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Romanian or Daco-Romanian (dated: Rumanian or Roumanian); self-designation: limba româna, ) is a Romance language spoken by around 24 to 28 million people, primarily in Romania and Moldova. It has official status in Romania, Moldova, and the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina in Serbia. While the language is used in Moldova, there it is officially called the Moldovan language for political reasons.
Romanian speakers are scattered across many other countries, notably Italy, Spain, Russia, Ukraine, Israel, Portugal, United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, France, and Germany.
Dacians, an Indo-European people, were the ancient inhabitants of Romanian territory.
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Encyclopedia
Romanian or Daco-Romanian (dated: Rumanian or Roumanian); self-designation: limba româna, ) is a Romance language spoken by around 24 to 28 million people, primarily in Romania and Moldova. It has official status in Romania, Moldova, and the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina in Serbia. While the language is used in Moldova, there it is officially called the Moldovan language for political reasons.
Romanian speakers are scattered across many other countries, notably Italy, Spain, Russia, Ukraine, Israel, Portugal, United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, France, and Germany.
History
The Dacians, an Indo-European people, were the ancient inhabitants of Romanian territory. They were defeated by the Romans in 106, and part of Dacia (Oltenia, Banat, and Transylvania) became a Roman province. This province, which was rich in ores, especially silver and gold, was colonized by the Romans, who brought with them Vulgar Latin as the language of administration and commerce, and who started a period of intense romanization, which gave birth to the proto-Romanian language. But in the 3rd century AD, under the pressure of Free Dacians and from invasions of migratory populations such as Goths, the Roman Empire was forced to withdraw from Dacia, in 271 AD, leaving it to the Goths. It is a matter of debate whether modern-day Romanians are descendants of the people that abandoned the area and settled south of the Danube or of the romanized people that remained in Dacia. (See also Origin of the Romanians.)
Owing to its people's geographical isolation, Romanian was probably among the first of the Romance languages to split from Latin. It received little influence from other Romance languages until the modern period (until the middle of the 18th century), and is therefore one of the most uniform languages in Europe. It is the most important of the remaining Eastern Romance languages and is more conservative than other Romance languages in nominal morphology. Romanian has preserved a part of the Latin declension, but whereas Latin had six cases, Romanian has three: the nominative-accusative, the genitive-dative, and marginally the vocative. Romanian nouns also preserve the neuter gender. However, the verb morphology of Romanian has shown the same move towards a compound perfect and future tense as the other Romance languages.
All the dialects of Romanian are believed to have been unified in a Proto-Romanian language up to sometime between the 7th and 10th centuries, when the area came under the influence of the Byzantine Empire. It was then that Romanian became influenced by the Slavic languages and to some degree the Greek. For example, Aromanian, one of the closest relatives of Romanian, has very few Slavic words. Also, the variations in the Daco-Romanian dialect (spoken throughout Romania and Moldova) are very small. The use of this uniform Daco-Romanian dialect extends well beyond the borders of the Romanian state: a Romanian-speaker from Moldova speaks the same language as a Romanian-speaker from the Serbian Banat. Romanian was influenced by Slavic (due to migration/assimilation, and feudal/ecclesiastical relations), Greek (Byzantine, then Phanariote), Turkish, and Hungarian, while the other Romance languages adopted words and features of Germanic.
Geographic distribution
Romanian is spoken mostly in Southeastern Europe, although speakers of the language can be found all over the world, mostly due to emigration of Romanian nationals and the return of immigrants from Romania to their original countries. Romanian speakers account for 0.5% of the world's population, and 4% of the Romance-speaking population of the world.
Romanian is the single official and national language in Romania and Moldova, although it shares the official status at regional level with other languages in the Moldovan autonomies of Gagauzia and Transnistria. Romanian is also an official language of the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina in Serbia along with five other languages. Romanian minorities are encountered in Serbia (Timok Valley), Ukraine (Chernivtsi and Odessa oblasts), Hungary (Gyula) and Bulgaria (Vidin). Large immigrant communities are found in Italy, Spain, France, and Portugal.
The largest Romanian-speaking community in Asia is found in Israel, where as of 1995 Romanian is spoken by 5% of the population. Romanian is also spoken as a second language by people from Arabic-speaking countries who have studied in Romania. It is estimated that almost half a million Middle Eastern Arabs studied in Romania during the 1980s. Small Romanian-speaking communities are to be found in Kazakhstan and Russia. Romanian is also spoken within communities of Romanian and Moldovan immigrants in the United States, Canada and Australia, although they don't make up a large homogeneous community state-wide.
Legal status in Romania
According to the Constitution of Romania of 1991, as revised in 2003, Romanian is the official language of the Republic.
Romania mandates the use of Romanian in official government publications, public education and legal contracts; advertisements must bear a translation of foreign words.
The Romanian Language Institute (Institutul Limbii Române), established by the Ministry of Education of Romania, promotes Romanian and supports people willing to study the language, working together with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs' Department for Romanians Abroad.
Legal status in Moldova
About 10% of the world's Romanian-speaking population is Moldovan, and Romanian is the single official language of Moldova. In the Constitution, the language is officially called Moldovan, although linguists consider it to be largely identical to Romanian. It is also used in schools, mass media, education and in the colloquial speech and writing. Outside the political arena it is most often called "Romanian". Romanian has been the only official language of Moldova since the Law on State Language of the Moldavian SSR was addopted in 1989. This law mandates the use of Moldovan in all the political, economical, cultural and social spheres, as it also asserts the existence of a "linguistic Moldo-Romanian identity". In the breakaway territory of Transnistria, it is co-official with Ukrainian and Russian.
