The
Eastern Romance languagesThe Eastern Romance languages, sometimes known as the Vlach languages, are a group of Romance languages that developed in Southeastern Europe from the local eastern variant of Vulgar Latin.-History:...
developed from the Proto-Romanian language, which in turn developed from the
Vulgar LatinVulgar Latin can be defined simply as colloquial Latin.-Origin of the term:...
spoken in a region of the
BalkansThe Balkans is a geopolitical and cultural region of southeastern Europe...
which has not yet been exactly determined, but is generally agreed to have been a region north of the
Jireček LineThe Jireček Line is an imaginary line through the ancient Balkans that divided the influences of the Latin and Greek languages until the 4th century...
.
That there was language-contact between
LatinLatin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. Through the Roman conquest, Latin spread throughout the Mediterranean and a large part of Europe...
/ Vulgar Latin speakers and speakers of indigenous
Paleo-Balkan languagesThe Paleo-Balkan languages is a geo-linguistic concept referring to the Indo-European languages that were spoken in the Balkans in ancient times...
in the area is a certainty, however it is not known which Paleo-Balkan language or languages comprise the
substratalIn linguistics, a stratum or strate is a language that influences, or is influenced by another through contact. A substratum is a language which is influenced by another, while a superstratum is the language that exerts the influence...
influence in the Eastern Romance languages.
The substratal elements in the languages are mostly
lexicalIn linguistics, the lexicon of a language is its vocabulary, including its words and expressions. More formally, it is a language's inventory of lexemes....
items. Around 300 words are considered by many linguists to be of substratum origin
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/category:Romanian_language. Including place-names and river-names, and most of the forms labelled as being of unknown
etymologyEtymology is the study of the history of words and how their form and meaning have changed over time.For languages with a long written history, etymologists make use of texts in these languages, and texts about the languages, to gather knowledge about how words were used at earlier stages, and...
, the number of the substratum elements in Eastern Romance may surpass 500 basic roots. Linguistic research in recent years has increased the body of Eastern Romance words that may be considered indigenous.
In addition to
vocabularyA person's vocabulary is the set of words they are familiar with in a language. A vocabulary usually grows and evolves with age, and serves as a useful and fundamental tool for communication and acquiring knowledge.- Knowing and using a word :...
items, some other features of Eastern Romance, such as
phonologicalThis article discusses the phonology of the Romanian language. For other details on this language the reader is referred to that article....
features and elements of grammar (see Balkan sprachbund) may also be from Paleo-Balkan languages.
Lexical items
Older Romanian etymological dictionaries tended to assume a borrowing in many cases, usually from a Slavic language or from Hungarian, but etymological analysis may show that, in many cases, the direction of borrowing was from Romanian to the neighboring languages. The current
Dicţionar explicativ (the DEX) published by the
Romanian AcademyThe Romanian Academy is a cultural forum founded in Romania in 1866. It covers the scientific, artistic and literary domains. The academy has 181 acting members who are elected for life....
continues to list many words as borrowings, though the work of other linguists (Sorin Olteanu, Sorin Paliga, Ivan Duridanov,
et al.) may indicate that a number of these are in fact indigenous, from local
Indo-European languagesThe Indo-European languages are a family of several hundred related languages and dialects, including most major languages of Europe, Iran, and northern India, and historically also predominant in Anatolia and Central Asia...
.
Though the substratum status of many Romanian words is not much disputed, their status as Dacian words is controversial, some more than others. There are no significant surviving written examples of the
Dacian languageThe Dacian language was spoken by the ancient inhabitants of Dacia. It belongs to the Indo-European language family.Dacian is often considered to be a dialect of the same language as Thracian or to be a separate language from Thracian but closely related to it. -Characteristics and sources:Many...
, so it is difficult to verify in most cases whether a given Romanian word is actually from Dacian or not. Many linguists however favor a Dacian source for the Romanian substratum. Many of the Romanian substratum words have
AlbanianAlbanian is a unique Indo-European language spoken by nearly 6 million people, primarily in Albania and Kosovo but also in other areas of the Balkans in which there is an Albanian population, including western Macedonia, Montenegro, and southern Serbia. Albanian is also spoken by native enclaves...
cognates, and if these words are in fact Dacian, it indicates that the Dacian language may have been on the same branch as Albanian.
