All Questions
Tagged with romance-languages romanian
11 questions
2
votes
3
answers
273
views
Are there Romance parallel descendants to Italian "cicalare" and Romanian "cicăli(re)"?
I am looking for the etymology of the Romanian verb a cicăli (to make reproaches repeatedly, to nag), which is reported of unknown origin, and I have found an almost identical word in Italian: ...
- 780
1
vote
0
answers
103
views
Is there a Slavic equivalent of the Greek and Latin semantic transfer from "chest/vault" to "treasure", like θησαυρός/thesaurus?
I was looking at the etymology of the Romanian word comoară ("treasure", "hoard", "pile of precious things") and it seems based on the widespread Slavic form komora, ...
- 780
0
votes
3
answers
379
views
Can it be that the etymology of the Balkan root for "tickle" stretches as far as Korean?
Some context first:
I am interested in the etymology of the Romanian word gâdila/gîdila ("to tickle; the â/î variation is only graphical: it's /ɨ/, the close central unrounded vowel which in ...
- 780
5
votes
1
answer
311
views
Which is the origin of Romanian /h/?
According to Wikipedia,
Romanian has [...] the glottal fricative /h/.
You can hear it, for instance, in the Romanian word arhaic.
This cannot be of Latin origin because, as explained in the book La ...
- 176
1
vote
1
answer
122
views
Is "nea" <- "*nivis" proof that metaphonic diphthongisation occured in Romanian before the loss of intervocalic "v"?
The metaphonic diphthongisation phenomenon is said to have occurred between the 6th and 8th century. But it must have happened before the loss of intervocalic "v", though I have only one ...
- 189
8
votes
2
answers
1k
views
How did Latin "aqua" became Sardinian "abba" and Romanian "apă"?
The way I believe it happened was by the change of "w" into "v" and the fall of the velar "k". Furthermore, betacism caused the change of "v" to "b" ...
- 189
1
vote
1
answer
226
views
How could Vulgar Latin divide in so many branches in the Balkans in a such small timespan?
From the literature I've read ( Al.Rosetti History of Romanian for example ) it looks like we can talk about Vulgar Latin until the 4th or 5th century in the Balkans, and further than that many ...
- 189
6
votes
3
answers
1k
views
Why is the Romanian syntax for "Good night!" opposite to all the other Romance languages?
It's interesting to look at the phrase "Good night!" in the various languages of different language groups. The phrase is usually recognizable across related languages. (It's similar when looking at ...
- 898
10
votes
1
answer
779
views
Where did Latin and its descendants retain a case system most recently?
So we know that Latin nouns and adjectives inflect for case as well as person, number, and gender.
Also we know that all the major modern Romance languages except Romanian no longer have a case ...
- 14.8k
30
votes
7
answers
16k
views
Why do so many core Romanian words with Latin roots come from different roots than in the other Romance languages?
Romanian is a romance language like Catalan, Italian, French, Portuguese, and Spanish so much of its core vocabulary is derived from Latin.
Why then even in core vocabulary does Romanian so often ...
- 14.8k
25
votes
5
answers
2k
views
Which Romance languages have reflexes of the Latin nominative in nouns?
It is generally accepted that the nominal forms in the Romance languages represent reflexes of the Latin accusative rather than the nominative. (This is even true for those languages that have ...
- 2,215