Talk:Romanian language/Archive 6

Failed GA nomination

Even though the article has made some good information and does contain a lot of information with references, there are a few points which need to be addressed before I can really call it a good article. I'm going to give examples of problems by going through the good article criteria one by one:

1. well written

   There are some seriously listy and very technical sections in the article. "Grammar" is an example of a fairly concise summary that uses terminology that might not be known to everybody but isn't excessive. "Phonology" is a whole different matter. It is msotly a long list of (certain) sounds with an excess of IPA notation and the likes. The only comparison is historical and related to Latin and the info on phonotactics is also very selective.

2. factually accurate and verifiable

   I'm not an expert on Romanian, but I do have some concerns about what to me look like excessesive generalizations or outright speculation. Here are some examples:

   • "...Romanian was probably the first language that split from Latin..." - How is this "split" actually defined here? Is this supported by linguists?
   • "'Romanian' in a general sense envelops four hardly mutually intelligible speech varieties..." - Is this really the most common definition of Romanian? Isn't the problem that "Daco-Romanian" is actually just a more specific term for what most people call "Romanian"? Please note that the perspective needs to be a bit greater than just the debate among the Romanian academia.
   • "...the high homogenity and uniformity of the language." Not an outright challenge to the accuracy of the statement on my part, but it would be nice to know what the statement i based on.

   Through I am no fan of footnote counting, there are some statements (and even entire sections) that are screaming for even a minimum of reference and I will fact tag these accordingly.

3. broad in coverage

   Largely, yes. There are at least minimal mentions of all the linguistic aspects one would expect from an article like this, but some aspects are heavily over-represented while others are largely ignored. "Dialects" is mostly concerned with defining the general dichotomy of language vs. dialect and has minimal information about the actual dialects and nothing on the standard language. "Classification", "Writing system" and "Geographic distribution" take up more than half the article, and in the last section, most of it is a very tedious read on the finer points of the legal status of Romanian. Especially the latter is a very obvious example of undue weight which is obviously a result of strong nationalist sentiment.

4. neutral

   As far as I can tell, yes, except for the undue (or just overly zealous) coverage of the legal status of the langauge.

5. stable

   The article is edit-protected and I've seen some overly aggressive edit summaries without any serious attempts at discussion from certain parties.

6. properly illustrated

   It has plenty of pics, but unfortunately these are still very much focused on nationalist-political information, which really isn't merited. At least not in this article. A bonus, though by no means a requirement, would be some samples. Preferably from a text of some sort, like a poem or an excerpt of some well-known novel.

I'm going to help out with tweakage over the next few days, but I can't really bring the article up to GA quality with some copyediting. If anyone wishes to renominate the article again, they are welcome to contact me again for a reassessment of the article.

Peter ^Isotalo 14:55, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

I'd just like to point out that literally all of these complaints don't need to be fixed for the article to be receive a GA status, just the really major issues. If all of the above are addressed, I'd say the article will probably be up for a featured article nomination.

Peter ^Isotalo 08:17, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

I agree with all the points you made. Hope somebody with better editing skills than me will jump in. -- AdrianTM 12:24, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

Latin declensions

Please note that latin declensions had six cases, not seven as it is said at the beginning of "History" chapter. You can verify it by searching for the latin language rules on Wikipedia.

Ciocionheart 01:55, 11 October 2007 (UTC)

I apologize: on "Latin declension" in Wikipedia it is said that latine had seven cases, mentioning the locative. It is also said that it is marginal, and this is the reason, I guess, for in the "Latin" page it is not mentioned. Ciocionheart 02:02, 11 October 2007 (UTC)

New grammar rules?

I strongly believe that there should be a list with the most important changes to the grammar rules. I really not up-to-date to the new modifications and I would love to see a list of them. I have added a link that seemed to be quite comprehensive. Please add more links like this one, and if you know enough information about this, then please add it to the article - possibly a new section? But if you add it to the article, please do not decrease its quality.

(in Romanian) [1] Nergaal (talk) 00:48, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Lingustic typology

I think we're in much need of a classification of Romanian according to linguistic typology.
The current version of the article deals almost exclusively with etymology, vocabulary, and similarities with other languages. We do have, however, some info about word order in Romanian grammar.
So please, can someone with much more linguistics knowledge than mine, do it?
There is also no word on t-v distinction. But maybe just a link to the article t-v distinction will do. --Disconnect 6 (talk) 12:20, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

I agree, I think there were a bit about T-V distinction but that probably got removed. Here's the info T-v_distinction#Romanian for anybody who wants to edit, I'm not sure where it should go, we probably need only to mention that Romanian has a T-V distinction and for more info link to that article. -- AdrianTM (talk) 16:10, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

etymology

• cutie < kutu (Turkish) "box"

i think it is obvious that it should be cutie < κυτίον cution "box" (medieval Greek) the Turkish is also from the Greek. --Lucinos (talk) 00:51, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

Are you sure that entered Romanian from Greece or is it from Turkish? I know the word is present in both languages, and Romanian has borrowed words from both languagues. -- AdrianTM (talk) 02:55, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

It's difficult to see how the -ie ending could have come from the Turkish -u, but it's easy to believe it came form the Greek -ίον. —Angr ^{If you've written a quality article...} 05:19, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

OK, changed. Pushing the luck here, how about "papuci", I know that Greeks have "paputsia" (my guess is that Greek took the word from Turkish) but at the same time they have the word "pantofles" and Romanians have "pantofi" (similar meanings but reversed pantofi = paputsia and papuci = pantofles). -- AdrianTM (talk) 05:43, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

Paputsi Παπούτσι (Greek) is from Turkish papuç and the Turkish is from the Persian pāpūš "footcover". Παντόφλα pantofla (Greek) is from an Italic language (French?) and somehow is back from the Greek (*Pantofello "all of cork") --Lucinos (talk) 06:53, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

Language Map

There are major flaws with the map: an exagerated number of speakers in Timoc and Bugeac. Plus the person that edited the previous version went over the borders, damaging the quality of the map. Dapiks (talk) 21:47, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

I had the occasion to travel extensively during the last 10 years in the areas of Timok and Bugeac and I can testify that alot of local people are speaking Romanian and alot of people are learning Romanian, especially because it is increasingly a prestigious language to do bussines in and to have acces of higher culture. Especially after 2000, the fast growing economy of Romania and the penetration of the Romanian media in those areas are boosting the number of the local Romanian-speakers. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.105.123.228 (talk) 19:42, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

Reliable source

The IPA pronunciation providing this link might not be a reliable source. Please use a more verifiable reference for this. NHJG (talk) 01:01, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

I removed the link altogether. It was a rather good text-to-speech output, that is, when compared to other TTS engines, but not as good as an actual recording. One thing I notice is that the phoneme /ɨ/ is pronounced too close to /u/, which could be misleading. That appears to be the most difficult Romanian vowel for English native speakers, so it is especially important to get it right. I should remember to make a recording and upload it. — AdiJapan ☎ 05:32, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

From the Italian Wikipedia article

it:Lingua rumenica

"il lessico latino nella lingua letteraria avrebbe costituito solo il 20%," --VKokielov (talk) 20:29, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

The language map is not very accurate - in fact it may be original research. The Romanian speaking population in Timok Valley is not a big mass encompassing cities as well as villages but rather it is formed of scattered villages around cities which are and have historically been populated by Serbian speakers. Also, in the Bugeac, Romanians are rather scattered as well (only 13% of the population). They are concentrated mainly in Reni raion, however on the current map they are shown to include almost half of the Bugeac. I have added bellow an improved version based on the Languages of Europe map as well as the map for Bugeac and the one on Vlachs of Serbia. Dapiks (talk) 20:52, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

Major varieties of Romanian.

