned a theoretical book heralding his reformist belief: “Tentamen Criticum”, in 1840 and a huge Dictionary of the Romanian language in 1876 (after a seven year work) capitalising on the Latin word stock of Romanian and suggesting the removal of non-Latin lexemes.