# Romanian: Latin with a Slavic accent? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [May 10, 2012, 9:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/romanian-latin-with-a-slavic-accent/621551 "2012-05-10T21:26:02Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [May 11, 2012, 10:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/romanian-latin-with-a-slavic-accent/621551/21 "2012-05-11T22:11:01Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > You threw “et cetera” and “corpus” in there deliberately, didn’t you? 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [May 11, 2012, 10:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/romanian-latin-with-a-slavic-accent/621551/22 "2012-05-11T22:13:08Z")
> [@John\_Mace](#): > > I was distinguishing between words that were borrowed into English directly from Latin, as opposed to those that came into the language via Norman French. > > Words like “Bishop”, “Priest” and “Nun”. Also _street_, _wine_, and _cheese_. Loanwords from the last gasps of Roman Britain to the invading Anglo-Saxons. ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [May 11, 2012, 11:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/romanian-latin-with-a-slavic-accent/621551/23 "2012-05-11T23:14:16Z")
_Television_ and _automobile_ were met with disdain by really old school language purists, because they spliced together a Greek with a Latin root. Unheard of! Until the 19th century when it became normal. Robert Anton Wilson satirized the controversy over the hybrid word _automobile_ by having an 18th-century inventor name it “suikineton.” From Latin _sui_- ‘self’ and Greek _kineton_ ‘moving thing’. The satire is in switching around the Greek roots to their equivalents in Latin, and _vice versa_, keeping the same meaning as _automobile_. By that method, _television_ becomes something like “procultheama.” (_procul_=‘far-off’ in Latin + _theama_=‘sight, spectacle’ in Ancient Greek.) These new reverse coinages sound weird, though. Why is that? ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [May 12, 2012, 12:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/romanian-latin-with-a-slavic-accent/621551/24 "2012-05-12T00:24:12Z")
> [@Johanna](#): > > Also _street_, _wine_, and _cheese_. Loanwords from the last gasps of Roman Britain to the invading Anglo-Saxons. Did those words come into English from Latin, or did they enter into early Germanic from Latin, and then later into Enlish, Dutch, etc? Because those are words common to Germanic languages in areas that were never under Roman rule. ---
**Author:** ![Chimera](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/8e8cbc/32.png) [@Chimera](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chimera)\ **Post date:** [May 12, 2012, 12:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/romanian-latin-with-a-slavic-accent/621551/25 "2012-05-12T00:52:56Z")
> [@Johanna](#): > > By that method, _television_ becomes something like “procultheama.” (_procul_=‘far-off’ in Latin + _theama_=‘sight, spectacle’ in Ancient Greek.) Damn, we need to introduce that word into common usage. 😛 ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [May 12, 2012, 1:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/romanian-latin-with-a-slavic-accent/621551/26 "2012-05-12T01:09:12Z")
> [@Johanna](#): > > By that method, _television_ becomes something like “procultheama.” (_procul_=‘far-off’ in Latin + _theama_=‘sight, spectacle’ in Ancient Greek.) These new reverse coinages sound weird, though. Why is that? Well, “vision” is an English word in and of itself, and we’ve been hearing “tele” at least since the telescope was invented, so we grow up hearing those word/sounds all the time. If we heard “procultheama” in the cradle, it would sound perfectly normal. ---
**Author:** ![Hari\_Seldon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hari_seldon/32/5173_2.png) [@Hari\_Seldon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hari_Seldon)\ **Post date:** [May 12, 2012, 1:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/romanian-latin-with-a-slavic-accent/621551/27 "2012-05-12T01:22:44Z")
I have a good friend who grew up in Romania during soviet rule. Russian was compulsory. They were taught that the inflections in Romanian were borrowed from Russian, but as soon as he learned a bit of Latin grammar he realized that was an out and out lie. He said about 7% of Romanian words have Slavic origin. His grandmother insisted on teaching him French because, “No educated Romanian fails to speak French”. His French is still pretty good, although he has been living in NYC for over 30 years now. As an amusing aside, he learned English from reading IBM technical manuals! Despite that, his English is superb. Another Romanian I know was giving a series of lectures in Italy. He got by by speaking French with a Romanian accent (or maybe it was the other way around). I should mention that he is a professor at a French language university. ---
**Author:** ![KayLovesPurple](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kaylovespurple/32/6114_2.png) [@KayLovesPurple](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/KayLovesPurple)\ **Post date:** [May 12, 2012, 12:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/romanian-latin-with-a-slavic-accent/621551/28 "2012-05-12T12:06:49Z")
> [@dropzone](#): > > That’s a whole lot easier to read if I do it aloud with Church Latin pronunciations. This is approximately how you should do it 🙂 Romanian is considered a phonetic language =\> with very few exceptions, each word reads like the sum of its letters (just like Latin, although sometimes the stress is placed on a different syllable in Romanian). ---