Addition of Sicilian

Hello,

I just wanted to add Sicilian to the list under Classifications. I was unable for some reason. Following is what I wanted to add:

"Idda sempri chiudi la finestra àntica cina. (Sicilian)"

There are of course synonyms that could be used, such as "sirra" for "chiudi", "prima ca" for "àntica" and "pistìa, mancia" for "cina". There is also a variation of "àntica" that is similar to what Romanian shows, that is "in àntica" or "n'àntica".

If someone would add the above phrase to the list, I would much appreciate it. Thank you.

--M scalisi (talk) 08:19, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

H is never aspirated

The article currently says:

h always represents /h/. It is never aspirated, nor mute.

I'm a little confused as to what this means. Doesn't /h/ represent an aspiration? How can it not be aspirated, unless it is mute? Grover cleveland 04:10, 11 October 2007 (UTC)

It's like in "Hartford, Hereford, and Hampshire", whene "hurricanes hardly ever happen". Dpotop 19:08, 11 October 2007 (UTC)

Though I got my Linguistics Ph.D. 30 years ago or so, I am 'a bit' confused, too, when reading the explanation above — do we have to understand that this /h/ is neither a voiceless (aspirated) consonant [h] nor a mute [∅] (like in Spanish, French and others), but the voiced glottal fricative [ɦ]? If so, why not indicate it simply this way? Or am I too old to understand anything? — Kanġi Oĥanko (talk) 22:35, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

Romanian /h/ is usually the voiceless glottal fricative. Depending on the phonetic context, /h/ is sometimes realized as the voiceless palatal fricative (for example when followed by /i/) or as the voiceless velar fricative (for example at the end of the word). — AdiJapan ☎ 05:50, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

I think the sentence should be rephrased as something like "h always represents /h/; it is never silent, as in other Romance languages like Spanish and French". —Angr ^{If you've written a quality article...} 13:41, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

Done. — AdiJapan ☎ 16:23, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

Though "H" is always pronounced, it has dropped from words that are of Latin origin (om, omolog, oră, onoare, etc.). In modern Romanian, "H" always (as far as I know?) comes in words that are not of Latin origin (old Romanian words, either Slavic, borrowed from other nearby languages, or possibly from whatever language was spoken by Romanians before the Romans came). Ssmith619 (talk) 05:10, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

Too many maps that don't really add info

I think we have too many maps that are not really useful, for example we have two maps for Vojvodina when in Vojvodina there are only 0.1% of the Romanian speakers of the world. This constitutes under any criteria WP:Undue weight. Also, I don't think it's very relevant to Wikipedia to have a map where we show areas were 1-3% or less than 1% of the people learn Romanian as a second language. Also, the map of "places where Romanian is taught as foreign language" seems highly non-Encyclopedic to me, where are the sources? The author of those maps showed all the traces of ownership and accused me of abusive edits right from the start, even more, he continued that behaviour in my talk page choosing to ignore WP:AGF completely, therefore, I choose not to remove the maps a second time, since this can be interpreted as a personal war, but I'd like to see the opinion of other editors: do we really need two Vojvodina maps in this article? Is it undue weight or not? -- AdrianTM 00:57, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

I whole-heartedly agree with Adrian. These maps belong in a sub-article on the official/legal status of Romanian, not the main article itself. This may be a controversial topic, but it does not deserve excess coverage just because a few people feel very strongly about it. This edit along with its edit summary is very uncompromising and needlessly beliggerant.

Peter ^Isotalo 14:55, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

Anybody else? -- AdrianTM (talk) 01:13, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

the yellow/green map with Vojvodina has little weight in the context. should be only in the sub-article Nergaal (talk) 01:43, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

I know this is an old topic, but I agree that the map that shows where Romanian is taught as a second language is not needed. I haven't seen any such map in any other language article and think it clutters the page. Kman543210 (talk) 02:45, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

I agree. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 02:55, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

Sunt vs what?

There's a footnote in the article about "decision of the General Meeting of the Romanian Academy from 1993-02-17, regarding the return to „â” and „sunt”".

The part about â is explained in the article - it's â vs. î.

But what is the alternative to sunt? Was it spelled differently? --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 22:54, 1 January 2008 (UTC)

I have a Communist-era Romanian grammar book where sunt is spelled sînt, and I've been informed that it's still pronounced sînt despite being spelled sunt. Presumably the decision was that sunt would be spelled sunt and not sânt, as would otherwise be expected per the new rules on the distribution of â and î. —Angr ^{If you've written a quality article...} 07:29, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

It is the verb fi, right? I found it here: http://www.verbix.com/cache/webverbix/5/fi.shtml

Is it the same in the 1st singular and 3rd plural? (As in Italian sono?)

Yes. Eu sunt (I am), Ei sunt, Ele sunt (They are).

If it is pronounced as sânt/sînt, why did they want to spell it differently? --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 08:05, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

I asked on the language reference desk a while back and was told it's because they wanted it to be spelled the same as the Latin word sunt, which also means "they are". —Angr ^{If you've written a quality article...} 08:19, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

My question to the reference desk is archived here. —Angr ^{If you've written a quality article...} 08:22, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

Another explanation: my understanding is that in this case "n" almost takes the place of the vowel -- has vowel value, as in Serbian or some other Slavic languages, it could probably be written as "snt" (ask any Romanian to pronounce "snt" and you'll get the same pronunciation for the word "sunt" or "sînt") because Romanians are not used with consonants that take places of vowels (or so I think) they try to put there a vowel (or something that has vowel value, like "î"), since "sânt" would really be atrocious -- actually there are other atrocious changes like "râu" instead of "rîu" or "râpa" instead of "rîpa" since in Latin the words had "i", but I digress, in this case the word "sunt" is more common and important so when they made the rules for changing î to â they made a special provision for this word. I've actually noticed people saying "u" in "sunt" so it's clear that spelling influences the actual pronunciation, but in most of the cases is a short "u" and it's not far from "î" ( /u/ and /ɨ/ are actually close sounds, there's only slight difference that comes from where it is pronounced: "back" vs. "central") BTW, consider all this comment as original research, but I thought it might be interesting though to provide a different explanation. -- AdrianTM (talk) 04:17, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

Concerning "snt", most (if not all) consonants are also pronounced as if they had a vowel next to them, thus making "s" sound similar to either "sî" or "es". 89.36.53.11 (talk) 18:33, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

Commas or cedillas? Weird contradiction ...

