On the origins of Romanian language

Heh, there lies our problem - we understand this word in different ways. I for one understand by "dialect" modified languages derived from a common source (like the chinese dialects), while speaking the same language with the same words but with a different accent I do not consider "dialect", if I did, then there would be way too many dialects in each city (won't even mention a country), so in order for me to consider a way of speaking a dialect, its vocabulary has to differ a lot from the original one which is not the case here. Many times people who speak different dialects of the same language cannot understand among themselfs due to the degree of difference of the two. Hope you now understand why I oposed so much to the ideea that romanian language has 5 dialects.
But if I consider your way of understanding the word "dialect" then your "source" is wrong again - romanian language would have many more dialects then 5, depending how far on the road you get

As for US and official language - I find it hard to belive there is a country without an official language (especially when to become citizen of that country you must prove you speak english language). but anything is possible :]

PS: the admins changed the name of this thread so please stop fighting about such a silly thing.

This post has been edited by D13-th_Mytzu on August 18, 2005 02:27 pm

Hi D13th Mytzu,

Actually, I tend to agree that just pronouncing things differently is rather a thin basis for a "dialect".

However, there are more than just accent differences between the various English dialects around the world. There are large numbers of words that have different meanings. To name just ten that I can think of immediately:

Found in America - billfold, fender, chip, ATM, freeway, jelly, trunk, math, sidewalk, faucet.

Found in Britain - wallet, bumper, crisp, cashpoint, motorway, jam, maths, pavement, tap.

There are also archaic English hangovers present in America long lost or changed in the UK, such as "fall" instead of "autumn", "dove" instead of "dived", the systemic use of the suffix "-ize" instead of "-ise", etc.

The USA is not the only country without an official language. Britain has no official language either. The idea of "official" languages is often bound up in the emergence of nationalism. Countries which feel threatened by external cultural influences tend to adopt them as assertions of national identity.

It is no coincidence that just as Spanish is re-emerging as a widely spoken first language in parts of the USA, (with its own schools, libraries, etc.) a lively debate has opened up there about the possible adoption of English as an "official" language.

Cheers,

Sid.

What would be the % of different words to consider the someone speaks a languaeg as a dialect ?

I did not ridicule. All the evidence you gave was saying that the latin gyrus is from a greek word which appears in the dictionary but you cannot transcribe it here due to the fact that it was written in greek in the dictionary. Then you said about the letter Y. I first pointed out the letter doesn not necessarily mean the whole word is of greek origin, then I searched myself for a good source.
I found out about guros, and admitted my find.

The fact that the word gyrus (the origin of jur) has as origin the greek word guros is an explanation as to why imprejurare went from having no origin to being definetly latin? Is this irony or something, because I dont see the logic in this. Earlier when I said that gyrus was the origin of jur, imprejurare was not of latin origin? I lied or something? Please clarify.

Actually you brought it up, by contesting the latin origin of imprejurare and/or jur and asking for evidence... I did not bring this up...

Because the Dictionarul Explicativ al Limbii Romane, compiled by competent and prefessional linguists mentions that the origin of the word jur is gyrus, not guros.
Will you contest the accuracy of these professional linguists' findings?

And for the third time already, I said imprejurare does not have a SPECIFIED origin next to it, but it is a composed word and the latin origin of the words that enter its composition is CLEARLY pointed out in the dictionary. I dont think this is hard to understand... is it.

I see that you finally caught up with the fact that the word is circa. Congratulations.

First you said that the latin word gyros, of greek origin, was equivalent with the latin word circum. It was on the Aug 17 2005, 11:25 AM message, on this page: http://www.worldwar2.ro/forum/index.php?sh...pic=2382&st=105 :

Nevertheless now you want to show that the greek guro is the equivalent of circa. Very subtle, but very DIFFERENT. You are trying inch by inch to bring the issue where you actually want it -- jur is not latin but of greek origin, from guros. Sid, this is an agenda, or a goal, if agenda is too harsh a word. You obviously have a goal here... or you mess things up real bad.
How on earth could you say "gyros is a word of greek origin and is the greek equivalent of Latin circum"? By God, thats weird. I thin you meant "the latin word gyros, of greek origin, is the latin equivalent of circum.