**Author:** ![polar\_bear](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ec9cab/32.png) [@polar\_bear](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/polar_bear)\ **Post date:** [May 12, 2012, 1:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/romanian-latin-with-a-slavic-accent/621551/29 "2012-05-12T13:21:12Z")
> [@KayLovesPurple](#): > > This is approximately how you should do it 🙂 > Romanian is considered a phonetic language =\> with very few exceptions, each word reads like the sum of its letters (just like Latin, although sometimes the stress is placed on a different syllable in Romanian). Well, you first need to learn how the letters are supposed to be pronounced in Romanian. I think few people here would know how to pronounce ‘Ce Faci?’, ‘Iasi’, ‘Te iubesc’ That last one might be a word with slavic origins by the way;). ---
**Author:** ![Johnny\_Angel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/d26b3c/32.png) [@Johnny\_Angel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johnny_Angel)\ **Post date:** [May 12, 2012, 2:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/romanian-latin-with-a-slavic-accent/621551/30 "2012-05-12T14:53:38Z")
On Schola, the Latin social network, there are a couple of users from _Dacoromanania_ (as its called in Latin) in the chat room. There, all chat is done in Latin, and both of these users have given me to understand that Latin is not that big a leap from Romanian. I haven’t quizzed them on too many of the details, but I get the impression that the inflections aren’t a lot less complicated, as they are in many of the Romance languages today. In light of that, however, I took note recently when reading selections from Petronius recently, because the editor explains a lot of what to look for in the vulgar (‘common’) Latin used by many characters and one of those points is that many words of neuter gender were already becoming masculine in the Latin of common folk, a process that gradually eliminated the neuter gender altogether in all Romance languages except Romanian. Again, more evidence for a stronger connection to Latin than found in other Romance languages. Well, that’s about all I know about it, so, for what that’s worth… > [@Johanna](#): > > _Television_ and _automobile_ were met with disdain by really old school language purists, because they spliced together a Greek with a Latin root. Unheard of! Until the 19th century when it became normal. Apparently, again from my Petronius reader, mixing Greek and Latin in coinages has been common in vulgar practice from antiquity. ---
**Author:** ![even\_sven](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/dfb087/32.png) [@even\_sven](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/even_sven)\ **Post date:** [May 12, 2012, 4:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/romanian-latin-with-a-slavic-accent/621551/31 "2012-05-12T16:29:21Z")
I think Portuguese depends on the origin of the accent. The Rio accent sounds very Russian. Other cities, not so much. ---
**Author:** ![KayLovesPurple](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kaylovespurple/32/6114_2.png) [@KayLovesPurple](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/KayLovesPurple)\ **Post date:** [May 12, 2012, 4:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/romanian-latin-with-a-slavic-accent/621551/32 "2012-05-12T16:40:22Z")
> [@polar\_bear](#): > > Well, you first need to learn how the letters are supposed to be pronounced in Romanian. I think few people here would know how to pronounce ‘Ce Faci?’, ‘Iasi’, ‘Te iubesc’ That last one might be a word with slavic origins by the way;). You make it sound a lot more difficult than it is 🙂 The consonants are all the basic consonants that you know and love, no difference there. You already know all the vowels too – a reads like the one in strap, i reads like the one in strip, e reads like the one in strep, o reads like the one in top; no quick examples come to mind for our letter u, but it’s like the one in good, only shorter. Then there are the “strange letters”, ş and ţ – who read like sh and tz respectively, plus the “other vowels” (ǎ and î) that have no English equivalent that I know of (and I am not that good at phonetics to be able to explain it). The exceptions to the phonetic rule are the groups ce and ci (read tcheh and tchee) and ge and gi (read sort of djeh and djee). And that’s about it 🙂 Which means that “ce faci” is sort of tcheh fah-chee (first syllable accented), Iaşi is Iah-shi (but remember, it’s the i in strip not in Ian or lion) and te iubesc (which is indeed of slavic origin) is a sort of teh i-u-besk (again, i in strip, u a bit shorter than the one in good). ---
**Author:** ![pulykamell](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pulykamell/32/3166_2.png) [@pulykamell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pulykamell)\ **Post date:** [May 12, 2012, 6:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/romanian-latin-with-a-slavic-accent/621551/33 "2012-05-12T18:39:22Z")
> [@KayLovesPurple](#): > > a reads like the one in strap. Depends on the variety of English, I suppose, but in American English, that “a” is an /ae/ sound. Romanian “a” sounds more like a short o in my dialect, like the “o” in “hot” perhaps or the sound you make when the dentist tells you to say “ahhh!” [Or, better yet, here.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_central_unrounded_vowel) Is there an English dialect where “strap” is pronounced with that sound? And isn’t the “ǎ” simply a schwa sound? ---