In the 2004 census, out of the 3,383,332 people living in Moldova, 16.5% (558,508) stated Romanian as their mother tongue, whereas 60% stated Moldovan. While 40% of all urban Romanian/Moldovan speakers identified their native tongue as Romanian, in the countryside under 12% of Romanian/Moldovan speakers indicated Romanian as their mother tongue. However, the group of experts from the international census observation Mission to the Republic of Moldova concluded that the items in the questionnaire dealing with nationality and language proved to be the most sensitive ones, particularly with reference to the recording of responses to these questions as being "Moldovan" or "Romanian", and therefore it concluded that special care would need to be taken in interpreting them.
Legal status in Vojvodina
The Constitution of the Republic of Serbia determines that in the regions of the Republic of Serbia inhabited by national minorities, their own languages and scripts shall be officially used as well, in the manner established by law.
The Statute of the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina determines that, together with the Serbo-Croat language and the Cyrillic script, and the Latin script as stipulated by the law, the Hungarian, Slovak, Romanian and Rusyn languages and their scripts, as well as languages and scripts of other nationalities, shall simultaneously be officially used in the work of the bodies of the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina, in the manner established by the law. The bodies of the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina are: the Assembly, the Executive Council and the Provincial administrative bodies.
The Romanian language and script are officially used in eight municipalities: Alibunar, Biserica Alba , Zitiste (Žitište), Zrenianin (Zrenjanin), Kovacita (Kovacica), Cuvin (Kovin), Plandiste (Plandište) and Secanj. In the municipality of Vârset (Vršac), Romanian is official only in the villages of Voivodint (Vojvodinci), Marcovat (Markovac), Straja (Straža), Jamu Mic (Mali Žam), Sredistea Mica (Malo Središte), Mesici (Mesic), Jablanka, Salcita (Salcica), Râtisor (Ritiševo), Oresat (Orašac) and Costei (Kuštilj).
In the 2002 Census, the last carried out in Serbia, 1.5% of Vojvodinians chose Romanian as their mother tongue.
Legal status in other countries and organisations
In parts of Ukraine where Romanians constitute a significant share of the local population (districts in Chernivtsi, Odessa and Zakarpattia oblasts) Romanian is being taught in schools as a primary language and there are newspapers, TV, and radio broadcasting in Romanian.
The University of Chernivtsi trains teachers for Romanian schools in the fields of Romanian philology, mathematics and physics.
Romanian is an official or administrative language in various communities and organisations, such as the Latin Union and the European Union. Romanian is also one of the five languages in which religious services are performed in the autonomous monastic state of Mount Athos, spoken in the monk communities of Prodromos and Lacu.
Romanian as a second and foreign language
Romanian is taught in some areas that have Romanian minority communities, such as Vojvodina in Serbia, Bulgaria, Ukraine and Hungary. The Romanian Cultural Institute (ICR) has since 1992 organised summer training courses in Romanian for language teachers in these countries. In some of the schools, there are non-Romanian nationals who study Romanian as a foreign language (for example the Nicolae Balcescu High-school in Gyula, Hungary).
Romanian is taught as a foreign language in various tertiary institutions, mostly in neighboring European countries such as Germany, France and Italy, as well as the Netherlands, and elsewhere, like the USA. Overall, it is taught as a foreign language in 38 countries around the world.
Popular culture
Romanian has become popular in other countries through movies and songs performed in the Romanian language. Examples of recent Romanian acts that had a great success in non-Roumanophone countries are the bands O-Zone (which had great success with their #1 single Dragostea din tei/Numa Numa across the world), Akcent (popular in the Netherlands, Poland and other European countries), Activ (successful in some Eastern European countries) as well as high-rated movies like 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, 12:08 East of Bucharest or California Dreamin' (all of them with awards at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival).
On the other hand, some artists wrote songs dedicated to the Romanian language. The multi-platinum pop trio O-Zone (original from Moldova) released a song called "Nu ma las de limba noastra" (lit. 'I won't let go of our language'). The final verse of this song, Eu nu ma las de limba noastra, de limba noastra cea româna is translated in English as I won't let go of our language, our Romanian language. Also, the Moldovan musicians Doina and Ion Aldea Teodorovici performed a song entitled "The Romanian language".
Dialects
The term "Romanian" is sometimes (although not often) used also in a more general sense, which envelops four hardly mutually intelligible languages: Romanian, Istro-Romanian, Aromanian, and Megleno-Romanian. The four languages are offsprings of the Romance varieties spoken both to the north and to south of Danube, before the settlement of the Slavonian tribes south of the river - Romanian in the North, the latter two in the south, while Istro-Romanian is believed to be the offspring of a 11th century migration from Romania. These four are also known as the Eastern Romance languages. When the term "Romanian" is used in this larger sense, the term "Daco-Romanian" is used for Romanian itself. The origin of the term "Daco-Romanian" can be traced back to the first printed book of Romanian grammar in 1780, by Samuil Micu and Gheorghe Sincai. There, the Romanian dialect spoken north of the Danube is called lingua Daco-Romana to emphasize its origin and its area of use, which includes the former Roman province of Dacia (though it is spoken also south of the Danube, in Dobroudja, Central Serbia and northern Bulgaria).
This article deals with Romanian language, and thus only its regional variations are discussed here. The differences between these varieties are usually very small, usually consisting in a few dozen regional words and some phonetic changes. Standard literary Romanian language is identical when it comes to writing, regardless of the region or country.
Like most natural languages, Romanian can be regarded as a dialect continuum. Romanian cannot be neatly divided into separate dialects and Romanians themselves speak of the differences as accents or "speeches" (in Romanian: "accent" or "grai"). This correctly conveys the linguistics notion of accent, as language variants that only feature slight pronunciation differences (Romanian accents are fully mutually intelligible). Several accents are usually distinguished:
- Muntenian accent (Graiul muntenesc), spoken mainly in Wallachia and southern parts of Dobruja.
- Moldavian accent (Graiul moldovenesc), spoken mainly in Moldavia, northern parts of Dobruja and the Republic of Moldova. Written is at times realised as /k/, written before front vowels is sometimes realised as , written , in final position, is sometimes palatalized, written is rarely also pronounced as /i/.