There are two letters with a comma below, Ș and Ț, which represent the sounds /ʃ/ and /ʦ/. However, the allographs with a cedilla instead of a comma, Ş and Ţ, became widespread when pre-Unicode and early Unicode character sets did not include the standard form. This is what the article reads, but shouldn't we use commas then with the language examples directly below?! Or is this just a nice gesture for IE6 users (who obviously cannot see the consonants with commas) ;) -andy 92.228.84.169 (talk) 13:48, 20 June 2008 (UTC)

Yes, we should use commas instead of cedillas. And yes, the reason we don't is that many readers would see squares instead of those letters. Also, most editors have the cedilla versions on their keyboards. I expect it will be at least a few years until we can switch to the correct diacritics. When we do, we will have bots scan all articles and do it automatically. While this is a rather small problem for en.wp, it's much more important at ro.wp, where every article, except maybe the smallest stubs, have to be edited; besides, the functionality of links, templates, parameters, etc. depends on using the right version of the characters. If you read Romanian, here's where we've been talking about it: ro:Discuţie Wikipedia:Corectarea diacriticelor (note that even the namespace contains a Ţ...). — AdiJapan ☎ 18:32, 20 June 2008 (UTC)

Punctuation and capitalisation

In titles, only the first letter of the first word is capitalized, the rest of the title using sentence capitalization (with all its rules: proper names are capitalized as usual, etc.). Names of months and days are not capitalized (ianuarie "January", joi "Thursday"). Adjectives derived from proper names are not capitalized (Germania "Germany", but german "German").

I fail to see how these rules can be considered particular to Romanian, as capitalisation of anything but proper names is only used (correctly) in German and English of all major languages using the Latin alphabet, as far as I know. Devanatha (talk) 10:22, 23 July 2008 (UTC)

A small change...

I only want to say that it should be "Lei chiude~~" instead of "Ella chiude" in Italian.

Thanks~~ —Preceding unsigned comment added by 90.230.25.224 (talk) 02:25, 24 July 2008 (UTC)

It has already been re-corrected, but for the record: "ella" is literary Italian and is correct (but often considered dated in colloquial use), whereas "lei" means "It's her who (closes the window)" and is used colloquially for "ella". -- megA (talk) 19:24, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

French, Italian and other international words

To quote: "In the 20th century, an increasing number of English words have been borrowed (such as: gem < jam; interviu < interview; meci < match; manager < manager; fotbal < football; sandviş < sandwich; bişniţă < business; ciungă < chewing gum)." I'm not sure ciunga and bişniţă should be there as they haven't been really borrowed, more like they are miss-pronounced in some circles.

Not really borrowed? I'm not sure how else you could call the process of taking words from one language and using them in another. And rest assured, all Romanian words of foreign origin are "mispronounced", including the other words you quoted above. — AdiJapan 13:03, 29 July 2008 (UTC)

Oraş comes from Greek or Slavic (Baros) and not from Hungarian --82.171.95.220 (talk) 08:29, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

You have a source for that? The Romanian dictionaries agree on the Hungarian origin. — AdiJapan 13:56, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

Legal status in Vojvodina — which language for city names?

In the section on "Legal status in Vojvodina", there is a list of cities where Romanian is officially used. This list currently shows each city's Romanian name, followed in parentheses by the Serbian name (in Latin script). I'm wondering whether, perhaps, it should be the other way around — Serbian name first, followed by the Romanian name in parens — given the fact that we are talking about places in Serbia, where the primary official language (and thus, presumably, the primary official name of each city) is Serbian. I also note that the individual cities' Wikipedia articles are filed under the Serbian names, with the Romanian names being defined as redirects. What do people think about the idea of putting the Serbian city names first (followed by parenthesized Romanian names)? Richwales (talk) 20:22, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

Translation errors in Slavic Languages section

There are translation errors in the paragraph starting with

In general, most Slavic borrowings have become well incorporated into Romanian and are no longer perceived as foreign.

I believe the text should read

In general, most Slavic borrowings have become well incorporated into Romanian and are no longer perceived as foreign. In fact, many Romanian words occur as a natural combination of Slavic and Romance elements: devreme ce"since", aşíjderea "likewise", a îmbolnăvi "to make ill", a împleti "to weave", a învârti ...

Devreme means "early", devreme ce is the expression for "since" (in the sense of "because")

A îmbolnăvi is "to make ill" while a se îmbolnăvi is "to become ill". These are minor changes from the point of view of orthography (for lack of a better word) but I do not wish to make them because I do not know the original author's intent thus I am not qualified to decide which of the meanings were intended.

Would the original author please make the corrections?--66.11.89.241 (talk) 19:01, 19 March 2009 (UTC)

I made the edits. The article doesn't belong to the original author, so anyone who understands the subject can edit it. In this case it's pretty clear what the meaning of that paragraph is: some Romanian words are made up of parts of Latin and Slavic origin, such as devreme, where de is Latin and vreme is Slavic.

The phrase devreme ce doesn't exist. I suppose you meant de vreme ce. — AdiJapan 10:52, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

Let me ask you this: how much of that entire section is compliant with WP:OR, WP:RS and WP:NOT? Dahn (talk) 12:03, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

I can't really tell. I don't know enough about the subject to judge. All I could do was to place a couple of "fact" tags where I thought the statements were strange. (I didn't write the section, if you thought I did.) — AdiJapan 15:26, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

You are of course quite right. I can't believe I messed that up. I am not in any way an expert in the field and indeed not a usual wiki editor. I don't know how much of the information is correct or verifiable. I just wanted to correct what I as a native speaker (living outside Romania since I was a kid) saw as an obvious error. Since I'm new to Wikipedia editing, I didn't want to change the meaning without asking first. Thank you for fixing it!--66.11.89.241 (talk) 15:51, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

The section is too large and there are some tendentious claims there. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.34.230.127 (talk) 13:44, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

Geographic distribution map

 Official and national language    Official but not primary language    National minority language    EU    Romanian diaspora 

Should these be in different colors? poor sighted users might find the second- and third- last one's hard to read. -- 203.171.192.112 (talk) 06:30, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

Error in Italian phrase on this page

The Italian phrase should be "Lei apre sempre la finestra prima di cenare" Please change this! /Jannika —Preceding unsigned comment added by Jannikaojeda (talk • contribs) 22:51, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

Lei is wrong, it's used only in the oral form of italian. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 194.179.120.4 (talk) 14:41, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

Five cases in Romanian?

