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Chapter 8 Loanwords in Romanian* Kim Schulte 1. The language and its speakers R

Chapter 8 Loanwords in Romanian* Kim Schulte 1. The language and its speakers Romanian, also known as Rumanian (sometimes also spelt Roumanian, especially until the 1940s), belongs to the Romance languages, which form a branch of the Indo-European language family. Among the Romance languages, Romanian be- longs to the Daco-Romance sub-branch of the Eastern Romance branch. There are four distinct Daco-Romance languages, all of which are frequently referred to as different “dialects” of Romanian: Aromanian (c. 300,000 speakers in the Republic of Macedonia, Albania, northern Greece, Serbia and Bulgaria), Megleno-Romanian (c. 5,000 speakers in northern Greece and the Republic of Macedonia), Istro- Romanian (c. 1,000 speakers in the Istrian Peninsula in Croatia), and Daco- Romanian (c. 25 million speakers in Romania and Moldova). The subdatabase for Romanian is restricted to the lexicon of Daco-Romanian, the language generally referred to as Romanian in everyday usage. Throughout the remainder of this chap- ter, Romanian will be used as a synonym for Daco-Romanian. Romanian, used in all domains from the most informal to the most official, is the official language of Romania and the adjoining Republic of Moldova. Both are located in south-eastern Europe, northeast of the Balkan Peninsula, in an area in- cluding the inner and outer arch of the southern Carpathian Mountains, from the lower Danube in the southwest and south of the territory to the river Dniester in the northeast. This Romanian-speaking area is surrounded by speakers of non- Romance languages, namely Hungarian and several Slavic languages (Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Serbian). Beyond the territories of Romania and the Republic of Moldova, Romanian has co-official status in the Vojvodina Province in northern Serbia, and speakers of Romanian also live in areas of Ukraine close to the Roma- nian and Moldovan borders. There is a large Romanian diaspora, estimated at around eight million people, with concentrations in North America, Australia and Israel; due to recent emigration, there are also Romanian communities of consider- able size in Italy and Spain (about one million in each country). ! The subdatabase of the World Loanword Database that accompanies this chapter is available online at http://wold.livingsources.org. It is a separate electronic publication that should be cited as: Schulte, Kim. 2009. Romanian vocabulary. In Haspelmath, Martin & Tadmor, Uri (eds.) World Loanword Database. Munich: Max Planck Digital Library, 2137 entries. <http://wold.livingsources.org/vocabulary/8> Brought to you by | Penn State - The Pennsylvania State University Authenticated | 172.16.1.226 Download Date | 7/31/12 4:32 PM 8. Loanwords in Romanian 231 Within Romania, several historically established minority languages are spoken by the corresponding ethnic groups, the most significant of which are the Hungarians in western and central Transylvania, as well as the Romani minority, the latter constituting approximately ten percent of the overall population. Smaller ethnic groups include Albanians, Turks (mainly along the Danube in south-eastern Ro- mania), Tatars (mainly in the Dobrogea region), Russian Lipovens (in the Danube Delta) and speakers of other Slavic languages, mainly near the borders with the respective countries. Whilst Romanian is the second language for some speakers of these minority languages, the majority can be considered to be partly or fully bilin- gual. In the Republic of Moldova, the Turkic language Gagauz is spoken by approxi- mately 150,000 inhabitants of the Province of Gagauzia, in the south of the country. In Transnistria, a region east of the river Dniester, approximately one third of the population are ethnic Russians and another third are ethnic Ukrainians. Within the remaining territory, there is a clear urban-rural divide, with a compara- tively large proportion of ethnic Russians in the cities, especially in the capital Chi!in"u, due to migration during the period under Soviet rule; many native Rus- sian speakers only have limited linguistic competence in Romanian. Map 1: Geographical setting of Romanian Romanian can be subdivided into two major dialect groups, the Muntenian-based dialects spoken in the south, and the Moldavian-based ones spoken in the north of Brought to you by | Penn State - The Pennsylvania State University Authenticated | 172.16.1.226 Download Date | 7/31/12 4:32 PM 232 Kim Schulte Romania and the Republic of Moldova. The official name of the national language of the Republic of Moldova is Moldovan or Moldavian, but linguistically speaking it is very similar to the neighboring dialects of north-eastern Romania. In general, Romanian has comparatively little dialectal variation, but regional differences can nevertheless be observed and are the basis for a distinction between dialects such as Moldavian, Transylvanian, or that