Romanian language

Romanian (autoglottony: limba română, IPA [ 'limba ro'mɨnə]) or Daco-Romanian is an Indo-European language that belongs to the eastern branch of the Romance languages, currently being the fifth most widely spoken Romance language in the world after Spanish, Portuguese, French and Italian. Within the European Union, of which it is an official language, it ranks fourth among Romance languages and seventh overall.

For reasons of typological differentiation, the Romanian language is also called "Daco-Romanian" (although it is little known). Previously, for political reasons, the Moldovan authorities used the name Moldovan (currently used in the unrecognized state of Transnistria) to refer to the Romanian language spoken there, although there is little difference, the accent being the most relevant.

The Romanian language is spoken by approximately 28 million people, of whom more than 19 million live in Romania, where it is the only official language and, furthermore, according to 2002 data, mother tongue for 90% of the population. It is the mother tongue for 80% of the population.

Not counting the countries mentioned above, it is also one of the six official languages in the Serbian autonomous province of Vojvodina. It is one of the official languages of the European Union and is also spoken in Romanian emigrant communities in Germany, the United States, France, Israel, Russia, Venezuela and, more recently, Spain and Italy (where there are almost two million Romanian speakers), among others.

Historical, social and cultural aspects

Etymology

The denomination român comes from the Latin RŌMĀNUS and is a semicultism influenced by its double cult roman; the regular result without cultured influence would have been rumân. In the 17th century the process of semantic differentiation between the two words: român retained its ethnolinguistic meaning, while rumân changed it to 'ordinary people' and, later, to 'slave'. However, it is the older word that passed into other languages and resulted in words like romanian in Spanish, roumain in French, romeno and rumeno in Italian, Romanian in English, Rumänisch in German or rumuński in Polish.

The name dacoromân, meaning 'dacorromanian', refers to the ancient Roman province of Dacia, whose territory today forms a large part of Romania. Three other Eastern Romance languages make similar references: Macedo-Romanian to Macedonia, Megleno-Romanian to the Meglená river valley (in Greece), and Istro-Romanian to the Croatian peninsula of Istria.

Between 1953 and 1964, due to spelling reforms, the name of the language was written in Romanian romînă. Between 1964 and 1993 română and its derivatives were the only Romanian words written with â instead of î.

History

Romanian territory was occupied in antiquity by the Getae and the Dacians, some Indo-European-speaking peoples who were defeated and conquered by the Romans in the year 106 AD. C., during the reign of Emperor Trajan (98-117). As a consequence, the region became the Roman province of Dacia, which included what is now Oltenia, the Banat, and Transylvania. During the following 165 years the region was intensively populated with settlers from the western part of the Empire, especially of Italic origin. In this way, Vulgar Latin became the language of administration and commerce in the province.

It is assumed that during this period the Dacian language may have influenced Vulgar Latin either as an adstrate or as a substratum. As no written testimonies of this language are preserved, it is believed that some 160 words of unknown etymology that Romanian shares with Albanian may be of Dacian origin; for example: mal ‘coast’, brânză ‘cheese’ or brad ‘fir tree’.

Between 271 and 275, pressure from free Dacians (Carpals) and Goths forced the Roman Empire to withdraw from Dacia and settle south of the Danube. Some historians of the Austro-Hungarian Empire tried to explain that all the proto-Romanians would have left their land to take refuge south of the Danube, even though the region was occupied by the Romans and in any case fully exposed to barbarian attacks. The truth is that there is no trace of the presence of a similar group of pro-Romanians in that region. The purpose of the imperial historians was to find some moral justification for the discrimination against Romanians that they practiced in Transylvania.

Due to its geographical isolation, Romanian was probably the first language to split from the Latin stock, which surely explains one of its most characteristic features: the preservation of a declension residue (although while Latin had six cases, Romanian only distinguishes three: the nominative/accusative and the genitive/dative, in addition to the vocative).

It is believed that, between the 8th and 12th centuries, the Vulgar Latin spoken in the Balkan provinces of the Roman Empire split into four languages: Daco-Romanian (modern Romanian), Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian, and Istro-Romanian. While these languages are very similar in their grammatical structure, they differ in their vocabulary, with Slavic influences in Romanian and Greek in Aromanian.

Due to its geographical location, the basic vocabulary of Romanian barely contains words of Germanic origin (so characteristic of Western Romance languages). On the contrary, it was influenced by the Slavic languages - due to cultural assimilation and the influence of the Orthodox Church - and, to a lesser extent, by Greek, the language of the Byzantine Empire. However, words of Slavic origin tend to become archaisms. From Turkish, the language of the Ottoman Empire, with which the medieval states of Wallachia and Moldavia had to contend, there are only a few borrowings. Neither the language nor the religion of the Turks (Islam) managed to influence the Romanian principalities. In Transylvania, Romanian also adopted words from Hungarian and German. The influence of the French and Italian languages has also been important, especially in the second half of the 19th century.