The articles said: "Romanian has preserved declension, but whereas Latin had six cases, Romanian has five: the nominative, vocative, accusative, genitive, and dative,", I deletted that because is iincorrect and is contradictory with what is stated a few lines below: "Romanian nouns are inflected by gender (feminine, masculine and neuter), number (singular and plural) and case (nominative/accusative, dative/genitive and vocative)." So, Romanian is considered to have 3 case forms, not 5.--DaniloVilicic (talk) 05:40, 9 February 2009 (UTC)

You're right, they're just three. I reinserted and corrected the statement. Just deleting it was not the best solution, because in the context of Romance languages it is highly relevant that Romanian has preserved at least a part of the Latin cases. — AdiJapan 15:47, 9 February 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. I was thinking about that, I just wanted to check the names of the cases in a Romanian grammar, buut the way you wrote is ok.--DaniloVilicic (talk) 18:41, 9 February 2009 (UTC)

Quote: «Romanian nouns are declined by gender (feminine, masculine and neuter), number (singular and plural)…»

Declined by Gender?

declined by gender is linguistically incorrect. Nouns can decline by case and number because they change in case in number. Nouns do not decline by gender. Nouns have gender. E.g. дом [dom] (house) in Russian is always masculine. You can't decline it into feminine. But you can decline it into dative дому [domu] (to house) or change дом into plural дома [dama] (houses). In any case it remains masculine.

Adjectives can decline by gender according to the noun they modify: большой дом [balshoy dom] (big house), большая улица [bolshaya ulitsa] (big street). большой is masculine (as is дом – house), большая is feminine (as is улица – street). —Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.78.89.127 (talk) 16:13, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

Romanian language is an inflationary language that that has three genders for the noun (masculine, feminine, neuter), five cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, vocative) and two numbers (singular and plural). —Preceding unsigned comment added by 89.36.190.155 (talk) 19:50, 8 August 2009 (UTC)

World Map

The world map on this page says me that the EU is a "Romanian-speaking territory"... Could we just change the title of this map? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.2.80.75 (talk) 23:56, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

100,000 speakers in Hungary??

Sorry this seems to be a bit "crazy". I checked the referred site and it tells me that there are approx. 8000 speakers in this country. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.2.211.117 (talk) 00:52, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

Three different types of Romanian?

The following section puzzles me:

Contemporary Romanian with French or Italian loanwords:

• Toate fiinţele umane se nasc libere şi egale în demnitate şi în drepturi. Ele sunt înzestrate cu raţiune şi conştiinţă şi trebuie să se comporte unele faţă de altele în spiritul fraternităţii.

Romanian, excluding French and Italian loanwords, with Slavic loanwords:

• Toate fiinţele omeneşti se nasc slobode şi deopotrivă în destoinicie şi în drepturi. Ele sunt înzestrate cu înţelegere şi cuget şi trebuie să se poarte unele faţă de altele în duh de frăţietate.

Romanian, excluding loanwords:

• Toate fiinţele omeneşti se nasc nesupuse şi asemenea în preţuire şi în drepturi. Ele sunt înzestrate cu înţelegere şi cuget şi se cuvine să se poarte unele faţă de altele după firea frăţiei.

Are we to understand that these are all equally valid and natural sentences in Romanian? I note that the first sentence uses the term "Contemporary Romanian", which suggests that it is more neutral and natural than the other two. Or are they simply three versions cooked up as a kind of academic exercise to show how some words could be substituted by others?

Could someone explain the significance of the three versions a bit better?

Bathrobe (talk) 14:10, 20 October 2009 (UTC)

How big procent of words are of Turkic origin ?

Since the territory blonged to Turkic Cumans for several hundred years it would be an obvious to ask this question.

Quote from Cumans article.

• • Basarab I, son of the Wallachian prince Tihomir of Wallachia obtained independence from Hungary at the beginning of the 14th century. The name Basarab is considered as being of Cuman origin, meaning "Father King".**

Edelward (talk) 11:28, 22 October 2009 (UTC)

Not many, 2-3% at most. Mostly Ottoman terms, i.e borrowed during the Ottoman domination. Dc76\^talk 11:32, 22 October 2009 (UTC)

See that subject partly covered in Lazăr Şăineanu, which incidentally includes a full listing of common nouns supposedly of Pecheneg origin. Dahn (talk) 14:14, 22 October 2009 (UTC)

I have a genuine Romanian friend, besides the fact that google translator is horrible at Romanian to English translations, "is not exist limba moldovenească", she says. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 65.1.84.55 (talk) 05:25, 30 December 2009 (UTC)

The [e] in [era] is not pronunced as [ie]

The letter 'e' at the beginning of some words like in 'era' (from to be) is not generally pronounced with short i, this is only in the Moldovan dialect and it is not generally.

The section with pronunciation is a short section with general rules. Only general rules. No stories, no super long essays of linguistics and original research and one's impressions. Using original research of type "generally pronounced" is not allowed in Wikipedia. If it is "generally pronounced" it means by a majority? Nope. This is not true, as I am Romanian and never learned this rule of pronunciation in school and never heard it on TV or on the street.

Also please keep in mind that in that sections are the rules, not the exceptions that are controversial, because this is not helping anybody. You want to say for a stranger of Romania to better pronounce "este" as "ieste" with short "i" to be understood and if he pronounces "este" with no "i" is not understood?

These polemics and things that are controversial are not part of the encyclopedia. Only if you want to write an essay of linguistic you can mention these findings, but they don't have any value to a normal person, it just confuses. Thank you -- Alomado (talk) 08:02, 1 April 2010 (UTC)

Well, no, it is not original research. Linguistic works on Romanian say that all the forms of a fi that start with orthographic e are in fact pronounced with an initial glide, [je]: ești, este, e, eram, erai, era, erau. This can be easily verified in regular dictionaries, such as DEX 1998, Dicționarul ortografic 2002, DOOM 2005. The same occurs for all pronouns that start with orthographic e: eu, ea, ei, ele. Check the dictionaries. Many other linguistic sources exist on this subject. There is nothing controversial here. That sound does exist.

The fact that the current spelling norms hide that initial glide makes many speakers unaware of it. Sometimes, under the influence of the spelling, schoolchildren pronounce those words without the glide when they read out loud, which makes them sound very unnatural.

