Romanian after other Romance languages

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Romanian after other Romance languages

Postby flabbergasted » Mon Apr 24, 2017 6:44 pm

I have a reading knowledge of Spanish, French, Italian, Catalan, and Portuguese. The next logical step seems to be taking up Romanian, especially considering the fact that I like the writing of Mircea Cartarescu and would love to read him in the original. However, when I examined several pages of his new book, I was shocked how alien the text looked. Without knowing anything about Portuguese or Catalan, I had been able to understand quite a lot in texts in these languages just relying on my knowledge of French, Spanish, and Italian. This, however, was a completely different affair. Has anybody tried learning Romanian with the background of other Romance languages? How quickly did you make progress? Are there any good textbooks that you can recommend besides Discover Romanian and Assimil?
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Re: Romanian after other Romance languages

Postby tarvos » Mon Apr 24, 2017 6:48 pm

Romanian is closest to Italian and French, but its isolation has given it a completely different flavour. I managed to get conversant after a few months of working on Romanian, somewhere around half a year is when I felt comfortable speaking the language.

I spoke French already, but not much of the other Romance languages. Romanian was my second. My knowledge of Russian helped me.

There is a big Balkan substrate of words and influences. You would have to take these into account when learning - they account for most of the vocabulary differences and some of the major grammatical ones (such as preferring the subjunctive mood over the infinitive with verb combinations).
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Re: Romanian after other Romance languages

Postby Ogrim » Tue Apr 25, 2017 3:58 pm

I studied Romanian many years ago as part of my university degree in Romance languages. I have forgotten a lot, but I do remember that when I started it was much less transparent than other Romance languages like Catalan or Portuguese. Everything Tarvos says is true, but I just wanted to add a little to show why Romanian requires some effort and serious learning even if you just want to be able to read it.

The phonetical development of Romanian from Latin has several unique features which you don't find in other Romance languages, making it more difficult to immediatly recognise the words. Just a couple of examples: Latin CT became -pt- in Romanian while it was mostly palatalised in other Romance languages, so Spanish ocho, Italian otto but Romanian opt, or Latin NG became Romanian -mb-, so Spanish lengua, Italian lingua but Romanian limbă. There are several other specificities like that.

Romanian has maintained traces of the case system from Latin, having kept nominative, accusative, genitive, dative and vocative. It has also kept three gendres, masculine, feminine and neuter.

As the only Romance language, Romanian has an enclitic definite article, meaning that it is attached to then ending of the noun. For example:
codru - codrul (forest - the forest);
pom - pomul (tree - the tree);
casă - casa (house - the house);
floare - floarea (flower - the flower)

As Tarvos mentions, it often tends to replace infinitive with the particle să + subjunctive. Overall I find that the verb system is at least as complex as in Spanish. This Wikipedia article gives a nice overview of all the forms.

Regarding vocabulary, I found this on Wikipedia:

A statistical analysis sorting Romanian words by etymological source carried out by Macrea (1961)[] based on the DLRM (49,649 words) showed the following makeup:

43% recent Romance loans (mainly French: 38.42%)
20% inherited Latin
11.5% Slavic, including Bulgarian, Serbo-Croatian, Ukrainian, and Russian
4% Turkish
2.40% Modern Greek
2.17% Hungarian
2% German

If the analysis is restricted to a core vocabulary of 2,500 frequent, semantically rich and productive words, then the Latin inheritance comes first, followed by Romance and classical Latin neologisms, whereas the Slavic borrowings come third.
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Re: Romanian after other Romance languages

Postby flabbergasted » Tue Apr 25, 2017 5:32 pm

Thanks for the information, Ogrim and Tarvos. I can see where this "alien" effect comes from. Perhaps it's just a matter of learning the most widespread Romanian words which are not cognates of other Romance languages. As for the Slavic vocabulary, I speak Russian, so that should help.
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Re: Romanian after other Romance languages

Postby nooj » Sat May 09, 2020 1:44 pm

I would like to have more opinions now after 3 years since this thread was made, from people who have learned Romanian coming from other Romance languages. Anything youse would like to add? Thanks.
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Re: Romanian after other Romance languages

Postby Querneus » Sat May 09, 2020 5:38 pm

nooj wrote:I would like to have more opinions now after 3 years since this thread was made, from people who have learned Romanian coming from other Romance languages. Anything youse would like to add? Thanks.

