On the origins of Romanian language

"*" stands for "*" as it always did.

Hi Zayets,

Nope. Can't find "*lut" in my dictionary. What does it mean if not "slut"?

Here is your choice of possibilities:

alut
blut
clut
dlut
elut
flut
glut
hlut
ilut
jlut
klut
llut
mlut
nlut
olut
plut
qlut
rlut
slut
tlut
ulut
vlut
wlut
xlut
ylut
zlut

Or perhaps it was not English? If not, which language?

Cheers,

Sid.

This is definetly off-topic trolling.



This post has been edited by Imperialist on August 20, 2005 10:12 am

This is going nowhere.

I'll edit my last post, to eliminate personal references. But the *lut/slut discussion is pointless.

Hi Agarici,

Thank you for your considered post.

What you write about the limitations of internet sources is absolutely correct, as I have already said in an earlier post. However, mine are not quite as limited as you suggest. The "illustrious anonym" you mention would appear to be Dr. Cynthia L Hallen, who runs a lnguistics course at Brigham Young University. The "travel guide" is composed by the Romanian community in Belgium and Luxemburg and Belgian and Luxemburger "friends of Romania", and so, if hardly academic, may at least be presumed to be friendly toward Romania.

That still leaves the statistics contained in those internet sources. If they are wrong, there is presumably another set of statistics that corrects them. So far nobody has supplied any apart from Imperialists's completely unsourced "80%" of Latin origin, which triggered this particular discussion in the first place. (In the interests of ballance, will you also be pressing him on this matter of HIS source?)

I should point out that what I have posted was never based entirely on the internet. I have only consulted the internet since this disputation began. My initial questions were based on previous casual reading over the years. I think it also worth pointing out that however limited my sources, you didn't offer any at all in your entire last post.

I have never suggested that at 20% direct Latin inheritance Romanian did not have a "proportion similaire dans toutes les autres langues neo-latines". On the other hand, Imperialist thinks 20% is too low and wants to co-opt the unattributed 15% as Latin without any evidence. (In the intersts of fairness, will you also be pressing him on this?)

I have always recognised that "Les mots roumains herites du Latin representent depuis toujours dans le roumain, le noyau de base du vocabulaire". Please do not suggest otherwise.

I would ask you to withdraw the allegation that I "deliberately" omitted to reproduce what you have quoted. It is untrue and there is no evidence for it. All that you have quoted is freely available via links that I have provided to you. The whole point of supplying a link is to get the reader nearer a source and to save oneself the time consuming task of copying it word for word. Both are entirely reputable reasons. In all reasonableness, you can hardly accuse me of deliberately omitting something when simultaneously using my link to it. Please modify the unworthy suggestion that I "deliberately omitted" the passages concerned. In fact I made them available and for that you should be grateful, not accusatory.

"Re-Latinisation" was not my term. It came from the university linguistic link I gave. What is more, I have already proposed an alternative - Romancisation - to more accurately reflect the intermediate role of other Romance languages (predominantly French) in supplying words to the modern Romanian vocabulary. (Aug 16 2005 11:10AM).

Thank you for the more detailed survey of Romanian scholarship before the advent of French linguists. As it is, Imperialist has already satisfactorily demonstrated to me that the Lexiconul de la Buda did not have any French authors and pre-dates by some ten years the first French connection I found. I would also point out that I repeatedly stated that perhaps there were older Romanian dictionaries and "wouldn't be surprised at all if there are some", but it took a fair amount of prodding to get details of it. (I would also point out that the Lexiconul de la Buda fails Imperialist's own objection to my mention of Vaillant's later Romanian-French dictionary. Imperialist was after a monolingual Romanian dictionary, but the Lexiconul de la Buda is apparently in four languages.)

As a matter of interest, when was the first monolingual, all-Romanian dictionary published?

Back in a minute.......

Hi Victor and Imperialist,

Absolutely right. Firstly, here was no reason to use "*lut" in the first place and secondly, once it had been used, a straight answer to a straight question would have cleared it up.

If you want to edit out all posts with "*lut" in them, I would be fully in favour.

Cheers,

Sid.

Let me smile.Just a bit->

Here is another gem :

He proposed!To whom?With who's authority?

This post has been edited by Zayets on August 20, 2005 10:26 am

Hi Agarici,

.......What you write about the utility of importating neologisms to provide a vocabulary for modernisation is self-evident. Equally self-evident is the fact that French had a disproportionate influence in this, even though France was not the leader in 19th Century modernisation. If purely organic growth based on modernisation accounted for 19th Century neologisms, one would perhaps expect English and German to have been the main sources of neologisms, with French third.

