Romanian transitional alphabet

The Romanian transitional alphabet (Romanian: Alfabetul român de tranziție), also known as the civil alphabet (Romanian: alfabetul civil), was an alphabet containing a mix of Cyrillic and Latin characters used for the Romanian language in the 19th century.[1] It replaced the Romanian Cyrillic alphabet and was in turn replaced by the Romanian Latin alphabet.

Foaie pentru minte, inimă și literatură, the literary supplement of the Romanian newspaper Gazeta de Transilvania using the transitional alphabet in 1840
Transitional alphabet (fragment of Dimitrie Bolintineanu's Călătorii pe Dunăre și în Bulgaria, 1858

It started to be enforced in 1828 thanks to the grammars of Ion Heliade Rădulescu,[2] although the Romanian Orthodox Church continued to use the Romanian Cyrillic for religious purposes until 1881, after the declaration of independence of Romania. The Holy Synod of the Romanian Orthodox Church decided to replace the Cyrillic alphabet in this year under secular pressure.[3]

The Romanian transitional alphabet began to gain more popularity after 1840, first introducing in this year Latin letters between Cyrillic ones and then replacing some of the Cyrillic letters with Latin letters so that the readers of Romanian from Moldavia, Transylvania and Wallachia could become accustomed to them.[4] The final turning point was completed under French influence, which appeared due to the Wallachian and Moldavian revolutions of 1848 and the Crimean War which ended with the Treaty of Paris (1856).

The complete replacement of the Cyrillic alphabet by the Latin alphabet in the United Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia was formalized in 1862 by Prince Alexandru Ioan Cuza. The Romanian transitional alphabet became one of the symbols of Romanian unity and the national-bourgeois revolution, a direct consequence of the Revolutions of 1848 that also affected Wallachia and Moldavia.

See also

References
  1. Stînea, Carmen (2009). "Din colecțiile bibliotecii Muzeului Național al Unirii din Alba Iulia: primele manuale moderne românești din Transilvania" [From the Collections of the Library of the National Museum of Union Alba Iulia: The First Modern Romanian Textbooks from Transylvania] (PDF). Terra Sebus (in Romanian). 1: 267–277.
  2. Eliad, D. I. (1828). Gramatică românească (in Romanian). Sibiu.
  3. Malin, Virgil (1962). "Înlocuirea alfabetului chirilic cu alfabetul latin în tipăriturile noastre bisericești". Mitropolia Olteniei (in Romanian). 14 (10–12): 624–640.
  4. Barza, Vlad (23 December 2014). "Fotogalerie Si cartile de povesti au povestile lor. O expozitie arata "file" din istoria acestor carti din ultimii 160 de ani". HotNews.ro (in Romanian). Retrieved 1 March 2022.


This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.