The
BulgarianThe Bulgarians are a South Slavic people, generally associated with the Republic of Bulgaria and the Bulgarian language. Emigration has resulted in Bulgarian minorities or immigrant communities in a number of other countries.-Ethnogenesis:...
Thracologist Vladimir Georgiev helped develop the theory that the Romanian language has a Daco-Moesian language as its substrate, a tongue which had a number of features which distinguished it from the
Thracian languageThe Thracian language was the Indo-European language spoken in ancient times by the Thracians in South-Eastern Europe.-Geographic distribution:...
spoken further south, across the
HaemusIn earlier times the Balkan mountains were known as the Haemus Mons. It is believed that the name is derived from a Thracian word *saimon, 'mountain ridge', which is unattested but conjectured as the original Thracian form of Greek Haimos....
range.
Other Romanian words which are argued to be indigenous have close Slavic correspondences:baltă, daltă, sută etc., though some of these also have Albanian cognates:baltë, daltë. If such words are actually indigenous, then the Slavic correspondences are in line with the Daco-Thracian corpus, Slavic cognates existing for a number of Daco-Thracian words (Dacian
diesema considered to be cognate to
divizna, from Slavic languages, etc.). Also possible are a limited number of borrowings from a North Thracian (Dacian) dialect into
Proto-SlavicProto-Slavic is the proto-language from which Slavic languages later emerged. It was spoken before the seventh century. As with all other proto-languages, no attested writings have been found; the language has been reconstructed by applying the comparative method to all the attested Slavic...
(Pre-Expansion Slavic) as early as the 3rd-4th century AD.
Other languages
There are also some Romanian substratum words in languages other than Romanian, these examples having entered via Romanian (Vlach) dialects. An example is
vatră, which is found in
SlovakThe Slovak language , is an Indo-European language that belongs to the West Slavic languages ....
,
CzechCzech is a West Slavic language with about 12 million native speakers; it is the majority language in the Czech Republic and spoken by Czechs worldwide. Czech is similar to and mutually intelligible with Slovak and, to a lesser extent, to Polish and Sorbian. - Official status :Czech is widely...
,
SerbianSerbian is a South Slavic language, spoken chiefly in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Croatia, and in the Serbian diaspora...
,
CroatianCroatian is a South Slavic language which is used primarily in Croatia, by Croats in Bosnia and Herzegovina, by Croatian minorities in some neighbouring countries, in the Italian region of Molise, and parts of the Croatian diaspora....
, and other neighboring languages, though with modified meaning. Another one is
BryndzaBryndza is a sheep milk cheese made in Central and Eastern Europe. Recipes differ slightly across the countries.-Etymology:Brânză or brînză is the generic word for "cheese" in Romanian, there is no special type of cheese associated with it...
, a type of cheese made in Eastern
AustriaAustria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.3 million people in Central Europe. It borders both Germany and the Czech Republic to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the west...
,
PolandPoland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe . Poland is bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...
,
SlovakiaThe Slovak Republic is a landlocked country in Eastern Europe with a population of over five million and an area of about . Slovakia borders the Czech Republic and Austria to the west, Poland to the north, Ukraine to the east and Hungary to the south. The largest city is its capital, Bratislava...
and
UkraineUkraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It is bordered by Russia to the east; Belarus to the north; Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary to the west; Romania and Moldova to the southwest; and the Black Sea and Sea of Azov to the south. The city of Kiev is both the capital and the largest city of...
, the word being derived from the Romanian word for
cheeseCheese is a food consisting of proteins and fat from milk, usually the milk of cows, buffalo, goats, or sheep. It is produced by coagulation of the milk protein casein. Typically, the milk is acidified and addition of the enzyme rennet causes coagulation. The solids are separated and pressed into...
.
See also
- List of Romanian words of possible Dacian origin
- Wiktionary: Romanian substratum words
- Romanian lexis
The lexis of the Romanian language , a Romance language, has changed over the centuries as the language evolved from Vulgar Latin, to Proto-Romanian, to medieval, modern and contemporary Romanian.-Medieval Romanian:...