The present paper focuses on the history of a few German proper names, which can prove relevant correlations and similarities with the mentality, action and thinking of their users. Under the influence of certain factors, some toponyms and other proper names have lost their initial meaning in time and entered the language community as means of designation with generalizing function. It is unbelievable for the everyday user how many names contain etymologically hidden defamations, vague prejudices or refer to uncertain general places. Familiar words or constructions reveal a surprising background, unthinkable particularities and linguistic curiosities. Starting with the vocabulary and its dynamics, we describe onomastics and word history as linguistic disciplines, followed by a presentation of etymological data on certain proper names in the corpus.

This paper provides an overview of adverbs in the diachrony of the Romanian language with data from the 16th–18th century. The analysis starts from the stock of adverbs inherited from Latin: primary adverbs, adverbs derived from other parts of speech, especially adjectives, or borrowed adjective-adverbs. The striking fact is the lack of adverbs ending in -mente. The presence of this suffix in Western Romance languages is due to the influence of Late Latin. Being only influenced by Slavic languages at the beginning of its existence, the Romanian language started to use the suffix -eşte, the equivalent of -mente. However, short adverbial forms rarely combine with suffixes. This indicates that old forms are resistant to derivation, which differentiates Romanian from other Romance languages.

The paper provides a state of the art in research on prepositional adverbials in Romance that combine a preposition with an adjective, e.g., Sp. en breve ‘in short’ (= PA-pattern). It therefore reviews the existing bibliography on Romance in general, Latin, Catalan, French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, and Spanish. The theoretical background is the hypothesis that the PA-pattern could have played a relevant role as a third way of forming adverbials in the diachrony of Romance, paralleling adverbial adjectives (e.g., breve used as an adverb: hablar breve) and derived adverbs (e.g., brevemente). The review confirms that the PA-pattern is marginal in (written) Latin but rises abruptly in early Romance, suggesting a “hidden” past in spoken Latin. This is corroborated by the fact that similar PA-patterns are used in all Romance languages. However, these insights have often to be deduced from marginal observations on the adverbials in use. As yet, research has not systematically studied the role of PA adverbials in the diachrony of Romance.

Professeur des universités HDR en linguistiques roumaine et romane à l'Université Babeş-Bolyai de Cluj-Napoca (Roumanie), directeur de l'École doctorale d'études linguistiques et littéraires (SDSLL) et responsable d'une aire de recherche dans le cadre du Centre de linguistique romane et analyse du discours (CLARD), Faculté des lettres.

Dans notre intervention, à partir du corpus CoRoLa, nous nous proposons de discuter de l'adverbe d'altérité (altundeva) qui s'associe en roumain moderne à des adverbes indéfinis ou relatifs-interrogatifs locatifs, en créant des syntagmes adverbiaux complexes (oriunde altundeva, altundeva unde), à valeur de renforcement ainsi que de différenciation. Une telle analyse peut confirmer, dans certains cas, l'appartenance du roumain à la romanité et, dans d'autres, son individualité parmi les autres langues romanes, du fait de son isolement du continuum roman et, par la suite, de sa voie évolutive particulière.