As I said, though, gyrus and circa do not have the same meaning. Gyrus means just circle, spiral, while circa means in circle, in spiral, around.

I was referring to today's vocabulary.
You still havent found an answer for the 15% that are completely absent from that belgian travel guide...

And to point out another HUGE error, deliberate or not, on the same message I quoted further up:

The source, according to me, gives gyrus as the origin of jur. Just that, it does not go into the further origin of gyrus (greek), because I see you still dont understand that gyrus is a latin word, though its origin is greek, the same way as the greek guros is greek though its origin could very well be any other older language.

This post has been edited by Imperialist on August 18, 2005 05:15 pm

Let's just say it wasn't high in my list of priorities, but at least it was higher than biology.

IIRC the language particularities in the different parts of the country were called "regionalisms".

Hi D13th Mytzu,

I suspect that there is no "%" of different words that distinguishes a language from a dialect. Nor could there be, as other factors such as promounciation, grammar, etc. are involved.

In the various background reading I have done for this thread, I have found, for instance, that not all linguistics agree that Istro-Romanian, Megeleno-Romanian and Aromanian are dialects of Romanian. Some think that as they are almost mutually incomprehsible they should be considered separate Romance languages, in the way that Spanish and Portugues are.

I see language as a continuum. If you look at the various definitions in my Teora Romanian-English dictionary of language, patois, dialect and grai that I mention above there seems to be no strict division.

When we get Romanian definitions of dialect and grai, this may be clarified, but I doubt those will be able to provide a "%" answer as it is almost certainly not a subject susceptible to such mathematical quantification.

Cheers,

Sid.

Those are not romanians so it doesn't even matter what they speak (meaning it does not serve our purposes in this discussion - not mine or yours).

About the % thing, if one wishes to make a strict definition then I gues you MUST define what would be a minimum ammount of words that should be different to declare a language a dialect.
Lets think about our issue: you consider romanians within romania speak different dialects, however they have same vocabulary and same grammar. What is different is their accent (something like british accent, US accent, australian accent..) and very few words - example: tuica/palinca which is a strong alcoholic drink, in Muntenia it is called "tuica" and in Ardeal it is called "palinca" , or certain food types, but the basic vocabulary (water, house, sky, child, forest, tree, flower, sheep, etc. etc. etc.) is the same. So as you can see only a very small amount of words and the accent are different, now how would you tell appart two dialects or same language with different accents ande very few different words ? Using a % for this would be a good ideea - like if you have more then 3% of different words then you call it a dialect (this is just an example).

This post has been edited by D13-th_Mytzu on August 19, 2005 09:51 am

Not that it serves this discussion,but I don't think that one from Muntenia minds to have a "palinca" or one from Ardeal to have a "tuica" as long as both are good quality.

Denes will tell you about the Palinca.. which is Hungarian origin word.

Hi Imperialist.

Yes. You were completely up front about your find regarding "guros".

I tried to find Latin words with a "Y" that were not of Greek origin. After looking at a couple of dozen in my dictionary I couldn't find any. This is not exactly a fully comprehensive scientific survey, but it does imply that if there are any non-Greek words in classical Latin with a "Y" they are few and far between. If you have any suggested Latin "Y" words for me to check, I would be happty to do so.

The issue of origins arose because we were discussing with regaard to "circumstantia" whether French-derivation should be recognised as separate from Latin-derivation. If one holds that French-derivation is of no relevance, and all should be classified as Latin, then the logical extension of this is that Latin words of foreign origin (i.e. "gyrus") should be ascribed to their native tongue (in "gyrus" case Greek - unless one is Zayets, in which case Sanskrit seems to be an option.)

If one discounts all foreign loan words in Classical Latin and ignores all intermediate Romance languages through which classical Latin words travelled in order to reach Romanian, then one will come up with an entirely contrived percentage of the Romanian language's "Latinness" that obscures the real origins of the modern vocabulary. From the statistics I offered earlier, and to which no one else has offered any alternatives yet, it would appear that only about 20% of the Romanian vocabulary is directly derived from Latin historically via old Romanian. Somewhere between two and three times as much seems to be of modern assimilation, mostly from French.

No. You did not lie. Nor have I suggested this.

The "gyrus" trail leads back to "imprejurare", which is not a word I introduced into the discussion. When I asked a question about its origins, you also first produced "gyrus". There is nothing discreditable in this.

