George Giuglea

George Giuglea (January 29, 1884 – April 7, 1967) was an Austro-Hungarian-born Romanian linguist and philologist.

Biography Origins and education He was born in Satulung, a village that today is incorporated into Săcele city, close to Brașov in southeast Transylvania. The family were shepherds, and Giuglea's childhood was divided between his native village and Roseți, Călărași County, in the Romanian Old Kingdom. Like other local shepherds, his parents would leave their mountainous home and cross the border, taking their sheep to spend the winter on the plains, in a warmer climate, close to the Danube. Giuglea attended Andrei Șaguna High School in Brașov, followed by the literature and philosophy faculty of the University of Bucharest in the Romanian capital. His professors included Titu Maiorescu, Nicolae Iorga, Ioan Bianu, Dimitrie Onciul and Simion Mehedinți. Ovid Densusianu was particularly influential for the student, who would compose an evocative obituary for him in 1938.

Career at Cluj Giuglea completed his Romance studies in Italy from 1920 to 1921, with Matteo Bartoli at the University of Turin and Ernesto Giacomo Parodi at the University of Florence. The former initiated him into the principles and methods underpinning the new field of linguistic geography, while the latter deepened his knowledge of Vulgar Latin and Italian dialects. After returning from Italy, he began holding courses and seminars on Romance philology in Cluj, while attending the weekly meetings of Pușcariu's Museum of the Romanian Language circle, where he presented the results of his own research. He was a constant contributor to Dacoromania.

He was elected a corresponding member of the Romanian Academy in 1936. In 1940, after the Second Vienna Award assigned Northern Transylvania to Hungary, he withdrew to Sibiu, together with the university and the museum. He returned to Cluj in 1945, continuing as a professor until 1947, when he reached the retirement age. However, his scientific activity continued: he took part in sessions of the Museum (which became the Linguistics Institute in 1948), and organized the gathering of toponymic and anthroponymic material, surrounding himself with younger collaborators from Cluj but also Timișoara and Pitești. He died in Bucharest in 1967 and, in accordance with his wishes, was buried in Cluj.

Nevertheless, his research interests shifted toward a historic and etymological study of the Romanian lexis and a determination of the language's relationship to its Romance counterparts. Giuglea's first published foray into this domain was a 1909 work on Latin elements in Romanian, devoting special attention to pastoral and agricultural vocabulary. His study of etymology aimed to support the Daco-Romanian continuity thesis of the origin of the Romanians through linguistic arguments. To this end, he assembled a list of some 400 words of Latin origin found in Romanian but not in the Aromanian language. He continued to emphasize Latinity in the early communist period, when the emphasis was on exaggerating the Slavic influence.

At the same time, he was deeply interested in exploring the pre-Roman Eastern Romance substratum. However, his attempts to demonstrate Germanic influence from passing Goths and Gepids, as well as old Greek elements, proved less convincing. Toponymy was another of his preoccupations. As a Romance scholar, he was interested in lexical and semantic parallels between Romanian and, in particular, the Iberian Romance languages. After retiring, he remained in Cluj although his family lived in Bucharest, and despite advancing blindness, published a significant number of articles in his later years.