Lucian Costin ‘bănăţenist’? Observaţii critice despre o reputaţie necuvenită şi consecinţele acesteia în lexicografia (dialectală) românească: Proceedings of the International Conference ‟ZILELE SEXTIL PUŞCARIU”, 6th Edition, Cluj-Napoca, September 14–15, 2023

The present text intends to question the well-established reputation as a linguistic ‘expert’ in the regional varieties of Romanian spoken in Banat enjoyed by Ion Gheorghe Costinescu (1887-1951), better known under the pen name Lucian Costin, which he assumed after settling in Banat in the wake of WWI. A high-school professor of geography in Caransebeș, Costin engaged in various philological, literary, and artistic pursuits without much talent, but with a high dose of self-confidence and self-promotion. He earned his reputation as a “dialectologist” and a specialist of Banat by publishing in 1926 and 1934 two volumes of a dialectal glossary, which have been quoted as bona fide and authoritative sources by many Romanian scholars and, most notably, by the influential dictionary of the Romanian Academy (DLR). Based on my research into unpublished archival sources, I examine some of the circumstances in which the two volumes were elaborated and published, as well as their reception – for the most, critical – among Costin’s contemporaries, (e.g., linguists such as Sextil Pușcariu, Iosif Popovici, Carlo Tagliavini), who reproached him for his lack of linguistic expertise, lack of a rigorous method, and, especially, for collecting most of the linguistic materials he published indirectly, through his untrained students. I argue that these circumstances make Costin’s publications highly unreliable, only to be used with extreme care when not corroborated by other sources. I also discuss the specific circumstances that led to the uncritical reception of the linguistic material published by Costin in some of the volumes of the dictionary of the Romanian Academy (DLR) and suggest a way in which this could be avoided in a future, revised edition of that most influential dictionary of Romanian.