I believe you are just relying on your own perception, but if you do have sources that support your view, please mention them here. — AdiJapan 12:21, 1 April 2010 (UTC)

I don't think this e pronunciation in a fi conjugation: eram, erau, era is part of the rules.

I mentioned the controversy around e in erai but the details are not relevant for the general rules. Even if there are sources for the "a fi" pronunciation, this is not a rule, it is an exception.

The vast majority of words starting with e like electricitate, educatie, ecologie, ecumenic, eroare, elaborare, etc do not have this ie pronunciation, so we cannot have a rule that words starting with e are pronounced with ie. And the section there is about rules, not about exceptions. Architengi (talk) 17:22, 1 April 2010 (UTC)

It's a recognized irregularity — and as far as I'm aware, it's the mainstream pronunciation (not just in Moldova) — and it should be documented in the article on that basis. And the current version of the article (reverted back to AdiJapan's recent version) isn't trying to say that the "ie" pronunciation applies to all instances of initial e; read it again and note that it only says this pronunciation is standard for a very limited set of common words. Do you know of any specific group(s) of Romanian speakers who do not pronounce "este", "eu", etc. with initial "ie"? If so, please find a source and document this as an "exception to the exception". Richwales (talk) 18:01, 1 April 2010 (UTC)

Architengi, I think you're missing the wider picture here. In the section "Romanian alphabet", just above the one we're talking about, it is clearly stated that "Today the Romanian alphabet is largely phonemic." That is the rule. Everything else is an exception. As such it is useless to give the regular pronunciation for each and every letter, but much more useful to talk about the exceptions and other peculiarities. This is what the section "Pronunciation" is trying to do. You shouldn't read it out of the context.

As I was saying yesterday, there is absolutely no controversy about the pronunciation of e in words like eram or el. All linguists concerned with the subject confirm that those words are indeed pronounced with an initial [j] glide. I added one more source in the article just for that, although I feel that we place an undue weight on such a minor detail. If you want more on the subject you can also check Fonologia limbii române, by Emanuel Vasiliu, at page 88. I haven't added this source in the article because it would be really too much.

But, as Richwales said, if you do find a reliable source stating otherwise, the paragraph can be reworded accordingly. My bet --- and I am willing to bet a lot on this! --- is that you will not find such a source. — AdiJapan 04:50, 2 April 2010 (UTC)

Correct pronunciation of română

The IPA transcription [roˈmɨnə] (in both the lead paragraph and the infobox) shows stress on the second syllable, but the linked audio sounds to me as if it stresses the first syllable. Which is correct? I assume the audio is more likely to be correct, since it seems less likely that a speaker of Romanian would mispronounce the name of his own language than that an IPA transcription would contain a mistake. But maybe, since I am completely unfamiliar with the language, I'm not correctly detecting the stressed syllable in the audio. Someone who knows, please clarify. Thanks. --Jim10701 (talk) 18:01, 31 December 2009 (UTC)

The IPA transcription is correct, while the audio gives a rather careless pronunciation, which fades out toward the end giving the false impression that the stress occurs earlier (and that the final [ə] is closer and more relaxed) than it should. This is totally okay for native listeners, who can reconstruct the stress internally, but not so much okay for non-natives, who need to hear each sound and each stress distinctly. The audio needs to be replaced. — AdiJapan 04:50, 1 January 2010 (UTC)

I remade the recording. — AdiJapan 17:09, 2 January 2010 (UTC)

It's still not OK as it sounds more like ending with an a than with an [ə]. 80.187.150.76 (talk) 18:44, 14 February 2010 (UTC) Apass

I think I may know why some users are mis-hearing the recording of "română" and thinking there is a stress on the first syllable. An English speaker not familiar with Romanian is likely to misinterpret the pitch contour (↗lim.ba.ro↘mâ.nă) and think the syllable "ro" is stressed because it is on a high pitch. In fact, the common Romanian pitch pattern in a statement or an isolated phrase has the pitch drop on the last stressed syllable — so a Romanian hearing ↗lim.ba.ro↘mâ.nă will instinctively feel that the "mâ" syllable is being stressed (and may be baffled as to why anyone else would think differently). If the pitch rises (or stays high) on the last stressed syllable, and drops after the stress — as is common in North American English — this indicates a question in Romanian (e.g., "Limba română?" = lim.ba.ro↗mâ↘nă or ↗lim.ba.ro.mâ↘nă). A similar pitch pattern exists in Italian, in case anyone here has any familiarity with that language. Richwales (talk) 22:55, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

I recorded it again, hopefully it's better this time. It has a slightly more didactic intonation, stress and rhythm (and therefore somewhat marked, but still within the limits). That means it should be useful for non-natives who need a distinct pronunciation, without sounding unnatural to natives. As for the final vowel, it was just fine; that is the right degree of closing from [a] to [ə]. — AdiJapan 17:34, 10 May 2010 (UTC)

Mișto - etymology

I think the origin of the word "mișto" (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_language#Other_influences )is German "mit Stock"/"ohne Stock" (see http://www.romlit.ro/mito_i_legenda_bastonului ) Căluşaru' (talk) 22:51, 9 August 2010 (UTC)

Actually the source you mention strongly contradicts your opinion and supports the Romani etymology. — AdiJapan 04:55, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

You seem to be right, I was using my horse glasses when reading that article. Well, at least I found a good source to sustain that word's etymology an learned something today. Căluşaru' (talk) 00:15, 5 December 2010 (UTC)

Ea închide totdeauna fereastra înainte de a cina.

What is the purpose of this sample sentence in the article? Why and how was this particular sentence chosen? Do any sources on Romanian (or on any other language) take such sample sentences to illustrate something? If they do, we should use their samples. This one seems to be trying hard to use only Latin-origin words. — AdiJapan 08:15, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

The phrase originated in the Portuguese language article. Since then it was included in many articles about Romance languages. It was not designed secifficaly for this article (Romanian language), so it is very clear it was not designed to "use only Latin-origin words". The simple fact is that up to 90 percent of Romanian words (70% overall, 80% in the spoken language, 90% in the written language) are of Latin origin. (This are rough percentages, but you can look for more accurate studies). --Danutz (talk) 19:25, 10 March 2011 (UTC)

At this moment no article on any Romance language contains that sample, or at least none of the 10-15 articles I checked. Unless it serves a relevant purpose and unless it's somehow verifiable, the sample will be removed. — AdiJapan 03:56, 11 March 2011 (UTC)

Only because you say so? I don't think so. Remember you are not the chief of Wikipedia. Allthoug I'm not very keen on keeping it, I also don't see the purpose of deleting the sample, as it is neither wrong and it does not harm the article. Actually it enriches it. We should also see other opinions. Of course you can do what you want but don't say „the sample will be removed”, say „I will remove the sample” (because this time you are speaking for yourself, not for Wikipedia). However please pay attention to WP:NPOV and Wikipedia:Vandalism. As we are not speaking about „facts, allegations, ideas, and stories” this does not qualiffy as original research. Remember that all material added to articles must be attributable to a reliable published source, even if not actually attributed. And remember that you are just a person, not a representative of Wikipedia. --Danutz (talk) 10:33, 11 March 2011 (UTC)

I know all that, thanks, although you obviously got me wrong. I'm not attempting to be a chief, to speak on behalf of Wikipedia, to push a POV, to vandalize, or anything like that.

