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hello everyone welcome to the langfocus
channel and my name is paul today's
topic is the romanian language or limba
romuna in romanian as you can see the
word romanian contains the word roman in
it why because it developed from the
language of the romans latin to clarify
romanian is a member of the romance
language family when speaking of romance
languages romanian tends to get
overlooked and i'm guilty of that myself
maybe it's because of its geographic
isolation from the other romance
languages you can see that the other
major romance languages are all spoken
in western europe but romanian is spoken
in eastern europe and is separated from
the others by the balkans and parts of
central europe
romanian is part of the eastern romance
branch and there are other languages of
this branch which are spoken by
minorities throughout southeastern
europe notice that the names of these
languages contain the word romanian
these languages are all closely related
to romanian sometimes the word romanian
is used to refer to all of these closely
related languages together and some
eastern romance speakers consider them
to be dialects of one language the
language of romania and moldova is
sometimes referred to as deco romanian
to distinguish between it and the others
deco romanian has the largest number of
speakers out of all of those languages
by far and in this video i'm basically
focusing on deco romanian romanian is
spoken by around 24 million native
speakers and around 4 million second
language speakers it is the official
language of romania where it is the
mother tongue of around 93 of the people
or around 18.6 million people as well as
the official language of moldova where
it's spoken by around 2.75 million
people
in moldova the language is referred to
as moldovan by some people and as
romanian by others romanian is somewhat
unique amongst the romance languages
because it developed in close contact
with other languages mainly the slavic
languages which have influenced its
pronunciation and vocabulary the closest
romance language to romanian is
reportedly italian which shares about 77
lexical similarity with romanian compare
that to 82 percent for italian and
spanish or 89 for italian and french
history the people living in the area
before the arrival of the romans were
known as the dacians or dachi in
romanian desha was conquered by the
roman military in 106 ce and the
population adopted the latin language
very quickly exactly what happened is
not clear maybe the dacian people simply
adopted the latin language of their
conquerors but it's also possible that
the area was flooded with roman settlers
who intermarried with the local nations
there's also the theory that the dacian
language was already an italic language
closely related to latin what is clear
is that the area became very latinized
very quickly the roman empire withdrew
its military from daesha in 271 to 272
ce but left behind a romanized
latin-speaking population the next few
centuries are fairly mysterious but the
local dialects of latin gradually
evolved and sometime before the 9th
century proto-romanian the ancestor of
romanian and all the eastern romance
languages arose there are different
opinions about whether proto-romanian
developed from the vulgar latin spoken
by the romanized dacian population or
from a variety of vulgar latin spoken by
people south of the danube river who
later migrated to the north slavic
influence
notice again that romanian is surrounded
by mostly slavic languages that's
because of the migration of slavic
speakers into the area between the 7th
and 9th centuries ce contact with slavic
speakers had an influence on eastern
romance particularly in vocabulary and
pronunciation but also in grammar and
other areas it's thought that many
slavic speakers adopted the local
romance dialect but because it was their
second language they spoke it with an
accent and they continued to use certain
slavic words that felt natural for them
to keep using old church slavonic must
have also had an influence on romanian
because it was the administrative
language until the 16th century and the
liturgical language until the 17th
century it's hard to know exactly how
romanian developed during the middle
ages because there are no existing
romanian texts from before the 16th
century the earliest romanian text is
nyakshu's letter which dates to 1521 it
was written with the cyrillic alphabet
which was used to write romanian until
the 19th century this is an obvious
result of the slavic influence on the
language
the modern period it's beyond the scope
of this video to go into detail about
the history of romania and the
governments that ruled over its
different parts what's important for us
to remember is that despite changing
borders and governments there remained
an ethnic and linguistic group that
considered themselves romanian with a
growing sense of romanian national
identity efforts to standardize the
romanian language began in the 18th
century the first romanian grammar was
published in 1780
in the 1800s romanian linguists made a
concerted effort to re-latinize the
language and remove slavic and other
influences from the language and
interestingly in replacing a lot of the
non-romance vocabulary they drew words
not only from latin but also from
italian and especially from french
when romania became an independent
country in 1878 its official language
became romanian its borders changed
several times during the 20th century
while moldova spent much of the 20th
century under soviet rule as it gained
independence moldova made moldovan its
official language the consensus is that
romanian and moldovan are a single
language just with some regional
variation the standard written language
is exactly the same for both romanian
and moldovan
so how did this romance language survive
in this area when most others didn't
survive well nobody really knows but as
i said before the area known as daesha
became thoroughly latinized probably
more than other areas in the region so
whereas in other areas the latin
influence faded after the departure of
the roman empire in dacia that latin
influence did not fade there are also
various theories about the people
fending off invaders better than others
or that the geography of their land
insulated them from being overrun and
assimilated for example some say that
the carpathian mountains provided a
barrier for attack from the north and
east or provided refuge and strategic
high ground above invaders but again
nobody really knows so what is romanian
like well since romanian is a romance
language that developed from latin it's
obviously quite similar to french
spanish italian and other romance
languages but it's also been influenced
by other languages particularly the
slavic languages because of its position
in the balkan sprachbund the balkan
sprakpunt is an area in which the
various languages have mutually
influenced each other including romance
languages slavic languages greek and
albanian it has also been influenced by
other nearby languages like hungarian
vocabulary the majority of romanian
vocabulary is of latin and romance
origin based on one study 63 percent of
