Romanian language

Romanian (Română) is an Eastern Romance language, spoken by about 28 million people, most of them in Romania, Moldova (where it is the official language) and neighbouring countries.

History

The Romanian territory was inhabited in ancient times by the Dacians, who spoke an Indo-European language, the Dacian language about which there is very little knowledge.

Some words found only in Romanian (in all dialects) or with a cognate in Albanian language are generally thought to be inherited from Dacian, many of them being related to the pastoral life. (see: List of Dacian words). Some linguists believe that in fact, Albanians are Dacians that were not romanized and migrated south.

There is another theory that Dacian was fairly close to Latin, however there are no proofs available to support this claim and is generally discarded by linguists.

After the Roman conquest, Dacia was transformed in a Roman province and Vulgar Latin was used for administration and commerce. It is noteworthy that only a small portion of Dacia/Romania was conquered, most of the teritory being inhabited by the Free Dacians, populations that were never under the Roman rule. The popular theory about continuous settlement of Dacia from Roman times seems to be fairly controversial. For further discussion, see Origin of Romanians.

Due to its geographical isolation, Romanian was probably the first language that split and until the modern age was not influenced by other Romance languages, so the grammar is roughly similar to that of Latin, keeping declensions and the neuter gender, unlike any other Romance language.

All dialects of Romanian are believed to have been unified in a common language until sometime between the 7th and the 10th century, before the Slavonic languages interfered with Romanian. Aromanian has very few Slavonic words. Also, the variations in the Daco-Romanian dialect (spoken throughout Romania) are very small, which is quite remarkable, because until the Modern Era there was almost no connection between the Romanians in various regions. 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 Serbian Banat.

The first written record of a Romanic 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!").

Vocabulary

Most words in Romanian vocabulary (about 75%) are of Latin origin, but the language also contains many words borrowed from its Slavonic neighbours and also from French, Italian, German, Hungarian, Turkish and English.

There are some Slavonic influences, both on the phonetic level and on the lexical level - for example, since Latin does not have a word for yes, Romanian took the Slavonic da. Also Romanian is the only Romance language with /h/. (Although in many dialects of Spanish, particularly in the Americas, <j> is pronounced as [h], but the original, Castilian phoneme is /x/.)

It is also noteworthy that almost all rural activities have names of Latin origin, while most words related to urban life were borrowed from other languages, e.g. French, Italian, German, English, Hungarian. Modern words were often borrowed from French or Italian in the 19th century, some were later borrowed from German and English.

Geographic distribution

Romanian is spoken mostly in Romania, Moldova, Ukraine, Hungary, Serbia and Montenegro, Bulgaria, Macedonia and Greece, but there are also Romanian language speakers in countries like Canada, United States, Germany, Israel, Australia and New Zealand, mainly due to immigration after the World War II.

Official status

Romanian is official in Romania, Moldova (where it is named "Moldovan language") and is one of official languages of Vojvodina (a province of Serbia).

In other Eastern European countries (excepting Hungary and Ukraine) the Romanian minority has very few rights regarding the use of their language in schools and institutions.

Dialects

Romanian has four dialects:

• Daco-Romanian - generally referred as Romanian - spoken North of Danube
• Aromanian - Greece, Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Bulgaria, Serbia
• Megleno-Romanian - Northern Greece
• Istro-Romanian - Istria peninsula, Croatia

It is thought that the Romanian language appeared north and south of the Danube. All the four dialects are offsprings of the Romance language spoken both in the North and South Danube, before the settlement of the Slavonian tribes South of the river - Daco-Romanian in North, and the other three dialects in the South.

Grammar

Main article: Romanian grammar

Pronouns

As in Italian, pronouns in Nominative case are generally omitted in Romanian unless required to disambiguate the meaning of a sentence. Usually, the verb ending provides information about the subject. The inflection by gender can be found only on the third person.

Nouns

Romanian nouns are inflected by gender, number and case.

Gender

Unlike the other Romance languages, Romanian has three genders: masculine, feminine and neuter, keeping the neuter gender from Latin. Nouns of this gender use the masculine form for the singular and the feminine form for the plural.

