Transylvanian school
The Transylvanian School (Romanian Școala Ardeleană ) was a cultural movement in the second half of the 18th century and in the 19th century in Transylvania . She took her beginnings after about 1700 , the Greek Orthodox Church in Transylvania their submission to the Phanar gave up and with Rome Uniate and thus the Romanian Greek Catholic Church was. The new contacts with Rome brought the ideas of the Age of Enlightenment to the Romanians in Transylvania . Major centers of movement were in Blaj , Oradea , Lugoj and Beiuş .
Its members were the first Romanians to view Romanian ethnogenesis from a scientific point of view. They brought historical and philological arguments in favor of the theory of a direct descent of today's Romanians from the former Roman population of Dacia (the so-called Dako-Roman continuity theory ).
One of the first endeavors of this movement was the constitution of the Libellus Valachorum Supplex .
The Transylvanian School had a considerable impact on the self-image of the Romanians in the Carpathian Basin and also on those beyond the mountains; a Romanian national consciousness or a Romanian nationalism arose . The verses of today's Romanian hymn ( Deşteaptă-te, române! ) Were written during this time and first of all formed the Transylvanian hymn.
The school also developed the current Romanian alphabet based on the Latin alphabet , which in 1860 superseded the Cyrillic alphabet previously used. The pronunciation rules were derived from Italian and French .
Through sound change , the vowels i, a and u partially became the vowel ɨ . Philologists now proposed an etymological spelling according to which the alphabet should contain both a letter î and the letters â and û for one and the same sound ɨ in order to be able to write words of Latin origin accordingly. For example, Romanian în should be written with î, because it derives from the Latin in , Romanian sûnt with û, since it derives from the Latin sum and român with â, since it is derived from the Latin romanus .
Another noticeable contribution made by the school concerns the early use of French and Italian neologisms .