How different is Romanian? (Specific Languages) Language Learning Forum

How different is Romanian?
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prz_
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Message 9 of 25

08 June 2012 at 10:02pm | IP Logged

Mind the most important false friend - the word curva doesn't mean curve. It's a... vulgar word naming the prostitute.

Edited by prz_ on 08 June 2012 at 10:02pm
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Josquin
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Message 10 of 25

09 June 2012 at 1:26pm | IP Logged

prz_ wrote:

Mind the most important false friend - the word curva doesn't mean curve. It's a... vulgar word naming the prostitute.

I always thought 'kurwa' was used as some sort of punctuation mark in colloquial Polish, considering every sentence seems to contain it... ;)

Edited by Josquin on 09 June 2012 at 1:32pm
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Sonia.RedStar
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Message 11 of 25

03 July 2012 at 11:50pm | IP Logged

Why is this "Slavic influence" given so much importance? Sure Romanian has borrowings from Russian and Slavonic, which is not at all surprising, considering the history of this country. For centuries, Romanians didn't even use the Latin alphabet, but the Slavonic one. And there are many borrowings from Turkish, Hungarian and other "neighbour" languages, too. When I studied the history of Romanian in school, this topic was hardly mentioned. Romanians see their language as one of Latin origine, mostly.
I think that when learning a new language, knowledge of any other language could prove useful. I, for example, find many associations between German and Hungarian, which are probably coincidences, but they exist.
Romanian is vey special, it's just like a sponge.The Romanians' love for French caused a great flow of French words to enter the language. But the long periods of Turkish and Russian conquest/dominance have left a mark on the language.
I hope this post, my very first, proves useful. Thanks for reading!

Edited by Sonia.RedStar on 04 July 2012 at 1:01am
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Merv
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Message 12 of 25

04 July 2012 at 12:01am | IP Logged

Sonia.RedStar wrote:

Why is this "Slavic influence" given so much importance? Sure Romanian has borrowings
from Russian and Slavonic, which is not at all surprising, considering the history of this country. For centuries,
Romanians didn't even use the Latin alphabet, but the Slavonic one. And there are many borrowings from
Turkish, Hungarian and other "neighbour" languages, too. When I studied the history of Romanian in school, this
topic was hardly mentioned. Romanians see their language as one of Latin origine, mostly.
I think that when learning a new language, knowledge any other language could prove useful. I, for example, find
many associations between German and Hungarian, which are probably coincidences, but they exist.
Romanian is vey special, it's just like a sponge.The Romanians' love for French caused a great flow of French
words to enter the language. But the long periods of Turkish and Russian conquest/dominance have left a mark
on the language.
I hope this post, my very first, proves useful. Thanks for reading!

It's probably mentioned because the influence is very deep. To have words like "to read," "to need," "yes,"
"friend," and "love," come from Slavic means that there's a fundamental impact on the language from its earliest
history - arguably much deeper than the influence from neighboring Hungarian (which is itself also ~20% Slavic),
Turkish, and German. It's worth alluding to, just as knowing that Germanic English has lots of major French roots
is something
good for a language-learner to know.

Edited by Merv on 04 July 2012 at 12:03am
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Sonia.RedStar
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Message 13 of 25

04 July 2012 at 12:52am | IP Logged

I agree that it's worth mentioning, because a small part of the core vocabulary is indeed of Slavic origin. All I'm trying to say is that the only segment with Slavic influences is the lexicon. And probably the mentality in some regions :) Thus, knowledge of Slavic languages doesn't really help when it comes to phonetics or grammar.

Edited by Sonia.RedStar on 04 July 2012 at 1:00am
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Chung
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Message 14 of 25

04 July 2012 at 2:29am | IP Logged

Sonia.RedStar wrote:

What you went through in the Romanian education system reflects a certain political slant and makes sense given what I posted earlier:

Chung wrote:

[...] This article on Wikipedia has some more information on the topic but the Talk Page has a couple of Romanian editors disputing the veracity of the article. It seems quietly motivated from the common Romanian sensitivity toward traits which are perceived as demonstrating the divergence of Romanian from other Romance languages and/or Latin.

Sonia.RedStar wrote:

All I'm trying to say is that the only segment with Slavic influences is the lexicon. And probably the mentality in some regions :) Thus, knowledge of Slavic languages doesn't really help when it comes to phonetics or grammar.

Indeed. However vocabulary acquisition is a big part of the learner's task and Merv hits it on the head: it's just good for the prospective learner to know. I suspect also that the Slavonic influence on Romanian gets the attention that it does because for a Romance language, Romanian is quite divergent. One big reason is this influx of Slavonic vocabulary (a less obvious reason to most beginners is its belonging to the Balkan Sprachbund which affects its grammar).

The Wikipedia article indicates that the Slavonic influence goes beyond lexicon even if it might not highly obvious to non-specialists.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavic_influence_on_Romanian#Dialect_and_style wrote:

The number of Slavicisms is higher in border regions with significant Slavic-speaking populations. In spoken Romanian, their share is between 30 percent in Romania and up to 40 percent in Moldova, where Russian borrowings and constructions are common (compare Vreau un holodilnic and Vreau să cumpăr un frigider). In written Romanian, their share is somewhat lower (around 30 percent); Latin-based words represent around 55 percent, with the remaining percent of Greek, Hungarian, and Turkic origin and from the Dacian substratum.

In modern literary Romanian, Slavonic influences are evident in phonetics and morphology (influenced by Slavic speakers). Phonetic Slavicisms include the iotation of the initial e in words such as el, ea, este pronounced [jel], [ja], [jeste] (compare Spanish: el, ella, estamos), without the Slavic iotation effect) and the palatalization of consonants in the plural form (for example pom-pomi and lup-lupi, pronounced [pomʲ] and [lupʲ]; compare the original Italian sound in lupi). Several Slavic prefixes and suffixes, such as ne-, -că, -iţă, răs-/răz-, have become part of the Romanian lexis; -că and -iţă are markers of the feminine gender in Romanian morphology (lup-lupoaică, Italian-italiancă, actor-actriţă). Unlike Western Romance languages, Romanian is unusual in how its nouns undergo internal vowel modifications while being inflected (fată-fete, gheaţă-gheţuri). This feature is common in neighboring Slavic languages: лёд-льда, сон-сны, день-дни. These changes indicate that, unlike later-arriving Hungarians, local Slavs who settled in the Vlach lands learned Balkan Latin. This process infused Romanian with Slavic features, while leading to the assimilation of Slavs north of the Danube.

As in the Western Romance languages, the Latin h was lost in early Balkan Latin between the third and fifth centuries (for example, hibernum > Romanian iarnă and Spanish invierno, "winter"). However, Slavic influence after the sixth century led to a reintroduction of the Slavic hard h sound into Romanian. Therefore, most Romanian words beginning with h are Slavic in origin: hram, hrană, hulubărie, hrean.

The addition of Slavic verb stems ending in -i (a iubi, a citi, a goni, a izbi, a răni, a primi) and -î (a posomorî, a omorî, a târî) has led to an expansion of this conjugation pattern in Romanian: a opri, a zdrobi, a toropi, a osteni, a podi, a vărui, a beli, a cerni, a plesni, a coji, a ţocăi, a născoci, a grohăi, a glumi, a trudi. By contrast, in Western Romance languages the number of verbs in the original Latin -i group shrank with time.

Certain indirect sentence structures—such as mi-e bine and mi-e frig (literally "to me is cold")—are also Slavic-influenced (compare dobro mi je and hladno mi je). In the West, direct constructions are used instead (Spanish: estoy bien). The preservation of cases and the neutral gender has also occurred under Slavic influence, and is not observed in modern Western Romance. The tendency of late Latin was to drop all noun cases and redistribute the neutral gender between masculine and feminine (as in all modern Western Romance languages). Slavic influence has kept Romanian from losing these features. Romanian has also developed a Slavic-influenced vocative case, ending in -o: Fetiţo!.

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Kartof
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Message 15 of 25

04 July 2012 at 3:02am | IP Logged

Sonia.RedStar wrote:

Thus, knowledge of Slavic languages doesn't really help when it comes to phonetics or
grammar.

Not if you know Bulgarian. I swear, the few Romanian sentences that I've heard sounded very similar to Bulgarian
phonetically and some short phrases even had the same meaning. Then again, Portuguese also has a familiar
sound to it although I can't put my finger on why.
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Merv
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Message 16 of 25

04 July 2012 at 3:11am | IP Logged

Sonia.RedStar wrote:

I agree that it's worth mentioning, because a small part of the core vocabulary is indeed
of Slavic origin. All I'm trying to say is that the only segment with Slavic influences is the lexicon. And probably
the mentality in some regions :) Thus, knowledge of Slavic languages doesn't really help when it comes to
phonetics or grammar.

Knowledge of the fact that tons of English words have French roots also doesn't help pronunciation or grammar.
Still it doesn't mean it shouldn't be mentioned, if only out of historical interest.

The elephant in the room here is your implication that Slavs are inferior, something you hint at with your
"mentality in some regions" (whatever that would mean, since the mentality of Czechs, Montenegrins, and
Russians is pretty different, if we can even talk about national mentalities).

It's well known that some Romanians have this embarrassment with Slavic influence which is obviously much
deeper than just the language. Romanian used Cyrillic for centuries and even used Church Slavonic (rather than
Latin) in their Orthodox liturgy until comparatively recently. Slavic was influential in political terminology and
toponyms as well.

The influence of Slavic was very intentionally expunged by Romanian intellectuals in the 19th and 20th centuries,
who replaced tons of basic words with borrowings from French and Italian or directly from Latin.

The fact that your school system has taught you that there's a continuous line of descent from Trajan's Dacia to
modern Romanians with none of that awful Slavic trash influence...well, that's your problem.

Edited by Merv on 04 July 2012 at 3:15am

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