- Maramuresian accent (Graiul maramuresean), spoken mainly in Maramures.
- Transylvanian accent (Graiul ardealean), spoken mainly in Transylvania.
- Banatian accent (Graiul banatean), spoken mainly in Banat. Written before front vowels is sometimes realised as and as .
- Oltenian accent (Graiul oltenesc), spoken mainly in Oltenia and by the Romanian minority in Timok region of Serbia. In Oltenia a notable dialectal feature is the preferred usage of the simple perfect tense rather than the compound perfect which is preferred elsewhere.
Over the last century, however, regional accents have been weakened due to mass communication and greater mobility.
Classification
Romanian is a Romance language, belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European language family, having much in common with languages such as French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish.
However, the languages closest to Romanian are the other Eastern Romance languages, spoken south of Danube: Aromanian/Macedo-Romanian, Megleno-Romanian and Istro-Romanian, which are sometimes classified as dialects of Romanian. An alternative name for Romanian used by linguists to disambiguate with the other Eastern Romance languages is "Daco-Romanian", referring to the area where it is spoken (which corresponds roughly to the onetime Roman province of Dacia).
Compared with the other Romance languages, the closest relative of Romanian is Italian; the two languages show a limited degree of asymmetrical mutual intelligibility, especially in their cultivated forms: speakers of Romanian seem to understand Italian more easily than the other way around. Even though Romanian has obvious grammatical and lexical similarities with French, Catalan, Spanish or Portuguese, it is not mutually intelligible with them to a practical extent; Romanian speakers will usually need some formal study of basic grammar and vocabulary before being able to understand even the simplest sentences in those languages (and vice-versa).
In the following sample sentence (meaning "She always closes the window before having dinner.") cognates are written in bold:
- Ea semper fenestram claudit antequam cenet. (Latin)
- Ea închide întotdeauna fereastra înainte de a cina. (Romanian)
- Lei chiude sempre la finestra prima di cenare. (Italian)
- Elle ferme toujours la fenętre avant de dîner. (French)
- Ella siempre cierra la ventana antes de cenar. (Spanish)
- Ela fecha sempre a janela antes de jantar. (Portuguese)
- Idda sempri chiudi la finestra ŕntica cina. (Sicilian)
- Ella sempre tanca la finestra abans de sopar. (Catalan)
- Ela pecha sempre a xanela denantes de cear. (Galician)
- Essa nzerra sempe 'a fenesta primme de cenŕ. (Neapolitan)
A study done by Italian-American linguist Mario Pei in 1949, which analyzed the evolutionary degree of languages in comparison to their inheritance language (in the case of Romance languages to Latin comparing phonology, inflection, discourse, syntax, vocabulary, and intonation) revealed the following percentages:
The lexical similarity with Italian is estimated at 77%, followed by French at 75%, Sardinian 74%, Catalan 73%, Spanish 71%, Portuguese, and Rhaeto-Romance at 72%.
In the modern times Romanian vocabulary has been strongly influenced by French and Italian, (see French, Italian and other international words).
Contacts with other languages
Dacian language
The Dacian language was an Indo-European language spoken by the ancient Dacians. It may have been the first language to influence the Latin spoken in Dacia, but little is known about it. About 300 words found only in Romanian or with a cognate in the Albanian language may be inherited from Dacian, many of them being related to pastoral life (for example: balaur "dragon", brânza "cheese", mal "shore"). Some linguists have asserted that Albanians are Dacians who were not romanized and migrated southward.
A different view is that these non-Latin words (many with Albanian cognates) are not necessarily Dacian, but rather were brought into the territory that is modern Romania by Romance-speaking shepherds migrating north from Albania, Serbia, and northern Greece who became the Romanian people. However, the Eastern Romance substratum appears to have been a satem language, while the Paleo-Balkan languages spoken in northern Greece (Ancient Macedonian) and Albania (Illyrian) were most likely centum languages. The general opinion is that Dacian was a satem language, as was Thracian, which, however, was indeed spoken in the south.
Balkan linguistic union
While most of Romanian grammar and morphology are based on Latin, there are some features that are shared only with other languages of the Balkans and not found in other Romance languages. The languages of the Balkan linguistic union belong to individual branches of the Indo-European language family: Bulgarian and Albanian, and in some cases Greek and Serbian. The shared features include a suffixed definite article, the syncretism of genitive and dative case, the formation of the future and perfect tenses, and the lack of infinitives.
Slavic languages
The Slavic influences on Romanian are especially noticeable and can be observed at all linguistic levels: lexis, phonetics, morphology and syntax. This situation is due to the migration of Slavic tribes who traversed the territory of present-day Romania during the early evolution of the language. This process of the introduction of Slavic in Dacia was similar to the appearance of various Germanic dialects in the Western Roman Empire, where Gallic Latin and Northern Italian dialects became strongly germanized. However, due to lower Romance-speaking populace in the East, Slavic remained spoken for much longer and did not die out immediately. This partly explains why spoken Romanian is not intelligible to speakers of Western Romance languages unless they attempt to learn it.
And indeed, while Dacia was part of the Roman Empire for less than 2 centuries, various Slavic tribes crossed, ruled and settled the former Roman province from the 6th to the 12th century. Their presence was even stronger in Moldova and Bessarabia, where in the 16th centry Rusyn-speaking Slavs made up at least a third of the population. The Moldavian principality was thus refereed to as ?????????? (i.e. Russo-Vlahia). It is interesting to note that even though the Slavs migrated from the north, they were assimilated immediately north of the lower Danube. At the same time, they almost completely subsumed the Romanized population (the Vlachs) immediately south of Danube.
Unlike in the West, Dacian Romance-speaking population was rural and did not preserve written Latin language. Therefore, it was the written Old Slavonic that originated around the Byzantine city of Salonika and quickly spread in use as the lierary language of Vallachia and Moldavia. Modern Romania and Vallachia continue to be surrounded by the Slavic languages (with the exception of Hungarian after the 10th century) and thus have influenced Romanian through centuries of interaction. Interestingly, early Slavic features in Romanian have primarily Balkan (Bulgarian) character, whereas later borrowings(especialy in modern Moldova, where the majority of the population continues to be bilingual or even multilingual), have Eastern European (mostly Russian and less frequently Ukrainian or Ruthenian) origin.
