Romanian substratum words
|
|
The Romanian language contains at least 300 words considered by many Romanian scholars (and often non-Romanian scholars) to be of Dacian language origin [1] (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/category:Romanian_language). A few of these also have cognates in the Albanian language. Some of these etymologies are more controversial than others: because there are no significant surviving written examples of the Dacian language, it is difficult to verify, and because the Dacian language may have been relatively close to Latin, it is difficult to ascertain whether some of the words (i.e. mare, "large") are from Dacian or Latin. By adding place- and river-names, and most of the forms labelled 'etymon unknown', the number of the indigenous elements in Romanian may surpass 500 basic roots, which is in full agreement with the historical and archaeological data regarding the importance of the North Thracian (Dacian) influence in Romanian.
Note that, across time, many indigenous (Thracian or Dacian) words in Romanian were (and often still are) held for borrowings from Slavic or Hungarian, whereas a coherent etymological analysis may show that, in many such cases, the sense of borrowing was from Romanian to the neighboring languages; we may also surmise a limited number of borrowings from a North Thracian (Dacian) dialect into Proto-Slavic (Pre-Expansion Slavic) as early as 3rd-4th century A.D. With this in view, it is probable that the complete list of the archaic (Pre-Romance) heritage of Romanian will soon record an impressive number of such elements, of both Indo-European and Pre-Indo-European origin.
There are also some Dacian words in languages other than Romanian, most of these examples having entered via Romanian (Vlach) dialects (an example is vatrǎ, which is found in Slovak, Czech, Serbo-Croatian, and other neighboring languages, though with modified meaning). Albanian is considered by some to be descended from a Dacian dialect. If this hypothesis is correct, then Albanian words which are of native Albanian origin can also be considered as Dacian words.
References
- Rosetti, Alexandru. "History of the Romanian language" (Istoria limbii rom�ne), 2 vols., Bucharest, 1965-1969.
- Dicţionar Explicativ Online (http://dexonline.ro)
- English-Albanian/Albanian-English Online Dictionary (http://www.argjiro.net/fjalor/)
- Dicţionar Enciclopedic, Cartier Publishing House - ISBN 9975-79-080-1
- A New Dimension of the Lingustical Relations between Romanian and Greek (http://soltdm.tripod.com/limbimod/romana/grecrom.htm)
- Romanian Etymological Dictionary - A Short Introduction (http://soltdm.tripod.com/limbimod/romana/etimrom.htm)
- Sorin Paliga: links to both books and e-books - PDF format - which further clarify this topic (http://www.unibuc.ro/en/cd_sorpaliga_en)