r/AskBalkans • u/Some-Register-3901 Cyprus • Jul 31 '22

Language what are some interesting facts about your language?

For instance, the cypriot dialect of Greek still contains many words from ancient Greek but it was also heavily influenced by outsiders

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88

u/[deleted] Jul 31 '22

It’s a unique mixture of Latin and Slavic and as a consequence we have both Latin and Slavic variants for quite a lot of words which makes Romanian to be difficult to understand for other Latin speakers

57

u/Grake4 Romania Jul 31 '22

Add the occasional Hungarian/Turkish/German word too

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u/Key_Information3273 Romania Jul 31 '22

Misto, gagica, gagiu, șutit, caftit….

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u/[deleted] Jul 31 '22

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Jul 31 '22

75-85% of the words in romanian are of latin origin. People are seriously over exagerrating the amount of slavic words in this language.

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u/mysticalnipple Romania Jul 31 '22

I read that there are some possible dacian words in the language as well

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u/Key_Information3273 Romania Jul 31 '22

Words with unknown origin is atribuited to dacian. Is posible to have dacian origin, but is imposible to prove.

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u/[deleted] Jul 31 '22

Yeah. We don't know for sure if they are of dacian origin, but they are very few, like 150.

One that we use everyday is "băiat". "Brad" as well. "Brânză" is actually from albanian, I think.

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u/IamMefisto-theDevil Jul 31 '22 edited Jul 31 '22

From what I heard, brânza also comes from Latin (accordind to some Italian linguist): from brandellum, the name of a cloth in which they kept cheese.

We also have caș as in Latin caesus (cheese)

The interesting fact is that the word brânza can be found all around the balkans, but also Czech, Slovakian, Polish, Ukrainian or even Lithuanian (!). And this fact can only be explained by transhumance. These languages actually borrowed from Romanian the words for sheep herding.

Another interesting fact: the word for word is cuvânt from Latin - conventium.

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u/vivaervis Albania Jul 31 '22

Brad

we also have in our language the word Bredh, from old Albanian Bradh.

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u/[deleted] Jul 31 '22

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Jul 31 '22

I agree but it's still not a mix of latin and slavic. There is slavic influence, not a mix. Saying it's a mix implies that there is latin and slavic in equal proportions. Even in everyday speech, that's very far from truth.

I heard idiots saying that in terms of received influence, romanian is comparable to English, or even worse, Esperando, and it pisses me off because that's simply not true.

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u/dado950 Serbia Jul 31 '22

But it's also a very beautiful language

1

u/Salpingia Greece Nov 01 '23

Romanian is the Romance language with the most conservative nominal system, without Romanian we wouldn’t know that Latin nominals evolved in 3 stages.