I would remind you that you could initially offer no attribution for "imprejurare" and it took repeated requests from me to find out what dictionary you were using. I was operating in a vacuum of information from you. In these circumstances it was perfectly reasonable to ask whether "-jur-" might not have arrived directly from Greek, like a number of other words also in Romanian.

I would also point out that the prefix "giro-", which has exactly the same roots, is present in Romanian in a number of other words that are clearly too modern to have been derived directly by Latin descent within Romanian.

It may have escaped your notice that there is also a Latin word "circum" from which the prefix "circum-" is derived. Are we discussing "circumferinta" or "circaferinta"? As both circa and circum have almost the same meaning, I saw no particular point in making an issue of it. But as you seem to want to score bogus points on this issue, can I expect to be offering you reciprocal congratulations when you agree to the fact that there IS a Latin word "circum"?

You have now written several times that "imprejurare" does not have a specified origin to it but that its component parts are all of Latin origin. The problem arose because you did not include the second part in your original post and then produced one component that is actually of Greek origin. Anyway you will be happy to hear that this is all now perfectly clear and doesn't require endless repeating. I think everyone has the message.

I'll just post this. back soon.











.

Sid,this is a nice question for you I was thinking to ask you from very begining but I thought I'll rather enjoy the show.
Tell me,or tell us, if 38.4% of actual Romanian dictionary is coming from French (supposedly in the 19th century) as you try to make us believe,what were those words at origin before? What did we replaced with the new French words? Words of Turks origin?Slavic?English? Please do enlight me

Again, I have to point out that whether the latin word gyros is of greek origin (from guros) is irrelevant, as professional linguists have traced back the origin of the romanian word jur to the latin gyros, not to the greek guros.

I ask again, do you dispute the results of their work?

You seem not to understand that the origin of the latin gyros was not the issue, but the origin of the romanian jur. And that origin is gyros. By continuing to claim that gyros has a greek origin from guros (which I did not dispute) you try to imply that the word jur has actually greek origin. Tracing back the origin of words in this manner will eventually lead you to the source of all indo-european languages, like Zayets pointed out, and I dont understand the point in doing that.

To continue....

Spot the odd one out-

1) Langenscheidt Standard Greek Dictionary (1990): p.34. "guro, (adv) around".

2) Cassell's Latin Dictionary (1987): "circa, (alternative form for circum) (adv) around, round about.

3) Cassell's Latin Dictionary (1987): circum, (adv) round about, around.

4) Cassell's Latin Dictionary (1987): gyrus, (m) a circle, ring.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Thank you for spotting my misprint. Of course I did mean Latin, not Greek.

Desirable as it might be, I don't have to find the 15% missing from the list. Even if they were all Latin-based words (which I rather suspect scholars are rather too well educated in Latin to miss) it would still leave less Latin-derived words than French-derived words. If I find an answer to the missing 15% I will tell you know immediately. Some will presumably be attributable to dead languages like Dacian and others to languages that contributed less than 1,7% (English perhaps?). Even then, there will always be words of indeterminate origin so you will probably never get a 100% answer. Until then we will both have to remain in ignorance and the missing 15% unattributed.

Cheers,

Sid.

Yes, you do have to find that.
What scholars? Who were the scholars who wrote that percentages on that belgian travel site? Hmm....

A +/- 3-5% margin is one thing in a serious survey, a margin of +/- 15% is absurd. That number would never be left hanging like that.

Hi D13th Mytzu,

Aroman, Meleno-Romanian (spelling?) and Istro-Romanian are relevant to the discussion not because they are Romanian but because of the question over whether they should be considered languages or dialects. I could easily have used the examples of Catalan, Valencian or Gallego. I chose Aroman, Meleno-Romanian and Istro-Romanian because I thought they might be of more interest to you than Iberian examples. Obviously not.

I have no objection to a % rule being applied to differentiate languages, dialects, patois and grai, but as I pointed out, it is not easily quantifiable as other factors than word lists are influential. You will have to ask linguists why a "%" rule has not been applied, if you want a definitive answer.

There is a branch of linguistics, glottochronology, that analyses basic word lists to establish relationships between languages. Perhaps this might be worth looking up.

Cheers,

Sid.