**Author:** ![polar\_bear](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ec9cab/32.png) [@polar\_bear](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/polar_bear)\ **Post date:** [May 12, 2012, 7:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/romanian-latin-with-a-slavic-accent/621551/34 "2012-05-12T19:37:50Z")
> [@KayLovesPurple](#): > > You make it sound a lot more difficult than it is 🙂 > > The consonants are all the basic consonants that you know and love, no difference there. You already know all the vowels too – a reads like the one in strap, i reads like the one in strip, e reads like the one in strep, o reads like the one in top; no quick examples come to mind for our letter u, but it’s like the one in good, only shorter. Then there are the “strange letters”, ş and ţ – who read like sh and tz respectively, plus the “other vowels” (ǎ and î) that have no English equivalent that I know of (and I am not that good at phonetics to be able to explain it). > > The exceptions to the phonetic rule are the groups ce and ci (read tcheh and tchee) and ge and gi (read sort of djeh and djee). And that’s about it 🙂 > > Which means that “ce faci” is sort of tcheh fah-chee (first syllable accented), Iaşi is Iah-shi (but remember, it’s the i in strip not in Ian or lion) and te iubesc (which is indeed of slavic origin) is a sort of teh i-u-besk (again, i in strip, u a bit shorter than the one in good). I guess you’re right, it just seems that when I read a word in Romanian, I aways seem to expect it to sound different than it does (especially with the ‘i’). I only know a handful of words and phrases btw, so that would probably change if I were to really try and learn the language. Another question if I may, doesn’t the ‘i’ sound in ‘bine’ and a word I won’t write here - since its English translation wouldn’t even be allowed in the pit - have more of ‘Ian’ sounding ‘i’ (the fact we always learn these words first, shows what cavemen most people really are; well, what a caveman I am at least:p). ---
**Author:** ![KayLovesPurple](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kaylovespurple/32/6114_2.png) [@KayLovesPurple](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/KayLovesPurple)\ **Post date:** [May 13, 2012, 5:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/romanian-latin-with-a-slavic-accent/621551/35 "2012-05-13T05:04:20Z")
> [@pulykamell](#): > > Depends on the variety of English, I suppose, but in American English, that “a” is an /ae/ sound. Romanian “a” sounds more like a short o in my dialect, like the “o” in “hot” perhaps or the sound you make when the dentist tells you to say “ahhh!” [Or, better yet, here.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_central_unrounded_vowel) Is there an English dialect where “strap” is pronounced with that sound? > > And isn’t the “ǎ” simply a schwa sound? I told you I wasn’t that good at phonetics (while I have learned a bunch of languages both in school and elsewhere I am specialized in a whole different thing). Now that I think more about it, the a is indeed the sound you make when saying aaah at the dentist, and not the one in strap (after all, there’s a possibility I’m reading strap the wrong way, which would somewhat explain the confusion). Also, now that you mention it, the ǎ may fit the bill for a schwa sound. However, while it sounds very much like the a in about, it isn’t exactly the same. The difference may simply be a matter of accent; I am guessing that at least some of the people with that heavy accent you call Slavic have it because they reduce the a in about to ǎ (and other similar substitutions). > [@polar\_bear](#): > > Another question if I may, doesn’t the ‘i’ sound in ‘bine’ and a word I won’t write here - since its English translation wouldn’t even be allowed in the pit - have more of ‘Ian’ sounding ‘i’ (the fact we always learn these words first, shows what cavemen most people really are; well, what a caveman I am at least:p). You know, it took me quite a while to realize what that bad word you’re referring to actually is 🙂 I am probably the one person who does not learn the bad words of new languages; as of now the only language other than my own whose bad words I do know is English, and that is largely owing to the fact that you cannot quite keep away from the f-word and various c-words anywhere these days. I never saw an use for those words, it’s not like I am going to actually use them in formal conversation, and if I do ever happen to get beyond formal with any native speaker of anything there’ll be plenty of time for me to learn any word then 🙂 And yes, I am aware that most people learn the bad words first (I’ve known people who only ever learned those words in various languages), but it’s one of those things I don’t think I’ll ever ‘get’. As of the question, you may have a point there. Thing is, Romanian being my mother tongue, I never had to actually stop and think of these things, they were just there and an i was always just an i. I never considered there may be more than one way to say it 😛 From what I can tell it’s all about the syllable being stressed. If the stress is on the syllable with an i, then it is i like in Ian; if the stress is elsewhere, then it’s i like in strip. Apologies for not having been clear enough earlier. ---
