ARHIVELE OLTENIEI - Universitatea din Craiova

PROFESSIONS AND FUNCTIONSWITH A SPECIAL STATUTE IN THE PASTIUSTINA BURCIBetween an active society and the language spoken by its membersexists a relation of interdependence, because the changes from the economic,social, cultural, judicial or military life of the community, either important orless important, are often reflected in the branches of the language, specially inthe lexical one, which is the most willing (sometimes obliged) to accept and toadopt the changes.The Romanian semantics proved to be the depositary of an impressivenumber of appellatives, which were and are used in the context of some eventsthat occurred in the society in a specific time and, implicitly, according to thechanges from the consciousness of the speakers and to the importance that theygave to some notion or another, along the time. “This gradual evolution of onelanguage, in which everything happened successively, might be noticed whenwe try to study it, regarding the way it looks at some point (statically), or duringits development (diachronically)” 1 .On their basis one could reconstitute “images” from the past, with all itsspecific realities (the rulers and their internal or external fights, the fights betweenthe throne rivals and the boyar’s parties, the attributions of the high-officials, thecommercial and agrarian laws, the life on the court, the old institutions, the church,the industry, the trading, the trades 2 etc.), could be established the succession ofthe events and could be dated some realities. Each reality – material or spiritual –is characterized through a specific vocabulary, influenced by the borrowed wordsfrom the languages that came in touch, directly or indirectly, with the Romanianlanguage. From this point of view, the studying of the society’s evolutive stagesand, implicitly, those of the language spoken at one time, remained always anopen matter for the researchers from the most various fields, also representing arelatively reliable way for us to know our past.One of the domains in which could be done many researches is thatregarding the professions and functions, practiced along the time by theautochthon population.Because of its specific features, meaning that it concerns the humanactivity, and the connection with the development of the community (given the1 Th. Capidan, Limbă şi cultură, Craiova, Fundaţia Scrisul Românesc, 2005, p. 10.2 Ioan Bogdan, Documente şi regeste privitoare la relaţiile Ţării Rumâneşti cu Braşovulşi Ungaria în sec. XV şi XVI, Bucureşti, 1902, p. XII.ARHIVELE OLTENIEI, Serie nouă, nr. 21, 2007, p. 147–154