Romanian

1. Romanian Introduction-Day 1 Anca Dinu University of Bucharest

2. Romanian • Romanian is anIndo-European, neo-Latin language, the easternmost representative of the family of Romance languages (same family as Spanish, Italian, French or Portuguese). • It is spoken by about 24 million speakers, out of which 17 million live in Romania, the others forming communities outside Romanian territory. • 89.5 are Romanians, 7.1% are Hungarians, 1.7% Gypsies, 0.5% Germans (2000).

3. Romanian language history • Dacia was conquered and colonized by the Romans in the 2nd century • Vulgar latin was imposed through administration. • After the Roman administration withdrawed (271), Latin continued to evolve into a new language. • Scholars agree that, in the 10th century, Romanian was already formed as a languge.

4. Romanian • What is interesting of Romanian in comparison with other Romance languages is its geographical relative isolation, which kept Romanian away from the base kernel of Romance languages. • Romanian is a Romance island immersed in between non-Romance languages, mostly Slavic, but also belonging to other language families, like Hungarian or Turkish.

5. Romania

6. Romanian • Due to this geographic reality, and also to historical facts, Romanian language nature was subject of many debates regarding its phonology, the composition of its lexicon, its morphology and syntax. • Different scholars make different claims about Romanian typology, resulting in different levels of integration of Romanian into Romance languages group.

7. Romanian • Romanian morphology preserved almost unaltered its Latin structure. • At the grammatical level, Romanian is one of the most conservative Romance languages, preserving most pure Latin grammatical structures. • The bulk of the lexic is Latin and incorporates native Dacian words, Slavic, Hungarian, Turkish, English, French, German words, etc.

8. Romanian • Romanian is not a language that has numerous dialects (like Italian, for instance). • Apart from (Daco-) Romanian, the official language of Romania, there are only three Romanian dialects, all of them being present outside Romanian territory, south of the Danube:  • Aromanian,  • Megleno-Romanian, • Istro-Romanian

9. Romanian - phonology • The Romanian alphabet consists of 31 Latin letters: 7 vowels and 10 consonants. • Good news: Romanian spelling is mostly phonemic, meaning that words are written very much as they are pronounced. • Bad news: Romanian phonology and phonetics present a number of particular difficulties for non-native speakers, regarding some special sounds, diphthongs, triphtongs and some groups of letters.

10. The Romanian Alphabet

11. The Romanian Alphabet

12. The Romanian Alphabet

13. Special sounds in Romanian: â, î • Both lettersrepresent the same sound. • These cannot be equated with any English vowel sound. • In writing, â is used if the sound appearsanywhere inside the word, whilst î is used if the word starts or ends withthis sound. • In the case of compound words where the second word originallystarted with î, this letter will be preserved: bineînţeles (of course). • A sound relatively close to this in English is eugh!

14. Exception to phonemic writing • Initial e is pronounced as a soft e, similar to the English yellow in: • personal pronouns (eu, el, ea, ei, ele) • theforms of the verb a fi(to be) in the present and imperfect tenses that startwith e(ești, este, eram, erai, era, eram, eraţi, erau). • The pronunciation of letter x depends on the particular word in which occurs: [cs] in axă ‘axis’ or pix ‘pen’ and [gz] in examen ‘exam’ or exemplu ‘example’

15. Writing rules • Groups of letters ce, ci, ge, gi, che, chi,ghe, ghi, are pronounced [č], [ğ], [k'], [g']. • The group mp, mb can never turn to np, nb, except for foreign names like Istanbul.

16. final short versus long i • Final short versus long i presents difficulties for non-natives • The different pronunciation of words like a albi ‘to whiten, to bleach’ and albi ‘whites’ entails a difference in syllabification of the two: al-bi and albi. • The one-syllable form (short i) is hard to perceive for non-natives.

17. Diphtongs and hiatus • Romanian diphthongs and triphtongs are sometimes hard to pronounce and to distinguish: fine difference between oa and ua, for instance. • The ambiguity between hiatus (two consecutive vowels pronounced in different syllables) and diphthongs (two consecutive vowels pronounced in the same syllable) is hard to perceive for non-native speakers(ha-i-nă ‘heinous’ vs. hai-nă ‘coat’). • The only Romance language that presents the same distinction between hiatus and diphthongs is Portuguese.No orthographic distinction.

18. Morphology • Romanian is an agglutinative language, using stems, affixes (most typically prefixes, but also suffixes) and other morphemes to form words in a regular way. • Both types of word formation are active in Romanian: derivation and inflection. • The theoretical difference between them is that derivation results in changing the part of speech of the word (ne ’not’ + mai ‘agan’ + vazut ‘seen’ -> nemaivazut ‘never seen before’), while the inflection does not (a scrie ‘to write’+ m -> scriem ‘(we) write’).

19. Morphology • Romanian is highly inflectional, as Latin, Polish or German, much more than English. It uses affixes in noun declension and in verb conjugations to mark distinctions such as: • number, • gender, • person,  • tense,  • mood,  • voice • case.

20. Morphology • Good news: due to regularities, the rules are quite learnable for non-native speakers. • Bad news: however, as with other agglutinative languages, there are quite a few irregularities, such as modifying the stem in verb conjugations for a number of irregular verbs that have to be learned by heart.

21. Morphology There are ten parts of speech in Romanian: • the noun, • the article, • the adjective, • the pronoun, • the numeral • the verb, • the adverb, • the preposition, • the conjunction • the interjection Only the preposition, the conjunction and the interjection are inflexible.

22. Morphology The flexible parts of speech are characterized by variousgrammatical categories: • the noun, the article and the numeral have gender, number and case forms; • the adjective has forms of gender, number, case and, additionally, comparison degrees forms; • the pronouns have gender, number, case forms and, some of them, have additionally person forms; • the verb has voice, mood, tense, person and number forms; the impersonal tense participle additionally has gender and case forms;

23. Syntax • Romanian syntax has its roots in Vulgar Latin syntax. • At grammatical level, Romanian is one of the most conservative Romance languages, preserving to a great extent the Latin grammatical structures, the free word order and much of its complexities, such as the complex agreement system.

24. Syntax • The whole range of gender, number, case, and comparison degree forms is called the noun declension. • The whole range of person, number, tense, mood and voice forms is called the verb conjugation.

26. Course materials • Most of the grammar elements are from Dana Cojocaru, Stand alone Romanian, 2003 http://www.seelrc.org:8080/grammar/pdf/stand_alone_romanian.pdf • Euromobil project: http://www.solki.jyu.fi/english/publications/Euromobil/ • Handouts at http://www.unibuc.ro/prof/dinu_a_d/ under Resurse online