Substrate in Romanian

According to the official theory regarding the origin of the Eastern Romance languages, they developed from the local Vulgar Latin spoken in the region of the Balkans. That there is a connection between the Vulgar Latin and the Paleo-Balkan languages spoken in the area is a certainty. Taking into consideration the geographical area where these languages are spoken and the fact that there is not much information about the Paleo-Balkan languages, it is considered that the substratal of the Eastern Romance languages should be the ancient Thracian and Dacian.

The substratal elements in the languages are mostly lexical items. Around 300 words are considered by many linguists to be of substratum origin. Including place-names and river-names, and most of the forms labelled as being of unknown etymology, the number of the substratum elements in Eastern Romance may surpass 500 basic roots. Linguistic research in recent years has increased the body of Eastern Romance words that may be considered indigenous.

In addition to vocabulary items, some other features of Eastern Romance, such as phonological features and elements of grammar (see Balkan sprachbund) may also be from Paleo-Balkan languages.

Lexical items

Older Romanian etymological dictionaries tended to assume a borrowing in many cases, usually from a Slavic language or from Hungarian, but etymological analysis may show that, in many cases, the direction of borrowing was from Romanian to the neighboring languages. The current Dicţionar explicativ (the DEX) published by the Romanian Academy continues to list many words as borrowings, though the work of other linguists (Sorin Olteanu, Sorin Paliga, Ivan Duridanov, et al.) may indicate that a number of these are in fact indigenous, from local Indo-European languages.

Though the substratum status of many Romanian words is not much disputed, their status as Dacian words is controversial, some more than others. There are no significant surviving written examples of the Dacian language, so it is difficult to verify in most cases whether a given Romanian word is actually from Dacian or not. Many linguists however favor a Dacian source for the Romanian substratum. Many of the Romanian substratum words have Albanian cognates, and if these words are in fact Dacian, it indicates that the Dacian language may have been on the same branch as Albanian.

The Bulgarian Thracologist Vladimir Georgiev helped develop the theory that the Romanian language has a Daco-Moesian language as its substrate, a language that had a number of features which distinguished it from the Thracian language spoken further south, across the Haemus range.

Other languages

There are also some Romanian substratum words in languages other than Romanian, these examples having entered via Romanian (Vlach) dialects. An example is vatră (home or hearth) which is found in Albanian, Serbian, Croatian, and other neighboring languages, though with modified meaning. Another one is Bryndza, a type of cheese made in Eastern Austria, Poland, the Czech Republic (Moravian Wallachia), Slovakia and Ukraine, the word being derived from the Romanian word for cheese (brânză).

See also

References
  • Rosetti, Alexandru. "History of the Romanian language" (Istoria limbii române), 2 vols., Bucharest, 1965-1969.
  • Dicţionar Explicativ Online
  • Dex Online web 2.0
  • Dicţionar Online
  • English-Albanian/Albanian-English Online Dictionary
  • Dicţionar Enciclopedic, Cartier Publishing House - ISBN 9975-79-080-1
  • A New Dimension to the Linguistic Relationship of Romanian and Greek
  • Sorin Paliga: links to both books and e-books - PDF format - which further clarify this topic
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