Furthermore, if organic growth of the language was unrestricted, as in the Anglo-Saxon world, there would be no need to make Romanian an official language and no need for an official academy to regulate the language. There is little doubt that Romania made a deliberate differential decision in favour of France and French models on a number of major subjects, including, I would suggest, as the preferred source of neologisms in the 19th Century. This was something that the core Romanian language's own Latin roots and French policy both coincided on. Nor is there anything wrong in this. I am making no value judgements here.

(As an aside, although not a direct threat like Austria-Hungary or Turkey or Russia, France was definitely not a great power without interest in the area - as the Crimean War illustrates. In the 19th Century France tried to expand its influence widely by emphasising shared Latin roots. For example, the term "Latin America" first came into vogue in France during this period. 19th Century France, especially the Second Empire, definitely saw itself as having vested interests in all the Latin world, even in Bucharest, the "Paris of the Balkans". This interventionist tradition continues today in the rather less ambitious form of defending "Francophonie".)

I would suggest that a low rate of literacy is an advantage, not a disadvantage, if one wants to modify a language. It affords an opportunity through the first public education and text books to influence the development of an illiterate majority. Indeed, I would suggeast that there are few better moments to shape a language than at the start of a national literacy campaign.

I have at no point referred to the replacing of Cyrillic by Latin script in the 19th Century. Imperialist has suggested I might be confusing this with vocabulary changes, but in fact I have never mentioned it. As a matter of interest, why was this change adopted if the relatively few literate Romanians in Wallachia and Moldova already used Cyrillic?

I never implied that the Slavic languages were "undefended" (an interesting choice of word perhaps implying that they were under attack?). I have suggested that the Slavic percentage of the Romanian vocabulary appears to have declined in the last 200 years and that much that remains is apparently archaic. I have seen no evidence produced here to contradict these propositions. Have you some?

I have never suggested that the Latin core of the Romanian language, which my "amateur" sources put at about 20%, was changed by French influence. I was talking about the impact of French on the whole modern Romanian vocabulary, which my amateur, but Romania-friendly, sources put at 38%. All vocabulary is not used with equal frequency. I have previously used the example of English on this thread. English has a similar proportion of Germanic- and Romance-derived words in its current overall vocabulary. However, the core language is Germanic and Germanic-derived words are used in everyday speech far more frequently than Latin-derived words. Similarly, in Romania it is prfectly possible, even likely, that words from a 20% Latin core would be used far more frequently than words from a French-derived 38% of the overall vocabulary. This could account for the difference between the day-to-day observation of native speakers and the actual contents of the vocabulary as represented in dictionaries.

My argumentation is not "undocumented". It is certainly "under-documented", but this doesn't of itself actually make it wrong.

Why are you looking to me in particular for some sort of "agenda" other than the pursuit of the facts? In the interests of ballance, will you also be questioning the "agendas" of others? This thread wasn't started by me and my contribution to it has grown organically in response to the posts of others - without an "agenda". I would point out that, as a complete outsider, I am inherently less likely to have an "agenda" on these particular issues than Romanians, so why is my "agenda" in particular question?

I beg to differ. Personal anecdote is no sustitute for the distilled essence of more widely accumulated knowledge and experience. That way lies irrationality. It is more rational to accept the opinion of a linguist than an individual native speaker. One has a great body of accumulated evidence behind them, while the other is essentially reliant on more limited personal observation. It is no reflection on the personal merits of the individual to prefer a specialist or collective opinion, but on the ballance of probablilities one would be better advised to heed the specialist or collective source.

I am not "giving lessons". I am essentially asking questions and responding to questions. I reserve the right to disagree or question further the replies I receive if I consider they are inadequate and others are entirely at liberty to do the same with me.

With regard to my attitude to Imperialist. He has a history on earlier threads of making allegations and then refusing either to substantiate what he alleges or withdraw it. This is deeply discreditable. It seems to be part of his debating style. In English vernacular this is known as "Playing the Man not the Ball" or "Blaming the Messenger, not the Message". If my attitude to him looks patronising, then this is undoubtedly a fault of mine, but there is a reason.

As you may have noticed, I check Romanian words used on the thread in my Teora 2004 dictionary. "Boier" is, if I am not mistaken, a Slavic-derived word for nobleman. I then looked up "nobleman" in the English end of the dictionary. It didn't give "boier". Instead it gave "nobil", "gentilom" and "pair", the English equivalents of which are all of medieval French origin according to the Oxford English Dictionary. As you are keen on "good old fashioned questions", are any of these in the Lexiconul de la Buda? If not, when did they arrive in the Romanian language and why, given that there was already the functional word "boier". (In this connection, it is perfectly acceptable to reply that such research is beyond your immediate resources. We can't all know the answer to everything and I fully accept that.)

