Alexandru Lambrior

Born at Fălticeni in the Principality of Moldavia, his father was Dimitrachi Lambrior; a poor child who was adopted, Dimitrachi's origins are unknown, and his son would later strive to find them out. His mother Marghiolița was the daughter of a low-ranking boyar: her father Vasile Cumpătă was vistiernic (treasury official) who owned a large estate in Soci village. By 1848, Dimitrachi had become a pitar (bread supplier), but he died later that year, and Marghiolița followed in 1850, leaving five-year-old Alexandru and his younger sister orphans; he was subsequently raised by various relatives, first at his grandparents' and then in Flămânzi. In 1852, he began primary school in Târgu Neamț, continued in his native town and completed in Piatra Neamț in 1860. That year, he entered the Iași central gymnasium on a scholarship; In 1872, he became a history teacher at the Iași military school. At the beginning of the same year, he joined Junimea literary society. He delivered several public lectures on various topics, gaining esteem for his intelligence and critical ability. From September 1874 to February 1875, he taught advanced history at the city's National College. At the Sorbonne, he audited courses taught by Michel Bréal, Gaston Paris and Arsène Darmesteter. In 1876, Lambrior entered the École des Hautes Études, where he was appreciated by his professors. Starting in 1877, he began publishing a few articles on linguistics in România magazine and was elected a member of the Société de Linguistique de Paris. Lambrior returned to Iași that June, taking up his former post at the National College. In order to support his family, he also taught at several private schools. He was close friends with Mihail Eminescu and Ion Creangă, and continued publishing in Convorbiri Literare, the Junimea organ where he had made his published debut in 1873. In 1879, he began offering an open course on Romanian philology at the university. In 1882, he was named a teacher at the upper normal school; the same year, he was elected a corresponding member of the Romanian Academy. One of his sons became a doctor at Sfântul Spiridon Hospital in Iași, a second worked as a magistrate in Tecuci and the third was a teacher and primary school inspector in Bacău. ==Contributions==

As a philologist, Lambrior made a name for himself in 1873, when he published a study about old and modern Romanian, which became a representative text for Junimea's approach to language issues. The article revolved around the Romanian translation of four philosophical volumes by Johan Gabriel Oxenstierna, which appeared in Moldavia between 1781 and 1807. While praising the translators for the accuracy of their expression, he deplored their avoidance of older words in favor of newer terms, which he felt could never be in harmony with the rest of the language. Starting from a linguistic positivism that was essentially Neogrammarian, he was interested in discovering phonetic, morphological and syntactical rules of Romanian. He was aided by his knowledge of the language's history and of its dialects, and chose to integrate his study not in the context of the Balkan languages, as had heretofore generally been done, but of the Romance languages. He vigorously defended the language as spoken by the common people, and deplored any sort of neologisms, which he considered damaging for the language's spirit and its national character. As for the written language, he appreciated its expressive force and evocative quality, which he believed belonged only to the received language and not neologisms. He recommended that the literary language be enriched by borrowing from living folk expressions, and praised authors who chose this style. In a lengthy 1881 study, he was among the first Romanian scholars to suggest that the language was written down before 1500, also proposing that Latin letters were used prior to the adoption of the Romanian Cyrillic alphabet. His ideas were later taken up by Alexandru Dimitrie Xenopol and Alexandru Rosetti. The same article, starting from an analysis of the Cyrillic writing, argued in favor of a phonetic system of orthography. In 1880–1881, he was among the first philologists to argue that Coresi played a leading role in the literary language's development, and that the first translations of religious texts in Transylvania "extinguished" local written dialects in the other Romanian provinces of Moldavia and Wallachia. Later philologists such as Nicolae Iorga, Ovid Densusianu, Rosetti and Petre P. Panaitescu embraced the idea, which was only given a critical re-evaluation by Ion Gheție in the 1980s. In line with his principles and with the Junimist notion of a patriotic education, he published Carte de citire, an anthology of old Romanian texts, in 1882. He was greatly interested in popular history and traditions, incorporating literary folklore into a wider context. Lambrior believed folklore was of documentary value in studying history as well as the language. He thus recommended that folklore be collected directly from villagers, and decried anthologies put together by scholarly Latinists. He was the first Romanian folklorist to argue in favor of assembling a corpus of folk literature by recording all variants and types in their authentic form, with the goal of precisely understanding the people's ideas, beliefs, spirit and literary inclinations. Lambrior also asserted that in previous centuries, there had been a commonality of traditions between boyars and peasants. He believed that his own century had witnessed the uprooting of the first and the exposure of the second to increasing influence by the educated class, threatening the production and transmission of folklore. This was the explanation he offered for the disappearance of certain forms, such as the ballad. Additionally, in 1875 he was the first to claim that the Romanian epic began in the early medieval courts. He suggested that the genre was initially sung at gatherings of the elite and that for the Romanian nobility of the period, it represented the highest form of verbal art. His theories were embraced and developed by later generations of folklorists, including Iorga and Panaitescu. ==Notes==