You still haven't answered the main question: What is the purpose of that sample in the article? Why is it relevant here? You say it "enriches" the article. Would you care to elaborate? Does it make a specific point? Is that point made in a similar manner in any works about the Romanian language?

Indeed, every piece of information in the article must be attributable. That is, it must be attributed when it is challenged. Well, I have challenged the verifiability of that sample, so if no source can be found in a reasonable amount of time (say a few months), I will remove it or someone else will (for short, it will be removed, with no suggestion of authority; just plain editing by regular contributors).

So the sample has at least two problems: relevance and verifiability.

But I also challenge the quality of the Romanian sentence. A wording like înainte de cinare is utterly unnatural, so unnatural that the phrase simply does not occur on the internet, not even once (by comparison, the English equivalent "before dinner" occurs some 6.7 million times, according to Google). Besides, this sample is somewhat like a "This is a pen" sort of sentence, with almost no imaginable use. Why would someone systematically close the window before dinner? If we want to illustrate a point (which remains to be defined), we should choose one of the innumerable natural wordings that are in actual use in Romanian, not something artificial like this. Even better, we should take the same sample sentence used by linguists to make the same point (if they do).

One more note: please stop assuming that I have any purpose here other than making this a better article. Stick to the topic. — AdiJapan 12:58, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

Well? It's been a month and we still have no sources for that sample.

We should do this the other way around: first delete the unsourced part, and then add it back when & if we have sources. — AdiJapan 10:02, 15 April 2011 (UTC)

Adi, I say revert and RfC the editor if he still pushes it back at this stage. Dahn (talk) 12:00, 15 April 2011 (UTC)

Done. — AdiJapan 17:17, 15 April 2011 (UTC)

Adi and Dahn, don't make a mess. My problem was that Adi unilateraly and repetedly removed the expression (înainte de cinare), without any source, just because he "felt" is not right. Finally I put a source in the article, but from that point on, that had nothing to do with keeping the whole comparision chart in the article.--Danutz (talk) 14:48, 18 April 2011 (UTC)

Romanian the only romance language with a slavic yat vowel?

I've noticed the way Romanian pronounces the diphthong ea not as e-a but ea sort of like English "yeah" or "yah" which the vowel corresponds to the Old Church Slavonic yat vowel Ѣ. And Romanian had this vowel for the "ea" diphthong when the language was written in the Cyrillic alphabet. Any thoughts on this? Hypothetical BS (talk) 07:13, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

In standard Romanian, the diphthong ea is pronounced [ja] in the word ea "she", and arguably after consonants [k] and [g]. But otherwise the diphthong ea is really a short semivocalic [e] followed by a full vocalic [a]. In dialects (in particular those spoken in Moldavia and Transylvania), diphthongs ea and ia tend to get confused, and in some areas they become identical.

For example, in this text from around 1850 written with the Romanian Cyrillic alphabet, you can see that both Ѣ and Ѧ are used, according to pronunciation.

By the way, the "vowel" Ѣ was not a vowel in Romanian, but a diphthong. — AdiJapan 15:54, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

Isn't Romanian also the only Romance language that has had an official Cyrillic orthography? — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 19:21, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

It is.

I'm not sure what you meant by "also". The answer to the question in the title is neither yes, nor no, because it is a bit of a non-sense, or maybe I just didn't understand it. Yat is not a vowel, and the diphthong [e̯a] in Romanian is not of Slavic origin, but appeared as a solution to the [e.a] hiatus or by opening of the vowel [e] in certain stressed positions. — AdiJapan 02:46, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

I was addressing the part of the question regarding use of <Ѣ> in Romanian Cyrillic. It was, but not because of any genetic relationship to the yat vowel of slavic languages. The reflex of yat differs widely amongst the different Slavic languages, so this is more a series of coincidences than anything else. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 02:54, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

My guess was that the question pertains primarily to phonetics, because as far as the use of the Cyrillic alphabet goes, Romanian is certainly the only Romance language that used any of the Cyrillic letters, so any such question is by definition not interesting. That's why I tried to focus on the phonetic part. But then again, that part was relying on a false statement.

And if the question is about phonetics, then the answer is no. There are other Romance languages that have similar sounds. French has [ja] in piano, Italian has it in chiaro, etc. — AdiJapan 03:53, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

On an sort of off topic note, my opinion is that romanian written in cyrillic looked much more beautiful and unique and would have been the more distinct and unique of the romance languages in europe. It seems that romanian is, or was, by and large a slavo-romance language with a heavy dose slavic vocabulary, morphology and phonology, yet the syntax is predominantly romance. The language could have been just like the Maltese language, which is the only semitic language written in the latin alphabet; which has a heavy dose of italian/sicilian influence but the syntax is basically arabic.Hypothetical BS (talk) 08:06, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

I don't know where you're going with this but Romanian is a Romance language. not Slavo-Romance.

Each Romance language has a stratum, sub-stratum and ad-stratum. The stratum for every Romance language is Latin. The sub-stratum was the language of the indigenous population that was Romanized (Iberic, Lusitan, Gaulish, Dacian and so forth).

The ad-stratum was a language that influenced in a certain amount a particular language. For Western Romance languages that ad-stratum was Germanic and for Romanian (Eastern-Romance) it was Slavic.

So, Romanian is a Romance language which has a Latin-based grammar and vocabulary (over 80% of Latin origin - directly, or indirectly through other Romance languages)

There are some Slavic words in Romanian, which are mainly used in Church and are rarely used in daily speech.

Romanian uses the Latin script. But even if it used, at some point, the Cyrillic alphabet, that doesn't make it a Slavo-Romance language.

Mongolian uses Cyrillic, so does Kazakh - this doesn't make them Slavic languages.

Persian uses Arabic script - that doesn't make it a Semitic language!

What I'm trying to say is that I hate when people call our language Slavo-Romance when it's clearly a Romance language and Slavic is just an ad-stratum to the language, which doesn't affect it's Romance structure.

Scooter20 (talk) 09:19, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

Get over yourself. Like I said that was just my opinion. And reread what I wrote because not even half of your rant (I could almost hear Deşteaptă-te, Române! playing in the background), had anything to do of what I wrote. And by the way, leave the nationalism to professionals like the Nazis and Communists :)Hypothetical BS (talk) 10:04, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

There's a saying in Romanian: "Romania is a Latin island in a Slavic Sea".