Of great importance was the influence of Old Church Slavonic, as it was the liturgical language of the Romanian Orthodox Church (compared to western and central European countries which used Latin) from the Middle Ages, until the 18th century. However, Latin did get an important position in Transylvania after the 12th century, a part of the western-styled feudal Kingdom of Hungary at that moment. Liturgical Romanian was first officially used there after the union of the Romanian Orthodox Church in Transylvania with Rome, giving birth to the Romanian Greek-Catholic Church in 1698 (the most widespread denomination in Transylvania until World War II.) This caused Romanian to lose some of its Slavic borrowings, as the first standardisation (among others the switch to the Latin alphabet) was done by Scoala Ardeleana, founded in Transylvania. However, the capital of independent Romania (Bucharest) was located in the Eastern part of the country where Hungarian, German, and Latin influences were practically non-existent.
Two types of Slavic borrowings can be distinguished in Romanian. First came everyday spoken words that describe animals, emotional states, as well as certain grammatical features that appear in both spoken and written Romanian language. These Slavic features were incorporated into Balkan Latin through everyday contact of Romanian speakers with early Slav settlers. Then, with the spread of Orthodox Christianity and the Cyrillic alphabet, literary high-style words of the official Church Slavonic were introduced to supplement Romanian with terms for abstract concepts that were not present in the local Romance dialect. Writing in old Romanian language first appeared in the Cyrillic alphabet (a modified version of the Greek alphabet) in the 16th century and existed in this form in Romania until 1860s. In Moldova the tradition continued until 1990s. The alphabet reform had certain political implications and many peasants resisted it. The switch (as well as the related relatinization) caused additional tension in the unrecognized trilingual republic of Transnistria, which has decided to preserve the age-old tradition of writing in Cyrillic.
Most Slavic words were acquired through direct everyday contact with Slavic merchants, peasants, soldiers, etc. Due to massive influx of Slavs, much of the original Vlach population, estimated at 1 million people at the end of the Roman rule, became more or less bilingual during the 6th-12th centuries. Apparently, interethnic marriages were very common as Slavs settled among the Romanians and mingled with them very intensely. Indeed, some words describing family relations are Slavic or show heavy Slavic influence: tata < ???? "father", nevasta "wife" < ???????, ruda "relatives" < ?????; mezin "youngest child" < ???????; plod "baby", the suffix -ca added to Latin root fi- in fiica "daughter" (compare Slavic: ?????), bunica "granny" or maica "mommy". The degree to which Slavic and Romance populations interacted is also illustarted by the fact that practically all words that describe affection are borrowed from Slavic. A direct proof of this is the usage of Slavic particle "da" for affirmation in Romanian, which caused the native sic to shift its meaning to si (and).
At least a quarter of the basic spoken Romanian lexis is based on common Slavic roots such as: a iubi "to love", a citi "to read", glas "voice", nevoie "need", cinstit "honest", prieten "friend", trebuie "necessary". This situation is akin to the number and usage of French borrowings in English. Slavic borrowings are especially frequent when strong emotional terms or feelings are involved: sila "compulsion", vina "guilt", jale "sorrow", mila "compassion", boala "illness, disease", iubire "love", dragoste "love", slava "glory", nadejde "hope", etc. Slavic-derived adjectives and participles seem to have been borrowed in droves and form a whole lexical layer: slab, drag, bolnav, bogat, prost, dragút, cinstit, iscusit, iubit, jalnic, zadarnic, vrednic, obraznic, voinic, groaznic, harnic, strasnic, darnic, milostiv, mucenic, etc.
Romanian uses numerous Slavic verbs to describe various actions and changes of state: a lovi "to hit", a goni "to chase", a topi "to melt", a gasi "to find", a trezi "to wake up", a pomeni "to mention", etc. Many others borrowings exist in different spheres of life: sila "force", razboi "war", noroi "dirt", bogatie "richness", trup "body", plod "fetus", oglinda "mirror", copita "hoof", zori "dawn", zapada "snow", ceas "time", nisip "sand", vreme "weather", etc. Compare essentially the same, but less numerous Germanic borrowings in Western Romance languages such as in Spanish: guerra "war" (Slav. razboi in Romanian), rico "rich" (Slav. bogat), ganso "goose" (Slav. gâsca), buscar "to search" (Slav. a gasi "to find" in Romanian).
Apparently, until the arrival of Slavs Romance-speaking Vlachs were rural semi-nomadic cattle-breeders as most Romanian vocabulary related to cattle and cattle-breeding is of Latin origin. By contrast, most tools and utensils related to agronomy as well as new urban life have Slavic names, most likely as a result of being introduced by the agricultural Slavic population: lopata "spade", dalta "chisel", plug "plough", topor "axe", sita "sieve", nicovala "anvil", coasa "scythe", tocila "grindstone", grebla "rake", sanie "sleigh", potcoava "horseshoe", gard "zabor", zabrea "trellis", etc.
Names of many animals, birds, fish, and plants also made a swift transition from Slavic: vrabie "sparrow" (???????), lebada "swan", veverita "squirrel" (???e????), vidra "otter", stiuca "pike", rac "crayfish", paianjen "spider", loboda "pig-weed", bob "seed, bean", morcov "carrot" (???????), sfecla "beets", hrenita "water cress", râs "lynx", etc.
Curiously, some common cursewords are also Slavic in origin such as pizda ("cunt"), gunoi ("manure, garbage"), etc.
