Very Interesting Mirc, I always knew Romanian was very close to latin, but I didn't know about the "o" to "u" and vice-versa..
Yeah really few people know that, but there are quite a few Latin texts that I can read without any trouble whatsoever, especially since all the other Romance languages borrowed a somewhat noticeable number of basic words from Germanic languages, removing the original Latin ones, while Romanian, since it became isolated earlier (before the fall of the Western Roman Empire) kept the original ones.
A few examples on top of my head are:
- albus/alba (Latin) - alb/alba (Romanian) - bianco/blanco/blanche (Italian/Spanish/French, from Germanic root "blank") - means "white"
- albaster (Latin) - albastru (Romanian) - blu, bleu (Italian, French, from Germanic root -blau) - means "blue"
The preservation of such words is what makes it easy for us to understand Latin, but the incredibly complicated grammar (inherited almost fully from Latin, but almost completely LOST in other Romance languages) makes it hard for other Romance speakers to understand us.
But really few people actually know this, most of those I met think we speak a mix of Hungarian, Slavic and Turkish.
I must say that while the basis of Romanian (or Rumanian?) is Latin, It bears a marked slavic Influence, interestingly enough, it almost sounds like Portuguese, or the other way around.
Yes, it bears a marked slavic influence, but the Slavic words were mainly artificially introduced in Romanian, which caused their strong decline after the decline of Slavonian influence around us (while used to make up about 20% of the vocabulary in the 1500s, in the common speech back then and in the language of our days they make up less than 10%).
Anyway, almost all the slavic words have Latin doublets. The great majority of the times, the Latin ones are clearly preferred, sometimes they are equal (like in case of the words for time: "timp" and "vreme" are almost equally used, though the Slavic "vreme" is decreasing), sometimes (rarely) the Slavic one is dominant (like in the words for snow: the Slavic "zapada" is dominant but the Latin "nea" is used too, plus the verb "to snow" is "a ninge", which is an obvious Latin cognate, or like in "dragoste/amor" - love, again the Slavic one is more used, but the other one clearly exists too). Very few times have the Latin words been taken out of use completely.
The resemblance with Portuguese is freaky, actually, I agree, I noticed it quite a few times. It is because both languages heavily closed their pronunciation (a result of no centralized state officially speaking the language until very late) and so, many vowels and consonants suffered almost exactly the same transformations.
I believe they also speak German in some parts of Rumania?
Yeah, but the Germans emigrated heavily, unfortunately. In Transylvania, they were really important at some point, but the conditions of communism forced almost 90% of them to move to either Germany or Austria. Now they are not many, scattered through tens of villages and towns. Which is a pity, since they were the ones to bring the most civilized and western ideas to us. Their cities are always the best organized (like Sibiu, European Capital of Culture 2007), clean and beautiful. But okay, rant over.
Also, I think Rumanian is widely spoken in Hungary, Serbia and Moldova.
In Hungary not so much, it used to be spoken all the way to Debrecen but the Romanians were quickly assimilated. An interesting fact though is that about 200,000 people in Hungary have the surname "Olah", which means Romanian (in Hungarian).
In Moldova, it is
the main language. Moldova is nothing more than a joke state that consists of a part of the territories lost to the Soviet Union in WW2. There is no Moldovan language, that is a joke, it is identical to Romanian (there was even a Moldovan-Romanian dictionary printed in 2001, where all the words were just written twice
)
In Serbia, yes, there are many Romanians in the Vojvodina province, where it's recognized as a minority language. Not much outside this province.
Either way Rumanian is a beautiful language.
Hey , remember that song that came out a few years ago? ...
Dragostea Din Tei?..
It was pretty cool!
(what does that mean by the way?)
It means "love from the linden trees", but "Tei" probably refers to a certain park in Iasi (the band's home town), rather than the general name for a "linden tree".
I had a friend from Romania who spoke Romanian (of course), German, English, French, Italian, Spanish, Polish and Russian. I assume that with Latin being the common denominator it would be easy for Romanians to learn other languages. By the way, you're English is impeccable. So is it Rumania or Romania?
