The Romanian among the other Romance languages

Romanian language is a derivative of Latin language along with Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese. Its unique feature is that it is the only Romance language spoken still in eastern Europe (Romania and Moldova). Romanian language is, let’s say, the less popular among the Romance languages eclipsed by more well known Spanish and French mainly. Lately, some organizations have started a movement to give Romanian language the recognition that deserves and this ended up in a result, universities like Ohio State, Duke and University College of London to offer a Romanian education, Romanian courses being part of a Center for Slavic, Eurasian and East European Studies.

Different characteristics between Romanian language and the other Romance languages

Romanian language has evolved in an area in southeastern Europe that was already predominated by Slavic languages. No other Romance language has stated its presence in that specific region. As a result, as someone could reasonably think, the Romanian language was influenced by Slavic languages such as Russian and Bulgarian which made it sounding unique in many ways. It has also been influenced by Hungarian due to geographical proximity.

Friedrich Diez, who was the first Romance philologist declared the Romanian ‘’a semi-Romance language’’ which of course is considered untrue by most modern linguists, but this statement has a strong point indeed. The unique qualities that Romanian language has, make her by far different compared with the rest of the Romance languages.

But now let’s see some of them, let’s make some…

Romanian lessons

In order to better show this difference that was mentioned above, we will use some examples: The verb ‘’to speak’’ in five Romance languages: Romanian – a vorbi Spanish – hablarFrench – parlerItalian – parlare Portuguese – falarThe root in the four languages (except Romanian) comes directly from the mother Latin language – fabulare ( meaning: to talk or to speak) with the transformation of the ‘’f’’ to ‘’h’’ for Spanish. The Portuguese kept the original initial letter ‘’f’’- and parabolare (same meaning) for French and Italian. To the contrary, the Romanian version ‘’a vorbi’’, although its origins are uncertain, it is suggested that comes from the Slavic word ‘’ dvorĭba’’ which means ‘’court’’. The word ‘’without’’: Romanian – fără Spanish – sinFrench – sans talian – senzaPortuguese – semCatalan – senseLatin – sine

The word for ‘’man’’:

Romanian – bărbat
Spanish – hombre
French – homme
Italian – uomo
Portuguese – homem
Catalan – home
Latin – homo

The word for ‘’friend’’:

Romanian – prieten
Spanish – amigo
French – ami
Italian – amico
Portuguese – amigo
Catalan – amic
Latin – amicus

Similarities with the Romance languages

We saw some characteristics that make the Romanian language unique. However, we should bear in mind that this language is still in its majority a Romance language. It was mentioned before that there were a lot of borrowings from Hungarian and Slavic but, of course, the biggest percentage of its vocabulary is still Latin-derived. Also, and that is something that has to do with grammar, the pronouns, the numbers, the verb tenses and verb conjugations are clearly coming from Latin language. Let’s see few examples in our…

Romanian lessons