Theodor Capidan
Romanian linguist
Theodor Capidan (April 28 [O.S. April 15] 1879 – September 1, 1953) was an Ottoman-born Romanian linguist. An ethnic Aromanian from the Macedonia region, he studied at Leipzig before teaching school at Thessaloniki. Following the creation of Greater Romania at the end of World War I, Capidan followed his friend Sextil Pușcariu to the Transylvanian capital Cluj, where he spent nearly two decades, the most productive part of his career. He then taught in Bucharest for a further ten years and was marginalized late in life under the nascent communist regime. Capidan's major contributions involve studies of the Aromanians and the Megleno-Romanians, as well as their respective languages. His research extended to reciprocal influences between Romanian and the surrounding Slavic languages, the Eastern Romance substratum and the Balkan sprachbund, as well as toponymy. He made a significant contribution to projects for a Romanian-language dictionary and atlas.
Biography
Origins and early career
He was born into an Aromanian family in Prilep, a town that formed part of the Ottoman Empire's Manastir Vilayet and is now in North Macedonia. His parents were the tailor Teohari Capidan and his wife Eugenia Vreta. After attending primary school in his native town, he followed his elder brother Pericle, a future painter, in emigrating to the Romanian Old Kingdom.
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This entry incorporates text from “Theodor Capidan” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.