[1] Like other local shepherds, his parents would leave their mountainous home and cross the border, taking their sheep to spend the winter on the plains, in a warmer climate, close to the Danube.
Giuglea attended Andrei Șaguna High School in Brașov, followed by the literature and philosophy faculty of the University of Bucharest in the Romanian capital.
In 1919, following the end of the war and the union of Transylvania with Romania, Sextil Pușcariu invited him to the new University of Cluj, where he chaired the Romance department until retiring.
After returning from Italy, he began holding courses and seminars on Romance philology in Cluj, while attending the weekly meetings of Pușcariu's Museum of the Romanian Language circle, where he presented the results of his own research.
After lengthy discussions, Giuglea's proposal was adopted: the normal Romanian orthography would be supplemented by necessary diacritics in order to render faithfully the speech recorded.
Concerned with the development of Hispanic studies at Cluj, he founded a Spanish lectureship within the Romance philology department, with the position assigned to an academic from Spain.
[4] However, his scientific activity continued: he took part in sessions of the Museum (which became the Linguistics Institute in 1948), and organized the gathering of toponymic and anthroponymic material, surrounding himself with younger collaborators from Cluj but also Timișoara and Pitești.
[3] Giuglea began publishing in Densusianu's Buletinul Societății Filologice while still a student, submitting a study of the Săcele speech in 1907 and one on pastoral terminology in 1908.
Giuglea's first published foray into this domain was a 1909 work on Latin elements in Romanian, devoting special attention to pastoral and agricultural vocabulary.