**Author:** ![KayLovesPurple](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kaylovespurple/32/6114_2.png) [@KayLovesPurple](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/KayLovesPurple)\ **Post date:** [May 13, 2012, 5:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/romanian-latin-with-a-slavic-accent/621551/36 "2012-05-13T05:12:38Z")
(apologies for the double post, I tried to edit the original one but it wouldn’t let me) Just wanted to add that as far as I can tell the a is quite unlike the o in hot. If it makes any sense, I see our vowels being square (with rough corners, you know exactly which is which) and your vowels being round (gentler, with the difference between then far less obvious). Which is one of the reasons why the accent you call Slavic sounds so rough and gruff 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![Kizarvexius](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/da6949/32.png) [@Kizarvexius](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kizarvexius)\ **Post date:** [May 14, 2012, 6:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/romanian-latin-with-a-slavic-accent/621551/37 "2012-05-14T18:03:27Z")
Technically, I speak only English. But I have, over the course of my life, absorbed smatterings of German, French, Spanish, Italian, and Greek, as well as formal studies in the fundamentals of phonology and semantics. As a result, given a few sentences of most European dialects that are closely enough related to one of these tongues, I can often pick out a word or two, though it’s only on the rare occasion that I can get the overall gist of what’s being said. I have a Romanian co-worker, and I frequently hear him chattering away in his native tongue while on the phone, or when vilifying the copy machine. For the past two or three years I’ve marveled at the fact that I could never understand anything he said in Romanian. Nothing. Not a hint of a familiar cognate anywhere. He explained to me that his language was heavily influenced by Slavic dialects, and as my familiarity with such is extremely limited, it should not come as too much of a surprise. He clearly took a certain degree of comfort in the fact that nobody could understand him, as it granted him license to vent his frustrations without fear of consequences. One memorable day, as he struggled to retrieve legible results from our notoriously fickle photocopier, he shouted out a single frustrated word. My office is right next to the copy room, so it sounded in my ears as clearly as a bell. All the proper gears clicked into place, and, with no small degree of triumph, I called out that I had understand his last remark. He poked his head through the connecting doorway and eyed me suspiciously. “What word did you understand?” _“Cacat”_, I replied. “Okay,” he said slowly. “So what does it mean?” “Exactly the same thing it means in Latin.” “Which is…?” “Shit.” “Oh, man!” Overnight he stopped swearing at the copy machine. And I’ve never understood another word of Romanian since. ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [May 14, 2012, 7:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/romanian-latin-with-a-slavic-accent/621551/38 "2012-05-14T19:41:28Z")
And yet if you saw written Romanian, you’d probably understand quite a bit. I can speak Spanish fairly well, although not fluently. When I hear Italian, I can understand quite a bit. When I hear Portuguese, I’m lucky to understand one word in twenty. But if I see Portuguese written, I understand most of it. So much of understanding a spoken language is familiarity with the accent. Your difficulty with Romanian is not the prevalence of Slavic words, but the accent (possibly influenced by Slavic phonology). ---
**Author:** ![Loach](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/loach/32/350_2.png) [@Loach](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Loach)\ **Post date:** [May 14, 2012, 8:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/romanian-latin-with-a-slavic-accent/621551/39 "2012-05-14T20:52:16Z")
> [@MrDibble](#): > > I’ve always thought Portuguese sounded more Slavic than its related Romance languages - I think it’s the fricatives? > [@Alessan](#): > > Portuguese to me always sounds like Russians speaking Spanish. I thought I was the only one! Around here everyone who digs a hole or lays down blacktop is Portuguese. In my job I have dealt with them for years. When I first started I thought they were Polish until I figured it out. ---
**Author:** ![Kizarvexius](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/da6949/32.png) [@Kizarvexius](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kizarvexius)\ **Post date:** [May 14, 2012, 10:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/romanian-latin-with-a-slavic-accent/621551/40 "2012-05-14T22:33:08Z")
> [@John\_Mace](#): > > And yet if you saw written Romanian, you’d probably understand quite a bit. > > I can speak Spanish fairly well, although not fluently. When I hear Italian, I can understand quite a bit. When I hear Portuguese, I’m lucky to understand one word in twenty. But if I see Portuguese written, I understand most of it. > > So much of understanding a spoken language is familiarity with the accent. Your difficulty with Romanian is not the prevalence of Slavic words, but the accent (possibly influenced by Slavic phonology). Yes, you’re quite right. Written down, I have a far better chance of picking out whole clusters of words, particularly when the context is known in advance. What struck me as unusual was the way I couldn’t pick out anything by ear, and that’s over several years of hearing this guy speak. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/romanian-latin-with-a-slavic-accent/621551.md?page=1)