chronicles and recommend them for reading, he came to propose that the Moldavian dialect, as reflected in these, could be used as a template for the modern speech. Nevertheless, his views fluctuated, and he was noted for proposing himself that the Church language be used as a template, while contrasting the support he gave to Westernization in general with his distaste for popular French-sounding neologisms. In an article he published in 1847, Asachi defined himself as a partisan of "the juste milieu" on language matters, and recommended adopting words and rules of grammar with moderation, and from all sources available. According to the literary critic Garabet Ibrăileanu, "[...] anybody who has ever read anything of what this writer has authored knows that he has a language of his own, a characteristic one, resembling those of many writers, without resemblig that of anyone else to the point where we could place him in any category." The same commentator nonetheless noted that there were clear similarities between the way in which Asachi used Romanian and the language favored by Costache Conachi. His enduring aversion towards Western neologisms, as well as towards the Latin-based linguistic purism favored by many Transylvanian scholars, made Asachi a predecessor of the Bukovinian academic Aron Pumnul. However, in his later years, Asachi came to praise and uphold Heliade Rădulescu's controversial advocacy in favor of modifying Romanian on the basis of Italian (with its claim that the two languages were in fact closely related dialects of Latin). Asachi's experimentations with the Romanian Latin alphabet were noted for their inconsistencies, and criticized as such by Kogălniceanu (who, as an example, pointed out that Asachi had alternatively used "tch", "tz", "c", and "cz" to mark the voiceless postalveolar affricate). Asachi and the Romanian theater Considered, together with the Wallachian Heliade Rădulescu, the founder of early Romanian theater, Asachi produced the first staging of a Romanian-language play, first performed for the public on 27 December 1816, at the Ghica family manor. The work was his own adaptation of Myrtil et Chloé, a pastoral theme authored by Solomon Gessner and retaken by Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian; in its printed version, the text also featured illustrations drawn by his own hand. Extremely popular, Asachi's play was celebrated for helping to counter the perceived xenophily of the early 19th century Moldavian cultural environment. Two Ghicas and a Sturdza were assigned parts in the first staging,