Romanian language

“ And yet step by step one can follow up a modification; small at the confines of the Balkans, it grows greater the further it is carried westwards.
The conclusion is obvious. In Rumanian, the language is preponderantly of a Latin origin, but other tongues come in to make up its present character. A comparatively large [18] proportion of the popular language—which alone is of importance—is Slavonic; then follow in decreasing proportions Hungarian, modern Greek, Turkish and Albanian elements, but scarcely any trace of a more ancient local language. ”

“ RUMANIAN LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE. Rumanian Language. A Romance tongue spoken in three dialects, the Daco-Rumanian, in Rumania, Transylvania, Bessarabia, the Hungarian Banat, and Bukowina—that is, in old Dacia, by about 9,000,000 people; the Macedo-Rumanian, in Macedonia, Albania, Thessaly, and Epirus, by several hundred thousand people; and the Istro-Rumanian, in Istria, by about 3000 people. The Daco-Rumanian dialect comprises the Wallachian, Moldavian, Transylvanian, and Banatian sub-dialects. ”

“ The Rumanian developed from the vulgar Latin spoken in Dacia and Mœsia under the intluence suecessively of the Turano-Bulgarian, Albanian, Slavic, Hungarian, Turkish, and Modern Greek. These influences affected little the grammatical structure of the language, but greatly changed its vocabulary. About 3800 words are Slavic, about 2600 come from the vulgar Latin, about 700 are Turkish, 650 Greek, 500 Hungarian, and 50 Albanian. ”

“ Even when the Rumanian language at last supplanted the Slavonic, it did not emancipate itself from the original; the new was merely a translation from the old, and at the beginning it was as literal as possible. We have therefore in the first period a medieval literature transplanted to Rumania and consisting of translations from the Slavonic. The reason of the change from Slavonic into Rumanian is to be sought in the influence the Reformation had among the Rumanian inhabitants of Transylvania. ”

“ Your sword of blood, smoking/steaming from the enemy,
and on top of the hydra which billows by the wind
Your dream of proud, succeeding glory
What they say of the world, coloured flags,
That which are the people, grand and Romanian,
When he strikes, sacrificing his naive flame
Sweet Romania, this I wish for you. ”

“ Religion has never played an important part in Rumanian national life, and was generally limited to merely external practices. This may be attributed largely to the fact that as the Slavonic language had been used in the Church since the ninth century and then was superseded by Greek up to the nineteenth century, the clergy was foreign, and was neither in a position nor did it endeavour to acquire a spiritual influence over the Rumanian peasant. There is no record whatever in Rumanian history of any religious feuds or dissensions. ”

“ The extraordinary rapidity with which the Roumanian people has reasserted itself in recent years, is one of the most remarkable facts in modern European history, and it is largely due to the labours of its historians. Up till 1822 the Roumanian language was vigorously proscribed; the rulers of the Danubian provinces permitted instruction to the upper classes in the language of the rulers only, and while Slavonic, and in the days of the Phanariots Greek, was the official and fashionable language, used in educating the nobility and bourgeois, the peasants were left in ignorance. ”

“ In 1643 the Rumanian was admitted into State and Church upon an equal footing with the Slavic. but the Slavic language and alphabet persisted, and the important books of devotion continued for a long time in Slavic, the substitution of Rumanian lasting fully two centuries.
Besides the Church literature, the only other branch of literature cultivated was history. Of great importance for the early history is the anonymous Lêtopisețul țăriĭ Romîneștĭ și a țărĭ Moldoveĭ (the chronicle of the Rumanian and Moldavian countries) . ”

“ Although the Romanians were slow to benefit from the relatively high cultural and political level reached in Transylvania under the Austro-Hungarians, an appreciable number of concessions had been made to them by the middle of the nineteenth century. They began to share in the political life after political parties were established, schools were opened for Romanian children, and education became more widespread among the general population. ”

“ The very family names of the Roumanians, when not artificially brought into harmony with modern academic sentiment, reveal a non-Latin origin. Those of the peasantry are frequently Slavonic, while those of the nobility are not infrequently Greek. Yet the purists banished the Slavonic element from the dictionary of the Roumanian language compiled under the auspices of the Roumanian Academy by two native Latinists. ”

“ The intellectual development of Rumania has never until modern times been affected by Latin culture, but it has been profoundly influenced first by Slavonic literature, then by the Greek or Byzantine literature, and last, by the Western, notably French and Italian novels. The history of Rumanian literature can be divided into three distinct periods: the Slavonic, from the beginnings of Rumanian literature in the middle of the 16th century down to 1710 ”

“ Romania is the common and indivisible homeland of all its citizens, without any discrimination on account of race, nationality, ethnic origin, language, religion, sex, opinion, political adherence, property or social origin. ”

“ All educated Roumanians speak French, and most of them German, besides their own tongue; indeed French is almost the universal language of the middle classes, whilst those who have been educated here, especially the younger men, naturally speak English well, and therefore the Queen is in this respect only somewhat ahead of her more accomplished subjects. ”

“ He was a man of great talents and spoke and wrote many Oriental and European languages. Though a foreigner, he soon acquired a thorough knowledge of Rumanian, and was instrumental in helping to introduce that language into the church as its official language. He was a master printer and an artist of the first order. He cut the wood blocks for the books which he printed in Tirgovishtea, Râmnicu, Snagov and Bucharest. He was also the first to introduce Oriental founts of type into Rumania, and he printed there the first Arabic missal for the Christians of the East (Râmnicu, 1702) . ”

“ The Romanian people see themselves as a Latin island surrounded by Slavs and Magyars (Hungarians) . They are proud of their long, distinctly different historical development and consider that their history is important to them as proof of their ethnic uniqueness in the area and as proof that Romania belongs to the Romanians. ”

