Second-language.com

Minor · Joined: 16 Jul 2006 Posts: 1

I don't know if this is the right place to ask this, but how similar is Romanian to other Latin languages? I mean, I didn't even know that anyone that far east still spoke a Latin language, and since it was separated for so long from the rest of the Latin languages...well, I just wondered... Question

polyglot · Site Admin Joined: 15 Jul 2006 Posts: 10 Location: USA

Romanian is part of "Eastern" Latin, of which the only other major survivor is Italian (which shares traits of both east and west). Note that Moldovan in Moldova is really Romanian.

The Summer Institute of Lingustics states "Romanian has 77% lexical similarity with Italian, 75% with French, 74% with Sardinian, 73% with Catalan, 72% with Portuguese and Rheto-Romance, 71% with Spanish." see http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=ron

I think a good way of looking at it is that Romanian has a Latin grammar and basic vocabulary, with a large number of borrowings from Greek (because the East was Orthodox, not the Latin Roman Catholic Church) and from Slavic languages, since the Slavs overran the Balkans and cut Romania off from the rest of the Latin world.

In a way, this is similar to what happened to English, when the Norman French overran the Saxon kingdoms. The English that grew out of this event retained its Germanic roots in terms of grammar and basic words, then borrowed large numbers of words from French. However, it looks to me that Romanian still has more in common with Italian than modern English has with modern German.

I heard a story once about how Italian soldiers, who were doing occupation duty in World War II in Romania, were quite surprised to find that they could understand much of what the locals were saying...well, I am sure that they probably had trouble following conversations, but a large number of words were surely recognizable. I am looking forward some day to personally visiting to find out(!)
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polyglot

jimbo · Joined: 28 Jul 2006 Posts: 2 Location: Colorado, US

What are the odds that I could speak Italian or Spanish in Romania and be understood? Or is English more likely?
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jimbo