Also, several days ago I asked for sourced Romanian definitions of "grai" and "dialect". These have not yet been forthcoming. As you are a particular advocate of "grai", can you supply such definitions?

I hope this clears up some of the misunderstandings you had about my earlier posts.

Sorry for the delay in replying.

Cheers,

Sid.

Hi Zayets,

How about actually engaging the proposition about "Romancisation"?

Who, precisely do we need "authority" from to make proposals?

Cheers,

Sid.

Or designed specifically to attract french-language tourists by emphasizing the francophile nature of Romania and the very close relation between French and Romanian. Why didnt you think about that possibility too?
Undoubtedly true, french and romanian have/had a close relationship, but maybe there's an exaggeration in that 38%...

My source is Adrian Horodnic, "Istoria Romana. Compendiu pentru Bacalaureat si Admiterea la Facultate", pg.30:

I dont want to co-opt anything.
It just seemed very interesting that the site mentions 63% of romanian lexicon of direct and indirect
latin origin, and 15% to unmentioned origin (other...). I also noticed that 63%+ missing 15% = 78%, very close to the 80% I mentioned in my initial post. Given my example with "imprejurare" - the fact that the latin origin is not explicitly mentioned in words that are made up of words of latin origin, I wonder if the 15% is not the result of faulty statistics casually discarded as "other sources" in order to cover that fault.

Sid, the link you gave besides the travel site was this:

http://linguistics.byu.edu/classes/ling450...s/romanian.html

The limitations of this link are obvious.

Mrs. Melodie Hanners gives as sole examples of re-latinisation in the 19th century the opinions of 2 or 3 writers.
It does not clarify the issue (if their efforts were sucessful) and it does not say a word about the role of the Academy in all that re-latinisation.

Moreover, by saying this:

it is clear she referrs to the Latinists. You denied ever referring to the Latinists, but this source does so. I thought you knew about that movement, as it appeared even though not explicitly (with the name Latinists) in your source.
This convinces me more, that the Re-latinisation efforts the source referrs to, are the efforts of the Latinists, which failed.

However, the source makes a mess of it when immediately after associating Heliade with the Latinist movement, she goes to quote from his 1828 book, a time when he was against that movement and wrote the book as a criticism of that movement.

So, why do you now change Re-latinisation to Romancisation? If by the latter you understand borrowing from related romance languages, it certainly is not what you claimed at the start of the thread -- the policy of eliminating slavic words and purifying the language.
For me it is obvious you are trying to morph your argument into something else.

The easiest way to settle the french vs. latin issue would be the experiment I already said: one should go to ANY part of Romania and talk to a simple man first in Italian then same thing in French, tell me when did he understand you. Repeat experiment in different places around our country. I will tell you the result now: unless they learned french NONE of them will understand what you say when you use that language, when you will speak in italian most of them will understand a little of what you say. Now, the logical conclusion is: romanian language is very close to italian and quite different from french. I hope this will shad some light into the issue. Sid it must be hard for you to understand it, but unless you are a romanian you have to rely on what others wrote about it and a travel guide is not what we should call a reliable source. Besides, you should check romanian sources first and foreign sources second. Those who know best about this are the ones who speak the language.

This post has been edited by D13-th_Mytzu on August 21, 2005 12:48 am

Hi D13th Mytzu,

Talking to Romanians doesn't actually resolve the problem of the percentage origin of the vocabulary of the Romanian language today, for reasons I have already explained.

On the other hand, taking a representative sample of words from the DEX+S is much more likely to produce a more acurate % sample of the current Romanian language's vocabulary.

I have proposed to Imperialist that this might help resolve the question, but because it has over 1,000 pages he has refused. Have you a DEX+S? If so, would you be prepared to make a survey for us of the bottom right word of each page of the DEX+S in order to give us a rough idea of the origins of words in the current Romanian vocabulary?

I am prepared to do so, but it will take some months before I am in a positon to get access to a copy of the DEX+S.

I think you will agree that the DEX+S is about the best qualified Romanian source available on this subject, so you see, I have already tried to initiate the check of Romanian sources that you want.

Cheers,

Sid.

Of course not.You have to talk with English people.You did not explain a thing.Grow up.A read some books.Those things made from paper.They have some signs on their pages.We call them letters.Any combination of letters makes a word.Yes, is that simple.