DIMINUTIVE ÎN EPITAFURILE DIN „CIMITIRUL VESEL”
Diminutives Contained in the Epitaphs from the Merry Cemetary, in Săpânța

Summary/Abstract: Having over 80 years of history, part of which concurred with the communist period, The Merry Cemetery from Săpânța (Maramureș) has always been a valuable source of heterogeneous language samples not fully explored to the present day. Following an inner intuition, the well-known artist, Stan Ioan Pătraș, together with his aides and the disciples who continued his work, tended to bring the epitaph writing art to a common pattern that would resemble more the original texts inscribed on the first crosses.Strongly influenced by the colloquial speech, the language we notice in these funeral texts sums-up numerous lexical forms, which are more or less respectful of the literary pattern. One can remark the derivative capacity Romanian language has if they pay attention to the diminutive suffixes used in epitaphs and which, not at all unusual for such type of texts, often do not correspond to the form patterns mentioned in dictionaries. We consider this study to be necessary and appropriate for providing a detailed, diachronic analysis of the way the diminutive forms got preserved or transformed within the Maramureș area, even more so since Săpânța is situated between other two villages with a Ukrainian and Hungarian-majority population, respectively.Our focus will be on establishing connections between the diminutive forms and the persons to whom the epitaphs were dedicated, based on the common knowledge that, in most of the cases, the author of the texts - who would also be the sculptor of the crosses - took up the habit of adapting his lexical approach to the peculiarities of every person he wrote about. Diminutive suffixes not only apply to the common nouns forming the basic vocabulary of the language, but they also influence anthroponyms and toponyms. Some of these forms have gradually lost their specific emotional or pejorative background and, sometimes, even the diminutive touch, cases we will not dwell upon in the present study but instead we will briefly mention.

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