---
title: "Sextil Pușcariu"
chunk: 2/9
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sextil_Pușcariu"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:03:14.223615+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

=== Debut in academia and World War I experience ===
Pușcariu made frequent crossings into the Kingdom of Romania (the "Old Kingdom", in later reference). He was elected a corresponding member of the Romanian Academy in 1906, becoming a titular member in 1914. He also became one of several Transylvanian affiliates of Sămănătorul, the Romanian traditionalist and ethnic nationalist review in Bucharest, finding his ideas on linguistics and history challenged by Densusianu and Ion Aurel Candrea. Pușcariu's scholarly work was featured in the mainstream review Convorbiri Literare, signaling the latter's own transition toward Sămănătorist nationalism.
While at Leipzig, he came into contact with Wilhelm Meyer-Lübke, under whom he began his university career and who offered him a post at the University of Fribourg. Pușcariu declined, citing a wish to be closer to the Romanian lands. In 1903 Pușcariu began courting Leonora Maria Dima. In keeping up with the Pușcariu family tradition, which favored consanguine marriage, she was his mother's grandniece. Leonora had studied music in Brașov; her father, a mathematics teacher at Pușcariu's high school, was the elder brother of composer Gheorghe Dima. They were married on 5 September 1905, selecting academics Ion Bianu and Virgil Cioflec as their godfathers. Leonora's dowry included a villa in Bran, which became Sextil's favorite residence. The Pușcarius went on to have three children. At various later junctions, Sextil looked back on his conjugal life as having greatly improved his life, for being a "perfect union of souls".
In 1906, following earlier attempts by August Treboniu Laurian, I. C. Massim, Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu, and Alexandru Philippide, the Romanian Academy assigned Pușcariu the task of writing a Dictionary of the Romanian Language, with the latter two personally giving him their notes. Pușcariu took on the challenge at a difficult time: Romania's aging King, Carol I, had asked Philippide to remove all entries for neologisms, causing the latter to resign in protest. Pușcariu taught Romanian language and literature at Czernowitz University in the Duchy of Bukovina from 1906. He replaced the retiring Ion G. Sbiera, and eventually rose to become dean of the Literature and Philosophy Faculty. This period saw him forming a close bond with philologist Alexe Procopovici and historian Ion Nistor. In September 1911, he visited the University of Iași, in Romania, alongside Mathias Friedwagner; he forged a friendship with A. C. Cuza, the jurist and anti-Semitic doctrinaire.
While in Czernowitz (Romanian name: Cernăuți), Pușcariu refused the chance to teach at Vienna, as he would not have been able to lecture in Romanian, at the same time declaring his adherence to Pan-Germanism. The outbreak of World War I caught Pușcariu in Techirghiol, Romania. A reserve officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army, and overall an Austrian patriot, he rushed back to be mobilized in Brașov, and was later ordered to Cisnădie. In September 1914, after a liturgical music concert in the Sibiu Lutheran Cathedral, he met Onisifor Ghibu, whom he had known since 1905, and who records the deep concern the ongoing conflict was causing Pușcariu. Subsequently, Pușcariu was stationed on the Italian Front. There, his sentiments of loyalty toward the Empire conflicted with the Italophilia he felt toward a country whose inhabitants he saw as the natural allies of the Romanians, a fellow Latin people. Czernowitz, the site of his residence, where he kept his manuscripts and materials, fell to the Imperial Russian Army in the first half of the war. From February to June 1916, he was intermittently hospitalized for eye problems, first at Trieste, where he met Iuliu Maniu, and later at Innsbruck, followed by Brașov.
When the Romanian Kingdom entered the war in August 1916, on the side of the Triple Entente, he was either at home on leave or at the front, but in either case continued his research. Nevertheless, the situation forced him to interrupt work on the Dictionary of the Romanian Language he had started in 1906. The following January, he began keeping a diary, writing fairly regular entries until his wife's death in 1944. While on the front in early 1918 dealing with military accounting and supplies, he worked on a glossary of the Istro-Romanian language. His older brother, engineer Anton Pușcariu, escaped Austria-Hungary and joined the Romanian Army, dying of typhus at the garrison of Bacău in 1917.

=== Bukovina's unification ===