Which ignores Hungary right next door. :-) HammerFilmFan (talk) 12:59, 3 August 2011 (UTC) HammerFilmFan

Romanian language is a Romance language which managed to withstand Slavic influence and keep it's Latin heritage intact.

And Romanian is in no way like Maltese! Romanian is a Romance language which has a Latin-based grammar, its vocabulary is composed in a great majority of Latin words and it used the Latin alphabet.

Romanian language used Cyrillic in the past because it was force do so by the Russian / Slavic influence. But using a different alphabet even for a certain amount of time does not change the classification of a language like I exemplified above with Mongolian, Kazakh and Persian.

As a matter of fact English is a hybrid language not Romanian! English has a typical Germanic grammar but has a lot of Latin, French / Norman and Greek loan words which added together surpass the Germanic words.

So, bottom line, Romanian is a Romance language, with a Latin-based grammar, a vast majority of Latin words in its vocabulary and which uses the Latin script. Like I said before Slavic is just and ad-stratum to Romanian which by definition didn't alter it's core structure but added some loan words in the vocabulary. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Scooter20 (talk • contribs) 11:18, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

• Scooter, is this conversation really worth it? You're now listing some skewed, entrenched and quite tiresome clichés about the origin and structure of Romanian: the "rock-beats-scissors" assessment of Slavic vocabulary being inferior to Latin grammar (which originated with a certain 19th century linguist, and was contested by other Romanian linguists from the moment it was stated), the "Latin island etc." (which is not "a saying", it's a slogan, and very few people have ever used it uncritically) etc. And you're doing that not because of a benefit to the article, but because an editor mentioned in passing a personal preference; the rest is a straw man you raised in his/her honor, for absolutely no constructive purpose whatsoever. The talk page is not a forum (and, btwe, it's also not a FAQ), and this debate has nothing to do with the article, and very little to do with the subject. Dahn (talk) 11:34, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

You're right, Dahn! I was just bugged by the fact that he called Romanian a Slavo-Romance language.

Scooter20 (talk) 12:52, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

Dubious

I find the Balkan sprachbund paragraph very wrong. It first starts saying "While most of Romanian grammar and morphology are based on Latin, there are some features that are shared only with other languages of the Balkans and not found in other Romance languages." Then it says "The shared features include a suffixed definite article, the syncretism of genitive and dative case and the formation of the future and perfect." However the perfect is formed in Romanian exactly like in the other Romance languages (even including two forms of perfect, composed and simple, the latter not being present in other Balkan languages). The situation of the future (va+infintive) is similar. --Danutz (talk) 13:59, 14 March 2011 (UTC)

The comment regarding the future is, I believe, referring to the forms of the future based on the subjunctive (o să + subjunctive / am să + subjunctive). Richwales (talk · contribs) 16:30, 3 August 2011 (UTC)

I replaced the "perfect" part (which appears unclear) with the replacement of infinitive with subjunctive (Vreau să scriu [subjunctive] vs. Voglio scrivere [infinitive]) bogdan (talk) 20:49, 3 August 2011 (UTC)

Romanian-specific words

QUOTE About 300 words found only in Romanian (in all dialects) or with a cognate in the Albanian language may be inherited from Dacian, many of them being related to pastoral life (for example: balaur "dragon", brânză "cheese", mal "shore"). UNQUOTE

"Brynza" (брынза) is a Russian name for a certain type of cheese. So this word is not uniquely Romanian. Offensive ru (talk) 19:49, 16 March 2008 (UTC)

Is that a Slavic ward or is it loaned from another language? It's possible that Romanian linguists have made some mistakes about some words, if that's the case we need to find a reference from other linguists. -- AdrianTM (talk) 01:23, 17 March 2008 (UTC)

No. Actually, this particular word has been borrowed in many languages from Romanian. bogdan (talk) 01:27, 17 March 2008 (UTC)

Hmm. Any relation to Sbrinz, a Swiss cheese claimed to be the oldest European cheese? -- megA (talk) 19:34, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

I haven't checked the etymology of Sbrinz. If there is a shared etymon there with Romanian word, then both the Romanian word and the Swiss term may derive from a common IE root, which would be the etymon. Remember that with the Romanian substratum words, most of them aside from maybe a few should trace back to Proto-Indo-European roots. In the case of brânză there are several PIE/IE roots that interest me, one of them is IE *brentos-, meaning "herdsman", see Julius Pokorny's PIE database, [2]. There is also IE bhrendh-, "to swell, sprout", and the connection to brânză would be as in the case of Greek tyros (cheese) deriving from a root meaning "to swell", referring to milk curdling and bulging. There is also the article Bryndza with some more info. I haven't yet found a source that gives the established etymology of brânză, but I wouldn't be surprised if its one of the roots I mentioned. 76.208.178.193 (talk) 20:34, 8 August 2011 (UTC)

Thr Sbrinz article mentions a Lombard word sbrinzo. 76.208.178.193 (talk) 20:39, 8 August 2011 (UTC)

Dacian and Balto-Slavic

I took out this statement:

Dacian was probably close to the neighbouring Balto-Slavic branches of Indo-European.

Not enough support for this statement and the article on Dacian itself makes no mention of it. Besides, how can a language be close to two language groups that really have only a few similarities to each other and are rather controversially placed together? Kasnie 07:46, 3 December 2007 (UTC)

Well, Balto-Slavic isn't really controversial among linguists, it's only controversial among Baltic nationalists. Baltic and Slavic have far too much in common for them to be anything but descendants of a common post-Indo-European ancestor. But I agree the claim that Dacian (about which next to nothing is known) is close to Balto-Slavic is not sufficiently well sourced to be included at this point. —Angr ^{If you've written a quality article...} 16:10, 3 December 2007 (UTC)

Well, Baltic, Slavic and Albanian are all satem IE language branches, and Baltic and Albanian have so many close cognates, even some peculiar cognates (for example: Albanian mal "mountain", and Latvian mala "river bank, shore") not found in most other IE languages. It is not known whether Dacian was "closer" to Baltic than to Albanian, my guess is that Dacian and Thracian were a very distinct IE branch (I don't mean to say here that Dacian/Thracian and Albanian were not from a common branch, nor do I mean to say that Dacian/Thracian was far from Baltic), not too far from Albanian and Baltic, and Albanian may be a descendant of a Daco-Moesian variant or if not, Albanian and Daco-Thracian may be from a close common ancestor. Southern Thracian shows affinities with Greek also, not merely loans from Greek. 76.208.169.49 (talk) 22:47, 12 August 2011 (UTC)

Improvements to the Romanian language article

Hi, I'm making some changes to this article. The section on the Romanian substratum had to be updated so I'm in the process of doing that. Prior to my new edits, part of the section read too much as if, "oh, those substratum words are Albanian loanwords"---I want it to be clear in the Dacian language section of this article that:

1)the proposed substratum words that can be explained as later loans from Albanian comprise one category, and there are not many in this category, and I expect that all of those misidentified etymologies date back to older linguistic references.

