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Loanwords in Romanian Kim Schulte University of Exeter kschulte@ex.ac.uk 1. The

Loanwords in Romanian Kim Schulte University of Exeter kschulte@ex.ac.uk 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 belongs 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 loanword typology database 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 chapter, ‘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 including 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 Ukrainian areas close to the Romanian and Moldovan borders. There is a large Romanian diaspora, estimated at around 8 million people, with concentrations in North America, Australia and Israel; due to recent emigration, there are also Romanian communities of considerable size in Italy and Spain (c. 1 million in each country). 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 Romania), 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 bilingual. In the Republic of Moldova, the Turkic language Gagauz is spoken by approximately 150,000 inhabitants of the Province of Gagauzia, in the south of the country. In Transnistria, a breakaway republic 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 comparatively large proportion of ethnic Russians in the cities, especially in the capital Chişinău, due to migration during the period under Soviet rule; many native Russian speakers only have limited linguistic competence in Romanian. Fig. 1: Map of Romania and the Republic of Moldova 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 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 neighbouring 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; unsurprisingly, 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 database entry is not based on any specific regional dialect, but on what is considered 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 AD and 106 AD, leading to the foundation of the Roman province of Dacia. This was followed by a period of intense colonisation and Romanisation, during which a regional variety of Popular 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 AD. Despite the comparatively 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 extensive 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 prolonged process (see Section 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 9thcentury) 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 returning 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 settlers in Transylvania in the 12th and 13th centuries, encouraged by the Hungarian rulers, and the imposition of Ottoman suzerainty from the 16th century, bringing 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 meanings contained in the Loanword Typology Database, was either the author’s personal knowledge or standard bilingual dictionaries (Isbǎşescu, 1995; Savin et al., 1997; Leviţchi & Bantaş, 1992), complemented by the Romanian Academy’s monolingual dictionary (Coteanu et al., 1998) and a dictionary of synonyms (Seche & Seche, 2002); the latter 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 database are (a) the Romanian Academy’s Dicţionarul 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) Cioranescu’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-honoured Romanian philologists (Puşcariu, 1997 (1943); Philippide, 1894; Haşdeu, 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 Turkish, 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 the loans from various source languages. Information regarding the exact word form of the source word was frequently taken from dictionaries of the respective languages, e.g. Newmark (1998) and Fiedler & Klosi (1997) for Albanian, Grujić (1998) for Serbian, and Steuerwald (1972) for Turkish. Information regarding the earliest known source word was obtained from etymological dictionaries of various languages, e.g. Corominas (1961) for loanwords shared with Spanish and Grebe (1963) for loanwords with German cognates. 3. Contact Situations For the present analysis of loanwords in Romanian, the focus lies on words borrowed into the language after Latin began to be used in the area where Romanian is spoken today. Whilst it is neither possible nor sensible to define an exact point in time at which Latin became Romanian, it can be ruled out that a uploads/Litterature/ loanwords-in-romanian-pdf 1 .pdf