Romeno antico e lingua della poesia popolare: il problema degli arcaismi

The language of Romanian oral poetry, especially that of narrative genres like winter solstice songs (colinde) and epic songs (cantece batranesti ), is marked by a large number of lexical and morphological archaisms. In this paper we analyse some lexical items (mohorıt, pelita, a se nadai, a se mıneca, etc.) and a morphological phenomenon (the inversion of the auxiliary and the participle), to point out the relationship between the folk texts and the most ancient documents of Romanian (principally religious texts of the 16th and 17th century).