“ There is hardly a language, or even a dialect, to be found unworthy of the philologist’s attention. The Roumanian tongue can claim that attention on more grounds than one. It is the language of an European country as independent as England itself, and is spoken by a population numbering eight millions of souls, extending beyond the bounds of Roumania itself into Bulgaria, Servia, Transylvania, Hungary, the Austrian province of the Bukovina, and the Russian province of Bessarabia. ”

“ The determination of the gender of the noun is one of the difficulties of the Roumanian language. The student, however, must first observe that masculine nouns generally end in a consonant:
Romăn, ‘Roumanian.’ Engles, ‘Englishman.’ Grec, ‘Greek.’ nepot, ‘nephew.’ professor,⁠ ‘teacher.’ împărat, ‘emperor.’ tun, ‘cannon.’ There are, however, a few masculine nouns which end with a vowel, and here the real difficulty begins. ”

“ Every one knows that, in the modern principality of Roumania and in the adjoining parts of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, there is to be seen that phenomenon so unique in the East, a people who not only still keep the Roman name, but who speak neither Greek nor Turkish, neither Slave nor Skipetar, but a dialect of Latin, a tongue akin, not to the tongues of any of their neighbors, but to the tongues of Gaul, Italy, and Spain. ”

“ Underlying all these influences from abroad are elements of a native peasant culture that can be traced back to the Neolithic settlement found on the territory of the Romanian state. The mixing of all the elements has produced a cultural mosaic that, although it has much in common with the cultures of neighboring countries, is purely Romanian. ”

“ The chief are the Pruth, which now forms the boundary towards Russia, the Sereth, and the Oltu (Aluta) .
People.—Most of the Roumanians are supposed to be descendants of the race formed by the alliance of the Roman colonists with the original inhabitants of Dacia. The Roumanian language is derived mainly from Latin, with Slavonic, Hungarian, and other elements.
They are strong, well-knit men, with black hair, lively, but not very active. The mass of the people live in great poverty; a few thousand Boyars, nobles or landed proprietors, really form the nation. ”

“ This latter factor is probably alone fatal to the adoption of any living language. It can scarcely be disputed that neither English nor French occupies to-day so relatively influential a position as it once occupied. The movement against the use of French in Roumania, as detrimental to the national language, is significant of a widespread feeling, while, as regards English, the introduction by the Germans into commerce of the method of approaching customers in their own tongue, has rendered impossible the previous English custom of treating English as the general language of commerce. ”

“ The German minority, while anxious to preserve its cultural identity and rights, seems to have good relations with the Romanians and with other ethnic groups. Although their historic experience and their religion give them a cultural affinity with the Hungarians, they have remained aloof from the Hungarian-Romanian issue in Transylvania. As a whole, Germans have remained to themselves in their own communities and have made little effort to integrate into the national society. ”

“ Although artists were criticized for submitting to so-called decadent bourgeois culture if they moved too far away from the standards of Socialist Realism, they were not punished or enjoined from further creative activity unless their work could be interpreted as an attack on the regime or its policies.
At the same time, expanding relations between Romania and the noncommunist world brought artists and intellectuals into contact with cultural developments elsewhere and stimulated Romanian creative expression. ”

“ The earliest inhabitants of Rumania are tall, dark brachycephs—the Cevenoles of Deniker’s classification. This original element has been repeatedly diluted by Slavic and Tatar percolation. The Roman conquest, which together with the “pax Romana” brought civilization to the land, was not an ethnical victory. The Romans, a mere minority of leaders, ruled in the land much after the fashion in which the British govern India at present. But this occupation of the land by men representing a superior civilization sufficed to stamp the speech of Rome upon Rumania. ”

“ A rich heritage of folk music, both vocal and instrumental, has been passed down from generation to generation and has formed the background for serious Romanian music that began to develop in the mid-nineteenth century. ”

“ The peasants who form the majority of the population of most European states often speak a different language or dialect from that of the educated upper classes, and such lines of linguistic cleavage frequently represent lines of race distinction as well. For example, in Transylvania the language of about sixty per cent of the inhabitants is Rumanian, while the literary, military and land-owning classes speak either Magyar or German, and these Hungarians and Saxons, in addition to forming everywhere the ruling class, are gathered together in many places in compact communities. ”

“ Rumanian [10] is, geographically, an isolated eastern member of the group of Romance languages (q.v.) , being severed from all the rest by countries in which the predominant speech is Slavonic or Magyar. It represents the original rustic Latin of the Roman provincials in Moesia and Dacia, as modified by centuries of alien rule. Structurally, its Latin characteristics have been well preserved; but its vocabulary has undergone great changes, becoming so far Slavonized that the ratio of words of Slavonic origin to words of Latin origin is approximately as three to two ”

“ In this view, the modern Roumans would be the descendants of Trajan's colonists and of Dacians who had learned of them to adopt the speech and manners of Rome. But when we remember that Dacia was the first Roman province to be given up—that the modern Roumania was for ages the highway of every barbarian tribe on its way from the East to the West—that the land has been conquered and settled and forsaken over and over again—it would be passing strange if this should be the one land, and its people the one race, to keep the Latin tongue when it has been forgotten in all the neighboring countries. ”

“ This handbook attempts to describe the social, political, and economic bases of Romanian society and, more particularly, how these bases have been affected by Romania's independent stance within the alliances of Eastern European communist countries. The authors of the handbook have tried to be objective in order to provide a comprehensive exposition of the dominant aspects of Romanian life in the early 1970s. ”

“ Curiously enough, there is not a single novel in the Rumanian literature with a sustained plot; none which presents a study of the development of human character amid the multifarious vicissitudes of life. The reason for this deficiency is perhaps the unsettled conditions of Rumanian life, and the lack of a profound and long-established civilization ”