Various onomatopoeic verbs and expressions such as a plescai "splash" (compare Slav. ????????), a sopti "whisper" (compare Slav. ?o???, ???????) a haui "echo", tropot "clatter", a clocoti "to boil over" (?????????), etc. are closer to their Slavic rather than Western Romance equivalents (compare Spanish: chapoteo/roción; susurro/murmurro; eco; pataleo/trapa trapa).Certain interjections such as ba! "oh yes!" and iata! "Look!" (< ???) are taken from the Old Slavic (mostly Old Bulgarian) language.
Borrowings from Old Church Slavonic are also very numerous in certain lexical fields and include the following: a izbavi < ???????? "to deliver", vesnic < ?????? "forever, perpetual, undying", sfânt < ?????? "holy, saint", a sluji < ??????? "to serve", amvon < ???????? "pulpit", rai < ??? "paradise", iad < ?? "hell", proroc < ????? "prophet", hram < ???? "church patron", duhovnic < ???????? "confessor", dihanie < ??????? "wild beast, monster".
Slavic terminology is almost exclusive when used to assign the titles and ranks to medieval nobility (boier, cneaz, rob, sluga, a sluji, etc.). It is also used to describe various concepts of urban life and finances that emerged with the arrival of Slavs: a plati "pay", târg "market", rând "row", sticla "glass", etc. Seafaring concepts are no exception: corabie "ship" , lotca "boat", ostrov "island" and vâsla "oar" all come from their Slavic equivalents virtually unaltered.
Many Romanian names were also influenced by the use of Slavonic in Church and in administration. Over time, especially after the Latin alphabet was adopted, some Slavic words became archaic, but others such as the affirmative particle da "yes", clearly of Slavic origin, have maintained a widespread use.
In general, most Slavic borrowings have become well incorporated into Romanian and are no longer perceived as foreign. In fact, many Romanian words occur as a natural combination of Slavic and Romance elements: devreme "since", asíjderea "likewise", a îmbolnavi "to fall ill", a împleti "to weave", a învârti "to turn, rotate", a îmbogati "to enrich", nebunie "craziness", razbunare "revenge", rascruce crossing",
bunica "granny", portita "wicket", românca "Romanian woman", evreiesc "Jewish", neasteptat "unexpected", nerusinat" "unashamed", citire "reading", iubita "girlfriend", iubesc "I love", prostie "foolishness", hulubaríe "dove-cot", slabiciune "weakness", milos "charitable", etc.
The indirect Slavic influence on Romanian lexis and expressions is also very important. Many words and expressions were calqued from their Slavic equivalents or created to reproduce the patterns of the Slavic speech. Words such as suflet "soul" copy the logic of the Slavic word ????, and the original Latin anima shifted its meaning to inima "heart". The development of the Romanian particle si "and" hints at the usage of the Slavic particle "da" that is often used in both senses ("yes" as well as "and"). Other examples include luna meaning both "month" and "the moon"; "lume" (originally light) used in the sense of the world. Certain expressions such as din topor meaning "unrefined" also tend to be similar to their Slavic equivalents: ???????? = ??????.
Another prominent feature of modern Romanian that has resulted from intense contact with Slavic speakers is the formation of numerals from 11 to 20. For instance, unsprezece "eleven" is based on three components "un+spre+zece" literally "one above ten". Even though the elements themselves are Romance in origin, the model itself is word-by-word imitation of a typical Slavic "????+???+????" literally "one above ten" and is not found in the West where original whole Latin words were preserved (Spanish: once, doce, quince, veinte).
Interestingly, Romanian verb a fi "to be", though Latin in form, appears to be Slavic in meaning. Slavic ???? "to be" is derived from the past form ??? "was". Early Vlachs appear to be so fluent in Slavic that they perceived its internal logic and consequently redefined the original Latin fui "was" into a new infinitive a fi.
As a result of the long tradition of written Church Slavonic, most Slavic borrowings in Romanian are surprisingly well-preserved phonetically and changed little over the centuries. Some phonetic adjustment has taken place in certain cases: ohileti > a ofili, ljubiti> a iubi, protiva > potriva, podkova > potcoava. Importantly, many Slavic borrowing changed their original meaning after being incorporated into Romanian speech. Most notable examples are: a gasi "to find" < ?????? "to extinguish", a lovi "to strike" < ?????? "to catch", clipa "moment" < ???????? "rhythmic movement" etc.
To a significant extent, Slavic speech patterns have also influenced borrowing from other languages. For instance, Latin schola/scola > Slav. ????? shkola > modern Rom. scoala "school". Had the original Latin word been preserved in Dacia, it would have sounded as "scoara".
Thus, Slavic borrowings in Romanian help reveal the historical development of the language even though it is difficult to determine what was the cause and what was the effect of certain developments. Whatever the cause or effect, the migration of Slavs clearly separated the old Balkan Latin from the Western Romance area. The Old Romanian language emerged. By the 6th century the previously common shift of intervocal l>r (solis>soare); an, am, in, im > ân, în; si>si etc. stops, as new borrowings from Old Slavonic do not undergo the process: ???? > sila instead of the hypothetical "sira'". New developments such as sv>sf, h>f occur instead.
Generally, the share of Slavic words differs significantly depending on dialect and style. The number of Slavicisms is higher in border regions with significant Slavic-speaking populations. In spoken Romanian in general their share is around 30% and up to 40% in Moldova, where Russian borrowings and constructions are traditionally commonplace (Compare: "Vreau un holodilnic" instead of "Vreau sa cumpar un frigider"). In literary written Romanian, their share is somewhat lower (around 10%), while Latin-based words represent around 85%, with the remaining 5% being of Greek, Hungarian, and Turkic origin as well as from the Dacian substratum.
The issue of Slavicisms in Romanian has been heavily politicized since the 19th century and many Romanians prefer to avoid discussing the topic altogether. The anti-Slavic purism was first encouraged by certain Western powers in the 19th century. Primarily Catholic Austria-Hungary was competing with the Orthodox Russian Empire for influence in the Balkans. Austrians and Hungarians wanted to prevent Romanians from siding with the Russian Empire in their struggle against the Turks and the Hungarians. Magyarisation was encouraged instead. Later the NATO countries were interested in weakening the Russian influence in Eastern Europe. Seeking financial support from the West since the 19th century, Romanian politicians and intellectuals have made consistent attempts to get rid of Slavic heritage in Romania. As a result, many, but not all, Slavic words in Romanian now have neological Latin-based pairs. They are not completely identical in meaning, however. For instance, the words iubire "love" and prieten "friend", both of Slavic origin, are more frquent as they express deeper and more sincere feelings that the more recent Latin-based terms amor and amic, which are perceived as conveying pretentious, pompous and/or fake feelings.
But even in modern literary Romanian, Slavonic influences are evident in phonetics and morphology, heavily influenced by Slavic speakers. Phonetic Slavicisms include the iotization of the initial -e in words such as el, ea, este pronounced as [jel], [ja], [jeste] (compare Spanish: el, ella, estamos, without the Slavic iotization effect) as well as the palatalization of consonants in the plural form: pom-pomi, lup-lupi pronounced as [pom?] and [lup?] etc. (compare the original Italian sound in lupi). Besides, numerous Slavic prefixes and suffixes such as ne-, -ca, -ita, ras-/raz-, have become an integral part of the Romanian lexis. Especially -ca and -ita are important markers of the feminine gender in Romanian morphology: lup-lupoaica, italian-italianca, actor-actrita, etc. Unlike Western Romance languages, Romanian is also quite unusual in the way that its nouns often undergo internal vowel modifications while being inflected: fata-fete, gheata-gheturi, etc. This feature is quite common in the neighboring Slavic languages: ???-????, ???-???, ????-???. These changes indicate that unlike later arriving Hungarians, local Slavs, who settled in the Vlach lands, were also keen on learning Balkan Latin. On the one hand, this process infused Romanian with Slavic features and on the other, led to the eventual assimilation of Slavs north of the Danube.
Noteworthy, the original Latin sound [h] was lost in early Balkan Latin between the 3rd and 5th centuries A.D., just like in the Western Romance languages: hibernum > Rom. iarna and Spanish invierno "winter". However, Slavic interference after the 6th century lead to a reintroduction of the Slavic hard h sound into Romanian. Thus, most Romanian words with a letter h are Slavic in origin: hram, hrana, hulubarie, hrean, etc.
The addition of numerous Slavic verb stems ending in -i ( a iubi, a citi, a goni, a izbi, a rani, a primi, etc.) and -î (a posomorî, a omorî, a târî etc.) has led to a dramatic expansion of this conjugation pattern in Romanian, which is extremely productive: a opri, a zdrobi, a toropi, a osteni, a podi, a varui, a beli, a cerni, a plesni, a coji, a tocai, a nascoci, a grohai, a glumi, a trudi, etc. By contrast, in Western Romance languages, the number of verbs in the original Latin "-i" group shrank over time.
Certain indirect sentence structures, such as mi-e bine, mi-e frig (literally "to me is cold"), are also Slavic-influenced (compare ??? ???????). In the West, direct constructions are used instead: Spanish estoy bien. Preservation of cases and neutral gender has also occurred under Slavic influence and is not observed in modern Western Romance. The natural tendency of late Latin was to drop all noun cases and get rid of neutral gender that was redistributed between masculine and feminine (as in all modern Western Romance languages). Slavic languages have kept Romanian from losing these features. Moreover, Romanian developed a Slavic-influenced vocative case ending in -o: Fetito!, Mamo! (compare with Slavic ????!).
The sustainability of the Slavic elements in Romanian is also evident in the toponymics of Romania and Moldova. Despite the fact that Roman Dacia was the core of the ancient empire's influence, Romance population fled the original Roman cities after the fall of the Roman Empire and quickly shifted to semi-nomadic cattle-breeding. As a result, no original Roman placenames survived to the north of the Danube. Newly-founded settlements were largely a result of Slavic, and later Hungarian activities. Numerous Slavic placenames are found to these days throughout Romania and Moldova: Cernavoda, Prilog, Dumbrava, Bistrita, Talna, Rus, Bistra, Glod, Ruscova, Straja, Putna, Hulub, Bâc, Tecuci, Potcoava, Corabia, Lipova, Holod, Topila, Ostrovu, etc.
South of the Danube, where most Slavs eventually settled, the Vlach population was overwhelmed numerically and eventually assimilated. The processes of linguistic exchange in the Balkans appear to be unequal most likely due to other social and political circumstances. While Romanian exhibits significant Slavic influences, fewer Romance traces are found in the Slavic languages. Still, Balkan Latin influences have caused a simplification of declension in Bulgarian and Macedonian as well as strengthened certain analytical features and constructions in these languages. Overtime, Romanian, Bulgarian and Albanian developed typical "Balkan" grammar and phonetics while forming the core of the so called Balkan linguistic union.
Other influences
Even before the 19th century, Romanian came in contact with several other languages. Some notable examples include:
- Greek: folos < ófelos "use", buzunar < buzunára "pocket", proaspat < prósfatos "fresh", cutie < cution "box"
- Hungarian: oras < város "town", a cheltui < költeni "to spend", a fagadui < fogadni "to promise", a mântui < menteni "to save"
- Turkish: cafea < kahve "coffee", papuc < papuç "slipper", ciorba < çorba "wholemeal soup, sour soup"
- German: cartof < Kartoffel "potato", bere < Bier "beer", surub < Schraube "screw", turn < Turm "tower", rama < Rahmen "frame", mustiuc < Mundstück "mouth piece", bormasina < Bohrmaschine "boring machine"
French, Italian and other international words
Since the 19th century, many modern words were borrowed from the other Romance languages, especially from French and Italian (for example: birou "desk, office", avion "airplane", exploata "exploit"). It was estimated that about 38% of the number of words in Romanian are of French and/or Italian origin (in many cases both languages); and adding this to the words that were inherited from Latin, about 75%-85% of Romanian words can be traced to Latin. The use of these Romanianized French and Italian loanwords has tended to increase at the expense of Slavic loanwords, many of which have become rare or fallen out of use. As second or third languages, French and Italian themselves are better known in Romania than in Romania's neighbors. Along with the switch to the Latin alphabet in Moldova, the re-latinization of the vocabulary has tended to reinforce the Latin character of the language.
