Questions tagged [romanian]
Eastern Romance language and national language of Romania and the republic of Moldova, also a member of the Balkan Sprachbund.
32 questions
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Is Old Church Slavonic съпрѧтьнъ (sŭprętĭnŭ) descending from PIE *sprend-, *sprendʰ- *sper- (“to flinch; jump”)?
It has always intrigued me that the rather popular Romanian word sprinten (swift, fast, lively) seems very close semantically to English sprint.
The etymology of the English word is rather detailed on ...
- 780
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Why is Portuguese 'mundo' transcribed phonemically /ˈmũ.du/ but for other languages not even phonetic transcription records a "deviation" from /n/?
For a short version of the question, see at the end EDIT AFTER COMMENTS:
I know about the Differences between phonemic and phonetic transcriptions, and I am referring to the phonemic transcription, ...
- 780
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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
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Romanian â and î: Is /ɨ/ closer to /i/ than to /ə/?
In Romanian, two letters are currently used for the /ɨ/ (i with bar) sound (close central unrounded vowel), namely "â" and "î". There used to be other letters as well, retained ...
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How close are the Italian and the Romanian open central unrounded vowels?
The "a" sound in Italian and Romanian, is identified as the central unrounded vowel and represented as being practically identical, very close to [ä].
Although a is used in these images to ...
- 780
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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
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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
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In the Romanian language standard accepted pronunciation, is **noștri** pronounced differently from **noștrii**?
In the Romanian language standard accepted pronunciation, is noștri pronounced differently from noștrii? Could you share any link to a document / book confirming this?
As a native speaker, I do not ...
- 143
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Are the gramatical cases slowly disappearing in Romanian or they were never that used in the common speech?
Where I live in Muntenia, people rarely use the dative anymore and replace it with the preposition “la” + the nominative/accusative form of the noun or pronoun. “Am dat la băiat să mănânce” instead of ...
- 189
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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
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Is the Proto-Slavic root *term (dwelling) related to the Proto-Ugric root *tärɜ „open space, room”?
I am curious about the obscure etymology of the Romanian word tărâm (realm, domain, world, geographical space -- usually a poetic word, like in the plural form alte tarâmuri = "other (foreign) ...
- 780
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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
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Is the Romanian verb "pișca" etymologically related to Spanish "pellizcar" ( to pinch )?
From wiktioanry: "pellizcar (Spain) /peʝiθˈkaɾ/, [pe.ʝiθˈkaɾ]
(Latin America) /peʝisˈkaɾ/, [pe.ʝisˈkaɾ]- From Vulgar Latin *vellicicāre, from Latin vellicāre, most likely ultimately from vellus (...
- 189
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Where do the "îs" and "îi" forms of "a fi" ( "to be" ) originate in dialectal Romanian?
perhaps the Latin first person singular indicative "sum" with an "î" of uncertain origin? Im not sure about "îi". I guess from the short "e" /je/ form of "...
- 189
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How did latin "de post" become Romanian "după"?
Wouldn't the expected result be: "dopă"? I understand that the short "e" was assimilated by the long "o" from the next word, and then /o/ -> /ə/, but why o -> u ?
...
- 189
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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
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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 ...
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How come the Romanian verb for love iubi does not originate from the Latin iubeo
I took a course in diachronic linguistics during my MA, but it focused on grammaricalizations in English so I’m not at all versed in etymology of Romance Languages. To me, however, it seems more ...
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When was the name of Wales first attested in Romanian, and in which form?
As a native speaker, I am amazed that in Romanian the name of Wales, when it was introduced, very probably in the 19th century, was translated as Ţara Galilor, literally "Country of the Gauls", unlike ...
- 780
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Excepting Romanian, is "Wales" ever translated/transliterated in modern languages with the same term as that meaning "Gaul" or "Gauls"?
I have noticed that in Romanian the name of Wales is Ţara Galilor, which literally means Country of the Gauls or "Gauls-land". I consider this not just unusual, something that is not present ...
- 780
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Etymology of Romanian "amor" (cf. "iubire")
I found it interesting to learn that Romanian borrowed this word from a Slavic language as well as the verb "a iubi". I also discovered that the word "amor" is present in Romanian but apparently it ...
- 911
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Why is the Romanian tense system so "simple", compared to other Romance languages?
It appears like Romanian has only 5 inflected/conjugated tenses (excluding imperative), while all other Romance languages have much more. For example, in Spanish, French and Italian, there are 7(8) ...
- 417
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The background reason of the way of conjugation of Romanian verbs (indicative present tense) for -a ending verbs
As I have encountered a lot, some Romanian infinitives ending in -a (-a ending group) stick to the "-ez" suffix for indicative present tense conjugation. I know basically and normally we ...
- 173
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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
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What is the substrate of Romanian language?
I mean what was the native language of Wlachs and Dacians before they adopted Latin?
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"Torpedo compartment" for glove compartment?
In Turkish, the glove compartment of a car is called "torpido gözü", the literal translation of which is "torpedo compartment".
None of the dictionaries I have access to has an etymology for the ...
- 2,195
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How much Lithuanian and Romanian languages are mutually intelligible?
I have heard that Lithuanian and Romanian are related. As such, I want to know, to what extent they are mutually intelligible.
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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 ...
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So many Romanian words seem to end in "u"
I have just learned that the suffix "escu" in a Romanian name means "son of." But it seems that the "u" is a common ending in all Romanian words. Does that one letter have a meaning?
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What is the history of the sound spelled <â> or <î> (IPA /ɨ/) in Romanian?
I've read that some people attribute it to influence from the Slavic languages. But it doesn't just appear in Slavic loans — it also shows up in obviously Latin-derived words like câine 'dog' (...
- 4,605
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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
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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 ...
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