romanian vocabulary is romance while
11.5 is slavic with other vocabulary
coming from turkish greek hungarian and
german but if we focus on the most
common 2500 words in romanian the
percentage of romance vocabulary is
around 76 percent and slavic around 15
percent
let's look at some sentences and examine
their vocabulary
europe
this means i know the history of europe
very well word for word it's i know
history the europe's very well all of
these words are romance words
means i know or unfamiliar with and is
like konosko in italian or jaconet in
french historia
means history and is like storia in
italian or estoire in french europe
means european and is like eirope in
italian or ujopea in french
means very in romanian and is related to
the word meaning strong in italian forte
and in french for so here it means very
and it's not used that way in italian or
french
means well like the italian word bene
and like the french word bian
another example um
this means i wash the car in front of
the house without any problems word for
word it's myself i wash car the without
problems in face houses the
um means me or myself like me in italian
or ma in french it's the indirect object
pronoun which is used here because the
verb is reflexive
means wash in the first person singular
this word developed from vulgar latin
ex-berlavade and is like the portuguese
word perlavar meaning to wash mashina
means car and is similar to machina in
italian and like machina in spanish
which means machine or engine
means without and comes from latin for
us like fuori in italian which means
outside
problem is also a romance word coming
from latin problema which ultimately
came from ancient greek
means in and comes from latin and
ultimately goes all the way back to
proto-indo-european fatah means face or
front and comes from vulgar latin fakia
it's similar to fatiha in italian and
fas in french kasi means house like casa
in italian and casa in spanish
another
example trebues or primras boil this
means we must stop the war word for word
it's must subjunctive stop war
trebwe means have to and is a slavic
loan word
comes from latin c and this sentence
indicates the subjunctive mood
means stop and is a slavic long word
means war and is also a slavic loan word
many commonly used romanian words are of
slavic origin a few more examples are
prietin friend iubi to love apleti to
pay atresie to wake up
to find
so as you can see the majority of
romanian vocabulary is romance
vocabulary but slavic vocabulary is also
quite evident word order the word order
of romanian is very similar to other
romance languages with one particular
difference that we'll notice
the key words in these sentences are all
in the same order what's different is
that the romanian sentence has no
standalone definite article or
preposition for of that's because while
other romance languages no longer have
case declensions for nouns and
adjectives like latin did romanian does
have them well it has three case
declensions for nouns languages that
don't have case declensions often use
prepositions instead to indicate the
same information
in this sentence europe is in the
genitive case meaning of europe or
europe's the most basic form of the noun
is actually europa with an a but the i
at the end is a definite article and the
e indicates genitive case because the
genitive case indicates possession we
don't need a preposition meaning of like
in italian
as for the definite article in romanian
it comes at the end of the word and
works together with the case declension
in the word istoria the a shows that the
word is definite so we don't need a
definite article before the word
noun cases let's look at a noun in
romanian and see how it changes form
depending on its case meaning its role
in the sentence the noun is
which means man first in the singular
indefinite nominative and accusative
genitive and dative
definite
and in the plural indefinite
unorbit
here are a couple of examples of case
declensions in context focusing on the
word but
this sentence means the man bought a car
word for word it's man the has bought a
car
the form of the word for the man
is in the nominative case because it's
the subject so we use the definite
declension for nominative case that we
saw before
another example um
this sentence means i like the man's car
word for word it's myself or to me like
the form of the word for the man is in
the genitive case because it's showing
possession so we use the definite
declension for genitive dative that we
saw before the ul coming after the word
but
represents the definite article if the
definite article is followed by ui that
indicates genitive or dative
but
is a masculine noun feminine nouns and
neuter nouns take different case
declensions yes romanian has maintained
neuter gender unlike the other romance
languages let's look at one more
romanian sentence together and see what
we notice
this sentence means due to the rainy
weather we couldn't go to the picnic
word for word it's from cause weather
rainy no we have could go to picnic din
is a contraction of de plus which both
come from latin causa is a romance word
that was borrowed from french kosei
remi means whether and is a slavic loan
word it's a feminine noun and the base
form is vareme but in this sentence it's
in the dative case represented by this
ending i plus the definite article i
means rainy and comes from latin
pluviosis this adjective is also
declined to agree with the singular
feminine dative case noun vremi
no means no and comes from latin non
um is the first person plural form of
the verb for to have similar to in other
romance languages past actions can be
expressed by using the auxiliary verb to
have along with the past participle
means could and it's the past participle
of
which comes from latin
so together am and putut
mean could or were able to merge means
go and comes from the latin mergere
meaning to dip or to plunge but in
romanian it means to go
la is a preposition meaning to and comes
from the latin illac
and picnic means picnic and comes from
the french word picnic
if you speak a romance language or if
you've ever studied a romance language
then you'll probably notice a lot of
similarities with romania but you may
have to look a little closer to notice
those similarities romanian clearly
developed in a somewhat different
direction from other romance languages
and even though it was re-latinized it
still feels more slavic in some ways in
the way words are articulated in the way
words are formed and in some details of
the grammar that's what makes romanian
interesting and unique amongst the
romance languages its development in
geographic isolation from the others and
its contact with neighboring languages
so the question of the day for speakers
of romanian how similar do you think
romanian is to the other romance
languages like italian and for speakers
of other romance languages how similar
or different do you think romanian is
from your language and what stands out
to you as the biggest difference let us
know in the comments down below be sure
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nice day
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