The Eastern Romance languages contain around 300 words considered by many linguists to be of substratum origin [1]. Including place-names and river-names, and most of the forms labelled as being of unknown etymology, the number of the substratum elements in Eastern Romance may surpass 500 basic roots. Linguistic research in recent years has greatly increased the body of Eastern Romance words that may be considered indigenous. Jump to: navigation, search The Eastern Romance languages, sometimes known as the Vlach languages, are a group of Romance languages that developed in Southeastern Europe from the local eastern variant of Vulgar Latin. ... Jump to: navigation, search Etymology is the study of the origins of words. ...

Linguistics

Older Romanian etymological dictionaries tended to assume a borrowing in many cases, usually from a Slavic language or from Hungarian, but etymological analysis may show that, in many cases, the sense of borrowing was from Romanian to the neighboring languages. The current Dicţionar explicativ (the DEX) published by the Romanian Academy continues to list many words as borrowings, though the work of other linguists (Sorin Olteanu, Sorin Paliga, Ivan Duridanov, et. al.) may indicate that a number of these are in fact indigenous, of either Indo-European or Pre-Indo-European origin. The Romanian Academy (Romanian: Academia Română) is a cultural forum founded in Romania in 1866. ... Proto-Indo-European Indo-European studies Indo-European is originally a linguistic term, referring to the Indo-European language family. ... The Pre-Indo-European population of Europe included an unknown number of ethnic groups that dwelt on the continent before the coming of the speakers of Indo-European languages (though some scholars dispute the Indo-European invasion theory: see Paleolithic Continuity Theory). ...

Though the substratum status of many Romanian words is not much disputed, their status as Dacian words is controversial, some more than others. There are no significant surviving written examples of the Dacian language, so it is difficult to verify in most cases whether a given Romanian word is actually from Dacian or not. Many linguists however favor a Dacian source for the Romanian substratum. Alternate meanings: see Dacia (disambiguation) Dacia, in ancient geography the land of the Daci or Getae, was a large district of Central Europe, bounded on the north by the Carpathians, on the south by the Danube, on the west by the Tisa (Tisza river, in Hungary), on the east by... The Dacian language was an Indo-European language spoken by the ancient people of Dacia. ...

Albanian cognates and Slavic correspondances

Many of the Romanian substratum words have Albanian cognates, and if these words are in fact Dacian, it indicates that the Dacian language may have been on the same branch as Albanian. Cognates are words that have a common origin. ...

The Bulgarian Thracologist Vladimir Georgiev helped develop the theory that the Romanian language has a Daco-Moesian language as its substrate, a tongue which had a number of features which distinguished it from the Thracian language spoken further south, across the Haemus range. In ancient geography, Moesia was a district inhabited chiefly by Thracian peoples. ... The Thracian language was the Indo-European language spoken in ancient times by the Thracians. ... In earlier times the Balkan mountains were known as the Haemus Mons. ...

Other Romanian words which are argued to be indigenous have close or identical Slavic correspondances. If such words are actually indigenous, then the Slavic correspondances are in line with the Daco-Thracian corpus, Slavic cognates existing for a number of Daco-Thracian words. Also possible are a limited number of borrowings from a North Thracian (Dacian) dialect into Proto-Slavic (Pre-Expansion Slavic) as early as the 3rd-4th century AD. This article or section should include material from Common Slavonic Proto-Slavic is a reconstructed language which is a common ancestor of all Slavic languages. ...

Other languages

There are also some Romanian substratum words in languages other than Romanian, these examples having entered via Romanian (Vlach) dialects. An example is vatră, which is found in Slovak, Czech, Serbian, Croatian, and other neighboring languages, though with modified meaning. Another one is Bryndza, a type of cheese made in Eastern Austria, Poland, Slovakia and Ukraine, the word being derived from the Romanian word for cheese. Vlachs (also called Wlachs, Wallachs, Olahs) are the Romanized population in Central and Eastern Europe, including Romanians, Aromanians, Istro-Romanians and Megleno-Romanians, but since the creation of the Romanian state, this term was mostly used for the Vlachs living south of the Danube river. ... Jump to: navigation, search The Serbian language is one of the standard versions of the Å tokavian dialect (former standard was known as Serbo-Croatian language). ... Bryndza is a sheeps milk cheese made in Eastern Austria, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Ukraine. ... Jump to: navigation, search Cheese is a solid food made from the curdled milk of cows, goats, sheep, or other mammals. ...

See also

• Wiktionary: Dacian derivations

References

• Rosetti, Alexandru. "History of the Romanian language" (Istoria limbii române), 2 vols., Bucharest, 1965-1969.
• Dicţionar Explicativ Online
• English-Albanian/Albanian-English Online Dictionary
• Dicţionar Enciclopedic, Cartier Publishing House - ISBN 9975-79-080-1
• A New Dimension of the Lingustical Relations between Romanian and Greek
• Romanian Etymological Dictionary - A Short Introduction
• Sorin Paliga: links to both books and e-books - PDF format - which further clarify this topic