The Romanian language contains at least 300 words considered by many linguists to be of substratum origin [1]. If one adds place-and river-names, and most of the forms labelled 'of unknown etymology', the number of the substratum elements in Romanian may surpass 500 basic roots. Linguistic research in recent years has greatly increased the body of Romanian words that can now be held to be indigenous. Romanian (limba română IPA ), the official language of Romania is an Eastern Romance language, spoken natively by about 26 million people, most of them in Romania and Vojvodina. ...

Older Romanian etymological dictionaries overall tended to assume a borrowing in many cases, usually from Slavic or Hungarian, but coherent etymological analysis has shown and 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 hold many words as borrowings, even though the work of linguists such as Sorin Paliga, Sorin Olteanu, Ivan Duridanov, et al., has shown that many of these words look to be 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.

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. There do exist a number of cognates between Albanian and Daco-Thracian words. The Bulgarian Thracologist Vladimir Georgiev developed 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. Cognates are words that have a common origin. ... The Thracian language was the Indo-European language spoken in ancient times by the Thracians. ...

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. ...

There are also some Dacian words in languages other than Romanian, most of 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. ... Bryndza is a sheeps milk cheese made in Eastern Austria, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Ukraine. ... Cheese is a solid food made from the curdled milk of various animals—most commonly cows but sometimes goats, sheep, reindeer, and water buffalo. ...

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