The first Romanian –Gagauz dictionary in Moldova’s history was published and will be soon launched officially. Ambassador Todur Angheli worked on it for almost four years. The author has told IPN that he wrote the dictionary because he wants every inhabitant of the country to know the official language.
The dictionary has over 20,000 words and more than 16,000 synonyms. Todur Angheli said that the dictionary is easily comprehensible to both children and scientists. The Ministry of Education provided support in printing the dictionary after the author sought help from President Nicolae Timofti. By at least one copy of the dictionary will be distributed to the country’s libraries. The official launch will take place at the National Library in Chisinau.
In the book’s preface, Doctor of Philology Vasile Bahnaru, director of the Institute of Philology of the Academy of Sciences, wrote that this dictionary is very important for the ethnocultural area of Moldova as it will facilitate the learning of Romanian by Gagauzians and of the Gagauz language by persons of other ethnic groups.
“It’s not a secret that the coexistence of the Bessarabian Romanians with the Gagauzians makes the command of Romanian a necessity. After the fall of the USSR, this language acquired new functional dimensions in our society, substituting Russian in most of the socioeconomic and spiritual areas. For these reasons, for efficient and sensible national linguistic policy to be formulated and implemented, it is very important to know the language of the majority, while the bilingual dictionaries have an inestimable value in this respect,” said Vasile Bahnaru.
Ambassador Todur Angheli wrote historical books, including about the family of Dimitri Cantemir. He translated poems by Grigore Vieru and Mihai Eminescu’s poem “Luceafaurul” (“Adonis”) into the Gagauz language, but published books with his own poems in Romanian.