In the process of lexical modernization, many of the words already existing as Latin direct heritage, as a part of its core or popular vocabulary, have been doubled by words borrowed from other Romance languages, thus forming a further and more modern and literary lexical layer. Typically, the popular word is a noun and the borrowed word an adjective. Some examples:
| Latin | Romanian
direct Latin heritage | Romanian
neologism |
|---|
| agilis (quick) | ager (astute) | agil (it.<agile, fr.<agile)
(agile) | | aqua (water) | apa (water) | acvatic (it. <acquatico, fr.<aquatique)
(aquatic) | | dens, dentem (tooth) | dinte (tooth) | dentist (it.<dentista, fr.<dentiste)
(dentist) | | directus (straight) | drept (straight, right) | direct (it.<diretto, fr.<direct)
(direct) | | frigus (cold) | frig (cold - noun) | frigid (it.<frigido, fr.<frigide)
(frigid) | |
In the 20th century, an increasing number of English words have been borrowed (such as: gem < jam; interviu < interview; meci < match; manager < manager; fotbal < football; sandvis < sandwich; bisnita < business; ciunga < chewing gum; chec < cake). These words are assigned grammatical gender in Romanian and handled according to Romanian rules; thus "the manager" is managerul. Some of these English words are in turn Latin lexical constructions - calqued, borrowed or constructed from Latin or other Romance languages, like "management" and "interview" (from the French "entrevue").
Grammar
Romanian nouns are declined by gender (feminine, masculine and neuter), number (singular and plural) and case (nominative/accusative, dative/genitive and vocative). The articles, as well as most adjectives and pronouns, agree in gender with the noun they reference.
Romanian is the only Romance language where definite articles are enclitic: that is, attached to the end of the noun (as in North Germanic languages), instead of in front (proclitic). They were formed, as in other Romance languages, from the Latin demonstrative pronouns.
As in all Romance languages, Romanian verbs are highly inflected for person, number, tense, mood, voice. The usual word order in sentences is SVO (Subject - Verb - Object). Romanian has four verbal conjugations which further split into ten conjugation patterns. Verbs can be put in five moods that are inflected for the person (indicative, conditional/optative, imperative, subjunctive, and presumptive) and four impersonal moods (infinitive, gerund, supine, and participle).
Phonology
Romanian has seven vowels: , , , , , , and . Additionally, and may appear in some words.
In final positions after consonants (rarely within words) a short non-syllabic can occur, which is and is produced as a palatalization of the preceding consonant. A similar sound, the voiceless ending u, existed in old Romanian but has disappeared from the standard language.
There are also four semivowels and twenty consonants.
Diphthongs
Descending diphthongs: ai, au, ei, eu, ii, iu, oi, ou, ui, ai, au, îi, îu.
Ascending diphthongs: ea, eo, ia, ie, io, iu, oa, ua, ua.
Triphthongs
Pattern S-V-S (main vowel between two semivowels): eai, eau, iai, iau, iei, ieu, ioi, iou, oai.
Pattern S-S-V (two-semivowel glide before the main vowel): eoa, ioa.
Phonetic changes
Due to its isolation from the other Romance languages, the phonetic evolution of Romanian was quite different, but does share a few changes with Italian, such as [kl] > [kj] (Lat. clarus > Rom. chiar, Ital. chiaro) and also a few with Dalmatian, such as /gn/ (probably phonetically [?n]) > [mn] (Lat. cognatus > Rom. cumnat, Dalm. comnut).
Among the notable phonetic changes are:
- diphthongization of e and o
era > Rom. ceara (wax) Lat. sole > Rom. soare (sun)
- iotacism [e] ? [ie] in the beginning of the word
erba > Rom. iarba (grass, herb)
- velar [k], [g] ? labial [p], [b], [m] before alveolar consonants:
cto > Rom. opt (eight) Lat. quattuor > Rom. patru (four) Lat. lingua > Rom. limba (tongue, language) Lat. signum > Rom. semn (sign) Lat. coxa > Rom. coapsa (thigh)
lum > Rom. cer (sky)
- Alveolars [d] and [t] palatalized to [dz]/[z] and [ts] when before short [e] or long [i]
deus > Rom. zeu (god) Lat. tenem > Rom. tine (hold)
On the other hand, it (along with French) has lost the /kw/ (qu) sound before /a/ from original Latin, turning it either into /p/ (patru, "four"; cf. It. quattro) or /k/ (când, "when"; calitate, "quality").
Writing system
The first written record of a Romance language spoken in the Middle Ages in the Balkans was written by the Byzantine chronicler Theophanes Confessor in the 6th century about a military expedition against the Avars from 587, when a Vlach muleteer accompanying the Byzantine army noticed that the load was falling from one of the animals and shouted to a companion Torna, torna fratre (meaning "Return, return brother!").
The oldest written text in Romanian is a letter from late June 1521, in which Neacsu of Câmpulung wrote to the mayor of Brasov about an imminent attack of the Turks. It was written using the Cyrillic alphabet, like most early Romanian writings. The earliest writing in Latin script was a late 16th century Transylvanian text which was written with the Hungarian alphabet conventions.
In the late 1700s, Transylvanian scholars noted the Latin origin of Romanian and adapted the Latin alphabet to the Romanian language, using some rules from Italian, recognized as Romanian's closest relative. The Cyrillic alphabet remained in (gradually decreasing) use until 1860, when Romanian writing was first officially regulated.
In the Soviet Republic of Moldova, a special version of the Cyrillic alphabet derived from the Russian version was used, until 1989, when it returned to the Romanian Latin alphabet.