Words ending in "ă" are feminine, while words ending in consonant are masculine and neuter and the words ending in "e" can be of either gender.

Sometimes it is possible to change the gender using suffixes. From feminine to masculine it is used the suffix "-oi" (pisica (fem) - pisoi (masc) = cat) and the revers with suffix "-ică" (lup (masc) - lupoaică (fem) - wolf).

Romanian nouns have 5 cases, Nominative, Genitive, Dative, Accusative and Vocative.

Number

Romanian distinguishes between singular and plural forms of a noun, the plural being formed with vowel change, but sometimes there are some other sounds that change inside the noun.

Here's a table with the rough general rules of the Romanian plural:

Some examples:

Articles

Definite article

Another peculiarity of Romanian is that it is the only Romance language that has the definite article attached to the end of the noun (as in Swedish) instead of being a separate word in front. They were formed as in other Romance languages from the Latin demonstrative pronouns.

Indefinite article

Possession

Possesion is indicated by using the possesive article (see table) and the oblique case of the possessor noun.

See also: Romanian declension

Verbs

Romanian has the same four groups of verbs as Latin and unlike English, it has no sequence of tenses nor strict rules regarding their use, but it does has many alternatives (for example, it has six different types of future tense).

See also: Romanian conjugation

Writing system

The oldest written text in Romanian is a letter from 1521 ("Neacşu of Câmpulung's letter"). It is written using the Cyrillic alphabet, like all early Romanian writings (because the usual language for religious services was old Slavonian).

In the late 1700s, Transylvanian scholars started using the Latin alphabet to write Romanian. The Cyrillic alphabet remained in (gradually decreasing) use until 1860, when Romanian writing was first officially regulated.

Romanian alphabet

Main article: Romanian alphabet

The Romanian alphabet is based on the Latin alphabet, and has five additional letters (these are not diacriticals, 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 phonetic, with one exception: the "â" (used inside the words) and "î" (used at the beginning or the end), both representing the same sound. Long and short vowels are not distinguished in writing. Usually, the sounds denoted by letters are similar to Italian.

Here are the letters of the Romanian alphabet, and their pronunciation.

Q, W and Y are not part of the core Romanian alphabet; they are used mainly to write imported words, such as: quasar, watt, etc.

Writing letters /S/ and /ts/ with a cedilla instead of a comma is incorrect, but rather widespread, especially in computer environments.

Vowels

There are eight vowels in Romanian:

The last two letters both represent exactly the same sound, and since they are also not interchangeable in writing this article counts them as a single vowel.

A voiceless terminal "i" that can be found especially on plural forms.

Semivowels

Group of letters

These groups of letters are identical to those in Italian:

Common words and phrases

The Romanian alphabet is phonetic, so the words are read nearly as in Italian/Latin (with the exception of the quasi-diacriticals).

• Romanian (person): "Român"
• hello: "Salut" or "Salutare"
• good-bye: "La revedere"
• bye: "Pa"
• please: "Vă rog"
• sorry: "Îmi pare rău"
• thank you: "Mulţumesc"
• yes: "Da"
• no: "Nu"
• I don't understand: "Nu înţeleg"
• Where's the bathroom?: "Unde e toaleta?"
• Do you speak English?: "Vorbiţi engleza?"

See also:

• Romanian proverbs

External Links

• Romanian Wikipedia

Learning Romanian

• Romanian Lessons
• Verbix: Romanian verbs conjugation
• Romanian grammar

Phrasebooks

• WikiTravel Romanian Phrasebook
• Unilang2.org: Romanian Basic Words

Dictionaries

• Wiktionary in Romanian (begun May 1, 2004)
• A complete Romanian-English dictionary
• A very usable online Romanian-English dictionary
• DEX online - Romanian (explicative) dictionary
• Romanian - English Dictionary : from Webster's Rosetta Edition.
• Free downloadable dictionary

Miscellaneous

• SAMPA for Romanian
• Neacşu of Câmpulung's letter - the oldest written document in Romanian