The first written sample of Romanian dates from the 16th century. This is a letter written in 1521 by the merchant Neacșu de Câmpulung, in which he warned the mayor of the city of Brașov about a military expedition of the Turks who intended to attack the city. The document is written in the Cyrillic alphabet, as was customary at the time. The oldest text written in Romanian of which there is evidence is a Protestant catechism printed in Sibiu (Transylvania) in 1544, of which no copy survives. Instead, another, later catechism, published in Brașov in 1559, still written in Cyrillic characters, has survived. The substitution of the Cyrillic alphabet for the Latin alphabet first occurred in a document written by Romanians from Transylvania towards the end of the 16th century.

In the former Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic, Romanian was written with an adapted version of the Cyrillic alphabet, which was maintained until 1989, when the standard orthography based on the Latin alphabet was restored.

Geographic distribution

Romanian knowledge in the south-central Europe

maternal

more than 3%

1-3%

less than 1%

n/a

Romanian is the official language of two countries and one autonomous province, but its speakers are also found in other territories in Europe and America.

Romanian as a mother tongue

Most — about 90% — of native Romanian speakers live in Romania, where Romania is an official language. It is also spoken by 80% of the Moldovan population and the Republic of Moldova is the second country to have it as its official language. Because of the mass deportations of Moldovans from the Moldovan SSR, Romanian-speaking minorities are found in former socialist republics of the Soviet Union, including Kazakhstan and Russia. Many Romanians who had decided to stay in the regions lost to Romania after World War II also retained their mother tongue, forming the minorities in present-day Ukraine (Chernivtsi and Odesa oblasts) and Bulgaria (the city of Vidin and South Dobruja).

In Serbia, although there are two speaking communities in Vojvodina and Timok, only the inhabitants of the former are allowed to use their mother tongue in judicial or administrative cases. In addition, the Romanian-speakers of the Timok Valley are persecuted by the Serbian government and are not considered as a true linguistic and national minority. The minority also persists in the city of Gyula, in Hungary.

Romanian is also spoken by emigrants in several countries, including Spain (796,576 Romanians), Italy (between 500,000 and 1 million Romanians), Israel (approximately 250,000 speakers, according to the 1995 census), among others.

Dialectology

Romanian has six main dialects:

• Valaquious Dialecto
• Dialecto banato
• Transylvania varieties of Romanian

• Crișana Dialecto
• Maramureș Dialecto

• Moldavo (spoke in Moldova, where it is an official language, is considered a language separate from Romanian for political reasons)

Some consider the Balco-Romanian languages spoken in the Balkans to be dialects of Romanian:

• Macedorrumano, also called "arrumano", is spoken in Greece, North Macedonia, Bulgaria and Serbia.
• Meglenorrumano, also called "Meglenita", is spoken in northern Greece.
• Istro-rumano, is spoken in the currently Croatian area of the Istria peninsula.

However, several Romanian linguists consider these latter varieties to be separate languages, since the one from which Romanian is derived is Daco-Romanian.

Romanian is thought to have been born north and south of the Danube. All four varieties descend from the Romance languages. This could have been the case until the arrival and settlement of the Slavs south of the river.^{[citation needed]}

Linguistic description

Phonology

The Romanian consonant inventory is made up of the following segments:

There are seven vowels in phonological opposition in Romanian:

Grammar

Noun and adjective

Nouns and adjectives, in Romanian, are inflected indicating gender, number and case. As in other Romance languages, the adjective agrees in gender and number with the noun it modifies. Its normal position is after the name. When it precedes it, it takes the suffixed article.

A good teacher
'A good teacher'

O casă bună
'A good house'

Niște profesori buni
'Some good teachers'

Niște case bune
'Some good houses'

Gender

Romanian also has the two common genders in Romance languages (masculine and feminine) and a third one that in general contexts is often called symbolic «neuter» and that more precisely is the ambiguous gender: the words belonging to this They are used as masculine in the singular and as feminine in the plural. It is not, then, the neuter gender inherited from Latin. Consecutively, when mentioning "neutral", the ambiguous gender must be understood in it.

Most words ending in -ă are feminine, while nouns with a consonantal ending are masculine or ambiguous (neuter). Words ending in -e are usually feminine, although there are also many masculine ones, such as pește ('fish') and câine ('dog').

Sometimes gender can be modified by using suffixes. From feminine to masculine, the suffix -oi (pisica (fem) - pisoi (masc) = 'cat') is used and the opposite process is achieved with the suffix -ică (lup (masc) - lupoaică (fem) = 'wolf').

Number

The plural of nouns is formed by the suffixes -i, -e and -uri, sometimes accompanied by a phonetic modification at the root. For example, stradă ‘street’ pl. străzi ‘streets’; fată ‘girl’ pl. fete ‘girls’; frate ‘brother’, pl. frați ‘brothers’.