Romanian alphabet
The Romanian alphabet is as follows:
- A, a (a); A, a (a); Â, â (â din a); B, b (be), C, c (ce); D, d (de), E, e (e); F, f (fe / ef); G, g (ghe / ge); H, h (ha / has); I, i (i); Î, î (î din i); J, j (je), K, k (ka de la kilogram), L, l (le / el); M, m (me / em); N, n (ne / en); O, o (o); P, p (pe); Q (chiu); R, r, (re / er); S, s (se / es); S, s (se); T, t (te); T, t (te); U, u (u); V, v (ve); W (dublu ve); X, x (ics); Y (i grec); Z, z (ze / zet).
K, Q, W and Y are not part of the native alphabet, were officially introduced in the Romanian alphabet in 1982 and are mostly used to write loanwords like kilogram, quasar, watt, and yoga.
The Romanian alphabet is based on the Latin alphabet, and has five additional letters (these are not diacritics, but letters in their own right). Initially, there were as many as 12 additional letters but some of them disappeared in subsequent reforms. Also, until the early 20th century, a short vowel marker was used.
Today the Romanian alphabet is largely phonemic. However, the letters "â" (used inside the words) and "î" (used at the beginning or the end; it can also be used in the middle of a compound word) both represent the same close central unrounded vowel .
Another exception from a completely phonetic writing system is the fact that vowels and their respective semivowels are not distinguished in writing. In dictionaries the distinction is marked by separating the entry word into syllables for the words containing a hiatus that might be mispronounced as a diphthong or a triphthong.
Stressed vowels also are not marked in writing, except very rarely in cases where by misplacing the stress a word might change its meaning and if the meaning is not obvious from the context. For example trei copíi means "three children" while trei cópii means "three copies".
Pronunciation
- h is not silent like in other Romance languages such as Spanish and French, but represents the phoneme , except in the digraphs ch /k/ and gh /g/ (see below)
- j represents , as in French or Portuguese.
- There are two letters with a comma below, and , which represent the sounds and . However, the allographs with a cedilla instead of a comma, S and T, became widespread when pre-Unicode and early Unicode character sets did not include the standard form.
- A final orthographical i after a consonant often represents the palatalization of the consonant (e. g. lup "wolf" vs. lupi "wolves") -- it is not pronounced like Italian lupi (which also means "wolves"), and is indeed an example of the Slavic influence on Romanian.
- a represents the schwa, .
- î and â both represent the sound . See Romanian alphabet for details on use.
- The letter e is generally pronounced as the diphthong ie when it is in the beginning of a form of the verb a fi "to be", e. g. este "is". This rule also applies to personal pronouns beginning with e, e. g. el "he". This also shows the Slavic influence on the language.
- x represents either the phoneme as in expresie = expression, or as in exemplu = example, as in English.
- As in Italian, the letters c and g represent the affricates and before i and e, and and elsewhere. When and are followed by vowels and (or their corresponding semivowels or the final ) the digraphs ch and gh are used instead of c and g, as shown in the table below.
| Group | Phoneme | Pronunciation | Examples |
|---|
| ce, ci
| | ch in chest, cheek | cerc (circle), cine (who) | | che, chi
| | k in kettle, kiss | chem (I call), chimie (chemistry) | | ge, gi
| | j in jelly, jigsaw | ger (frost), gimnast (gymnast) | | ghe, ghi
| | g in get, give | ghetar (glacier), ghid (guide) |
Punctuation and capitalization
The main particularities Romanian has with regard to punctuation relative to other languages using the Latin alphabet are:
- The quotation marks use the Polish format in the format „quote «inside» quote”, that is, 99 down and 99 up for normal quotations, with the addition of non-French double angle quotes without space for inside quotation when necessary.
- Proper quotations which span multiple paragraphs don't start each paragraph with the quotation marks; one single pair of quotation marks is always used, regardless of how many paragraphs are quoted;
- Dialogues are identified with quotation dashes;
- The Oxford comma before "and" is considered incorrect ("red, yellow and blue" is the proper format);
- Punctuation signs which follow a text in parentheses always follow the final bracket;
- In titles, only the first letter of the first word is capitalized, the rest of the title using sentence capitalization (with all its rules: proper names are capitalized as usual, etc.).
- Names of months and days are not capitalized (ianuarie "January", joi "Thursday")
- Adjectives derived from proper names are not capitalized (Germania "Germany", but german "German")
Spelling issues between Romania's and Moldova's usage
Until 2000, there used to be minor spelling differences between official forms of Romanian language used in Romania and the variant (also called Moldovan language) used in the Republic of Moldova— Moldova hadn't switched yet to the new spelling rules introduced by the Romanian Academy in 1993. These differences were abolished in 2000. Romanian is also an official or administrative language in various communities and organisations (such as the Latin Union and the European Union).
Language sample
English text:
- All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
(Universal Declaration of Human Rights)
Contemporary Romanian - highlighted words are French or Italian loanwords:
- Toate fiintele
umane se nasc libere si egale în demnitate si în drepturi. Ele sunt înzestrate cu ratiune si constiinta si trebuie sa se comporte unele fata de altele în spiritul fraternitatii.
Romanian, excluding French and Italian loanwords - highlighted words are Slavic loanwords:
- Toate fiintele omenesti se nasc
slobode si deopotriva în destoinicie si în drepturi. Ele sunt înzestrate cu întelegere si cuget si trebuie sa se poarte unele fata de altele în duh de fratietate.
Romanian, excluding loanwords:
- Toate fiintele omenesti se nasc nesupuse si asemenea în pretuire si în drepturi. Ele sunt înzestrate cu întelegere si cuget si se cuvine sa se poarte unele fata de altele dupa firea fratiei.
See also
External links
Learning Romanian
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- , prepared by the Department for Interethnic Relations, Chisinau, Republic of Moldovia
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Phrasebooks
Dictionaries
Miscellaneous
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