I don't have much to add to the comments above... Romanian definitely has a different flavour from Western and Italo-Romance and Sardinian, which all seem to huddle together in a way (but it isn't all that weird either). The massive number of French borrowings (especially in technical vocabulary) does help a lot coming into it from other Romance, but a lot of common words have a Slavic (and sometimes Hungarian) origin, and they do feel a bit annoying for someone like me who doesn't know any Slavic language.

You may find dexonline, a website offering free searches of a few monolingual dictionaries, incredibly helpful. Not only for definitions, but also because the DEX '09 dictionary usually contains etymologies, and even better, if you click on the declinări tab you can see how nouns/adjectives/verbs are declined/conjugated with the stressed syllables marked! I'm not even sure there's any other Romanian conjugator that actually includes stress, and Romanian verbal stress is not all that obvious when you're learning the patterns (textbooks don't normally do a good job at teaching it either).

One annoying thing is that most grammars of Romanian you can find in English are surprisingly superficial, even the thicker ones among them. I don't know what is available in French though, but considering that Romanians have generally been fairly avid students of French over German and even English for more than a century, I imagine there might be better Romanian grammars available in French. Either way if you're like me and you like grammar I suggest getting to read the monolingual Romanian stuff when you can.

Assimil Le Roumain is pretty good, but I didn't need to tell you that. I used the new 2014 version, which is an overhauled edition. I don't know how it compares to the older version published until the early 2010s or so, which I've been told was different. I notice the author is the same though (Vincent Iluțiu).
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Re: Romanian after other Romance languages

Postby hatailor@gmail.com » Sun May 10, 2020 6:28 am

Anybody who says that Romanian is no big deal to learn because of Itaian resemblance, don't know what they are talking about. Balkan latin has a different article construction, a very messy set of short and long pronouns, and the 2000 most common words come from old Thracian or Russian.
Albanian has these pronoun similarities, though it's a fairly different grammar. To do these languages, there is a need for detailed study of verbs and conjugations. Eventually you get to a sophisticated level where the latin vocabulary is useful, but this is way downstream.
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Re: Romanian after other Romance languages

Postby tarvos » Sun May 10, 2020 8:18 pm

Hashimi wrote:
hatailor@gmail.com wrote:Anybody who says that Romanian is no big deal to learn because of Itaian resemblance, don't know what they are talking about.


When tarvos said that Romanian is closest to Italian, he didn't mean that it's no big deal to learn. It's just like saying that West Frisian is the closest language to English, but one has to spend hundreds of hours to learn it just like any other language.

nooj wrote:I would like to have more opinions now after 3 years since this thread was made, from people who have learned Romanian coming from other Romance languages. Anything youse would like to add? Thanks.


I would like to add that reading pages 69-74 and 196-207 in the following book is very beneficial for anyone who already learned a Romance language and want to learn (or learn about) Romanian:

https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/read/ ... sieves-pdf


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Re: Romanian after other Romance languages

Postby nooj » Sun May 10, 2020 8:54 pm

Hashimi wrote:
I would like to add that reading pages 69-74 and 196-207 in the following book is very beneficial for anyone who already learned a Romance language and want to learn (or learn about) Romanian:

https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/read/ ... sieves-pdf


Very interesting book! Thank you.

The title is dubious though: How to read all the Romance languages? On page 29 a justification is given that doesn't convince me but I see that clickbait titles aren't just a recent thing. ;)
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Re: Romanian after other Romance languages

Postby Serpent » Mon May 11, 2020 1:31 am

Years ago I found the PDF really useful as it helps you notice the way Latin words have changed in the modern Romance languages. I even printed some of it (I generally don't bother to do this).
Obviously to get some advanced nuances you'll need to spend time reading every language (and I'd argue you also need to develop some active skills), but this book is a great starting point. Also, as far as I can tell, the languages/dialects spoken in Spain and Italy often use words that exist in other Romance languages.
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