of the Banat region. An important distinguishing feature between regional varieties is their lexicon, particularly lexical loans; unsur- prisingly, those donor languages spoken in the immediate vicinity tend to be the source of a comparatively larger proportion of loanwords in the respective regional varieties. In order to provide loanword data for Romanian as a whole, the lexicon used for the subdatabase is not based on any specific regional dialect, but on what is consid- ered to be part of the language according to the Romanian Academy’s dictionary (Coteanu et al. 1998). As a result, a number of the loanwords included are most commonly used in particular regions; in some cases this results in the incorporation of several synonyms borrowed from different source languages. The historic foundations for the emergence of Romanian were laid when the Dacians, inhabitants of an area broadly coinciding with modern-day Romania, were defeated by the Romans under Emperor Trajan between 101 and 106 CE, leading to the foundation of the Roman province of Dacia. This was followed by a period of intense colonization and Romanization, during which a regional variety of Popu- lar Latin established itself as the local language. The contact with the rest of the Roman Empire was relatively short-lived, as the invading Goths forced Rome to pull out of Dacia after less than 170 years, around 271 CE. Despite the compara- tively short duration of direct contact with the rest of the Roman Empire, language shift from the Thraco-Dacian substrate to Latin must have been sufficiently exten- sive for a Latin-based language that we might call proto-Romanian to completely replace the substrate language(s), though this may have been a gradual and pro- longed process (see §3.1 below). Subsequently, various peoples invaded the area, generally moving in from the northeast and east. Whilst some invading tribes, e.g. the Huns, left few cultural and linguistic traces, other populations settled amongst the early Romanian speakers, notably Magyars (from the 9th century) and Slavs in several waves of migration (6th- 11th century), providing ideal conditions for long-term linguistic contact. There is an ongoing debate as to whether ethnic Romanians have been living in areas north of the Danube, particularly in Transylvania, continuously since Roman times, or whether they were pushed back by a large Hungarian population, eventually return- ing to those areas at a later stage. As this debate is primarily politically motivated and linked to territorial claims, it will not be entered into here; in any case, the linguistic evidence suggests a considerable degree of cultural contact, typical of a situation of cohabitation over an extended time period. Other linguistically relevant historical events include the arrival of German set- tlers in Transylvania in the 12th and 13th centuries, encouraged by the Hungarian rulers, and the imposition of Ottoman suzerainty from the 16th century, bringing Brought to you by | Penn State - The Pennsylvania State University Authenticated | 172.16.1.226 Download Date | 7/31/12 4:32 PM 8. Loanwords in Romanian 233 the population into increased cultural, administrative and trade-based contact with other areas of the Ottoman empire, particularly modern-day Turkey, Bulgaria, and Greece. 2. Sources of data The source of the lexical data, i.e. the Romanian words corresponding to the Loanword Typology meanings, was either the author’s personal knowledge or stan- dard bilingual dictionaries (Isb"!escu 1995; Savin et al. 1997; Levi#chi & Banta! 1992), complemented by the Romanian Academy’s monolingual dictionary (Coteanu et al. 1998) and a dictionary of synonyms (Seche & Seche 1997); the lat- ter were used to identify any existing synonyms and to determine the degree of semantic overlap between near and partial synonyms. The two main sources of the etymological information that appears in the data- base are (a) the Romanian Academy’s Dic!ionarul explicativ al limbii române (Coteanu et al. 1998), which provides the source language and etymon, where known, for each entry, but does not supply any additional etymological explanation or discussion, and (b) Cior"nescu’s (1966) etymological dictionary of Romanian, which contains very detailed etymologies but has a limited number of entries. Where neither of these default sources provided a fully satisfactory etymology, it was either complemented with suggestions by time-honored Romanian philologists (Pu!cariu 1943 [1997]; Philippide 1894; Ha!deu 1877, 1879, 1883), or more specific studies dealing specifically with the etymology of loanwords from individual source languages were consulted. Among these, Wendt (1960) examines loans from Turk- ish, Miklosich (1860, 1862–65) investigates the incorporation of Slavic elements into Romanian, Conev (1921) looks at contact between Bulgarian and Romanian, Murnu (1894) and Diculescu (1924–26) investigate Greek elements in Romanian, whilst Cihac (1879) and McClure (1976) examine uploads/Litterature/ pdfcbvcv.pdf