The distribution of plural suffixes is exemplified in the following table:

Determinant

Romanian has a system of two demonstratives: the near demonstrative acest(a) ('east') and the far away acel(a) ('ese, that'). It is usually used after the name, which must appear in a defined form.

The indefinite article is un (masc.) and o (fem.): un student 'a student'; o noapte ‘one night’.

The definite article is expressed by a noun suffix. This is a unique feature among Romance languages, but it is also found in a neighboring Balkan language, Bulgarian, suggesting adstratus influence.

The definite article varies according to the grammatical gender of the noun, according to the following table:

When the noun is preceded by an adjective, the article is normally suffixed to the adjective: cf. bun student 'good student' and bunul student 'the good student'.

Possession

Possession is expressed by the genitive/dative case of the article:

Cartea professorului"The Professor's Book"

Presiunea cauciucurilor"The Pressure of the Tires"

Acoperișul casei, 'The roof of the house'

There is also a possessive determinative adjective (masc./neu. al, pl. ai; fem. a, pl. ale) that is used when there is an adjective between the noun and the possessor, among other cases. It is very common, especially colloquially, to put the suffix -lui or -lei before the noun to facilitate pronunciation. Matches the name indicating the possessed object. For example:

Telefonul nou al profesorului, 'The professors new phone'

Casa cea mare a părinților mei, 'The big house of my parents'

Pronominal possession is expressed by possessive adjectives that follow the noun, which must be in a definite form:

Fratele meu este student, 'My brother is a student'

El vorbește cu prietenul său, 'He is talking to his friend'

Personal pronoun

Personal pronouns depending on the subject are omitted, except in cases of emphasis or informative highlighting. The forms of the personal pronouns are collected in the following table:

The forms in parentheses in the table are those used as clitics, phonetically attached to a verb or other pronoun:

My- a explicat despre ce este vorba, ''He explained what it's about.'

Așteaptă-l the stațieWait at the station.

The stressed forms of the accusative pronouns are used with prepositions:

Cinema te-a învățat pe tine să te porți astfel?Who taught you to behave like that?

Ion this cue mineIon's with me.

The verb

Romanian has inherited its four verb groups from Latin. On the other hand, Romanian has six different ways of expressing the future tense. Infinitives end in -are, -eare, -ere and -ire, just like Italian, and, like the other Romance languages, they can be used as nouns. Dictionaries normally offer short infinitives, that is, without the suffix -re, although it is also correct to use the full infinitive in sentences, both in terms of verbs and nouns.

Lexicon

As for the representative (basic) vocabulary of Romanian, the situation would look like this:

• Romanesque elements, 81 %, of which:
  • 70% are Latinos inherited
  • 5 %, French
  • 4 %, Latino scholars
  • 2 %, Italian
• Internal formations, 3 % (most coming from Latin)
• Slavs, 14 %
• Other, 2 %

Some researchers expressed doubts about some words of Slavic or Hungarian origin, since they could be autochthonous Romanian words borrowed from those languages.

The Slavic influence was due not only to migrations, but also to the period of affiliation of the Romanian Orthodox to the Church controlled by the Bulgarian patriarchate. A small Slavic influence is observed in both the lexical and phonetic components of the language. For example, since Latin does not have a word to express 'yes', Romanian took the Slavic expression da. Furthermore, Romanian is the only Romance language with the phoneme /h/; although in various dialects of Spanish <j> pronounced [h], the original Spanish phoneme is /x/ and Gascon Occitan pronounces the initial f as [h].

It should also be noted that almost all rural activities have names from Latin, while those related to urban life were generally borrowed from other languages (French, Italian, German, English, Hungarian, etc.).
During the 19th century, Romanian borrowed lexicons from French and Italian. Later he took from German and English.

Currently, the lexical similarity between Romanian and Spanish reaches the percentage of 71%.

Brief vocabulary

Writing

The Romanian alphabet is based on the Latin alphabet and consists of the following letters:

A,, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, Î, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, R, S, Ș, T, suma, U, V, X, Z.

The letters Q, W, and Y are only found in loan words from other languages, such as quasar, watt ('watt'), and yacht ('yate').

The Romanian alphabet is almost entirely phonetic, with two main exceptions:

• The letters ♪ e î represent the same sound: that of the closed central vowel not labialized ///. They are distinguished in î is used in principle and at the end of the word (începe 'start', omorî 'kill' and ♪ in other cases (♪ 'Mano').
• Various forms of personal pronouns and copulative verb a fi 'Being' they start with e- pronounced diptongated [je]- for example: eu ('yo'), this ('es') pronounced respectively [ieu], [chuckles].

Pronunciation

The following table illustrates the pronunciation of Romanian: