Ion Budai-Deleanu
Romanian writer and scholar (1760–1820)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ion Budai-Deleanu (January 6, 1760 – August 24, 1820)[1] was a Romanian scholar, philologist, historian, poet, and a representative of the Transylvanian School.
- Poet
- historian
- philologist
Ion Budai-Deleanu | |
|---|---|
| Born | January 6, 1760 |
| Died | August 24, 1820 |
| Occupations |
|
| Era | |
| Movement | Transylvanian School |
| Writing career | |
| Language | Romanian |
| Notable work | |
He was a member of the Order of the Golden and Rosy Cross, attending the society's meetings in Vienna.
Biography
He was born in Csigmó (today Cigmău), a village in the town of Algyógy (today Geoagiu, Hunedoara County), located in the western part of Transylvania.[2] Budai-Deleanu studied at Blaj gymnasium between 1772 and 1777, having Samuil Micu-Klein as a professor among others, and then at the College of Saint Barbara in Vienna between 1777 and 1779.[1] He completed his studies with a doctorate at the University of Erlau in 1783.[3] He settled in Lemberg (now Lviv in Ukraine) in 1797 as a royal counsellor.[4][5] His main works are the first draft of Supplex Libellus Valachorum and an epic poem, entitled Țiganiada ("Gypsy Epic"), about a band of gypsies that fought alongside the army of Vlad the Impaler, the medieval ruler of Wallachia.[1]
He was one of the first proponents of the idea of the unification of the lands that now form Romania.[6] He proposed that the union should be achieved under the rule of the Habsburgs, through the annexation of Wallachia and Moldavia into the Grand Principality of Transylvania.[7]
According to Budai-Deleanu, the Dacians did not have a role in the ethnogenesis of the Romanian people.[8] He thought that the Dacians were the ancestors of the Poles.[8]
He promoted the purification of the Romanian language from loanwords, proposing that only borrowings from Italian and French should be permitted.[9] He also strove for the replacement of the Cyrillic script with the Latin alphabet.[9] Budai-Deleanu was the first scholar of Transylvanian School to state that Romanian did not develop from Classical Latin directly, but from the vulgar language spoken in Dacia.[10]
Budai-Deleanu died in Lemberg in 1820, aged 60.
Streets în Arad, Bucharest, Cluj-Napoca, Oradea, Sibiu, and Timișoara are named after him.