2)most of the proposed substratum words cannot be explained as later loans from Albanian. They are in a different category. In this category, the words would have to have come from an early form of a language that later came to be known as Albanian, or from a variant no-longer-extant dialect of early Albanian, or from an early language that had branched off from a common ancestor that it shared with Albanian; then there are some words that could have come from an unidentified language that had many words in common with early Albanian: for example, even the far-away-from-Albania Baltic languages have some peculiar words in common with Albanian: Latvian mala, meaning "river bank", Lithuanian mazulis and mazas meaning "small" which the famous Russian linguist Vladimir Orel [3] (he is a current specialist in the fields of Balto-Slavic and Albanian language studies) and other linguists (I recall seeing that cognate given in other authoritative linguistic sources also, such as Bardhyl Demiraj's work) link to Albanian modhullë (from an earlier mozu-, modzu-) and modhë (from an earlier moz-, modze-), with the idea that maz-, moz- meant "something small", a root spread among the Balts, Albanians/Dacians/Thracians/Illyrians perhaps. Note that the Romanian mazăre is one of those proposed substratum words that cannot be explained as a later loan from Albanian and note that it has the form maz-, reminiscent of the Lithuanian mazulis. The Baltic links are very relevant also because the Dacian and Thracian languages are known to have many close cognates among the Baltic languages, as well as having many Albanian cognates and Slavic cognates.

3)many of the proposed Romanian substratum words do not have any close Albanian parallels or cognates.

4) So excluding the few later loans misidentified as substrate words, explaining point 2) and point 3) mostly comes to this: are any of the words Dacian in origin? are they rather Thracian in origin? Or Illyrian in origin? Or some other language?(<the "some other language" argument, e.g., not from Dacian, Thracian, or Illyrian, will be discussed later)

5) Dacian/Moesian was spoken in what is now Northern Bulgaria and North Eastern Serbia, not just in Dacia.

6) Dacian according to most linguistic authorities was most likely a Northern branch of Thracian.

7) Dacian, Thracian, and Illyrian may have been three kindred languages on the same IE branch, see Thraco-Illyrian. The Thraco-Illyrian hypothesis can kind of be described as tenuous, but the Daco-Thracian grouping has a lot going for it, including contemporary Roman and Greek statements. The Daco-Thracian/Thraco-Dacian grouping has more adherents than dissidents among the experts.

8) The Albanian language by modern linguistic consensus must have developed from an Indo-European Paleo-Balkan language, you can see the list of identified Indo-European Paleo-Balkan languages there. The most mentioned candidates are Dacian, Moesian (akin to Dacian), Thracian, or Illyrian. There is a big debate among scientists and historians and a heated debate (especially among Albanians, Greeks, and South Slavs) whether the Albanians migrated from the northern (Moesia, Dacia) or eastern Balkans (Thrace) or whether they are native to Albania and northern Greece and parts of Macedonia and Kosovo.

9) Substrate words such as mazăre give linguists valuable clues as to how different the source language of mazăre must have been from current Albanian dialects and from Old Albanian.

10) I know that a lot of great work has been done in many fields coming together, and I'll describe some more of that and I will further update that section of the Romanian language article later.

More to come. I know that we have the article Eastern Romance substratum and we have List of Romanian words of possible Dacian origin, however we needed a much better summary in the Romanian language article, so I'm working on that. I will post more here to discuss the needed changes. 76.208.178.193 (talk) 18:29, 7 August 2011 (UTC)

And yes I know that there were some speakers of Thracian in northern Greece and there were Thracian incursions and settlements of some sort in Albania, however those areas (northern Greece and Albania) were not in any way predominantly Thracian. Albania was by far mostly Illyrian, while in Northern Greece there were Greeks, ancient Macedonians, Paionians (unclear whether they were Illyric, Thracian, or a different group perhaps related to Phrygians), Illyrians, and some Thracians. 76.208.178.193 (talk) 18:58, 7 August 2011 (UTC)

I have a question: the idea that a significant portion of Proto-Romanian ethnogenesis and language genesis occured in Northern Greece, can we say that nowadays that idea is a fringe hypothesis, and it is given undue weight in the Romanian language article? I know that some material in Wikipedia is passed down from the early days of Wiki (2001 to 2005) when outdated ideas were often placed prominently in articles (and that still happens often) and the material often stayed there in the article for awhile---which may be the case here. 76.208.178.193 (talk) 19:13, 7 August 2011 (UTC)

Anyway, mentioning all that is not for this article, I think the better approach is to summarize it in a paragraph and a few sentences as I just did. 76.208.170.129 (talk) 07:41, 24 August 2011 (UTC)

You can only treat the immigration hypothesis as fringe if you have sources to do so. I'd recommend you to take this issue to Origin of Romanians, however. The article should not take any view for granted, as it currently does, until such sources are provided. I am not aware of any consensus on the issue, and indeed Stefan Schumacher, an expert on Old Albanian, finds it hard to believe that a Romance language formed in Dacia could have survived through the entire early Middle Ages north of the Danube, despite all the repeated invasions of barbarian peoples and the strong pressure exerted by Slavicisation in the entire region. However, the entire question of an origin north or south of the Danube is complicated by the fact that the Vlach mountain pastoralists seem to have always been highly mobile and travelled long distances (see transhumance), which may actually make the issue moot: the Romanian homeland might be a large area comprising territory on both sides of the Danube. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 20:36, 10 September 2011 (UTC)

Thanks to Dbachmann for fixing the neutrality issue and including information on the actual, attested history of the language. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 17:52, 11 September 2011 (UTC)

Florian, please adjust your attention span: Dbachmann did not touch the section that I edited in any of his edits: I can link all his edits but for now I will just link his last edit to this article: [4] . And pay attention again: I am asking for more recent sources particuarly for the *Northern Greece* claim, not for the claims that proto-Romanian ethnogenesis occured in middle and northern Albania or Serbia or Moesia. I left the Albanian and Serbian scenarios there in the article, but I removed Northern Greece pending recent sources being brought and cited, better yet quoted on the talk page also. Besides that Florian, you seem like a fine editor and I agree, as you said, that "the Romanian homeland might be a large area comprising territory on both sides of the Danube". 76.208.183.45 (talk) 19:51, 28 September 2011 (UTC)

Also please detail whether Northern Greece (Northern Epirus? Macedonia? Northern Thessaly included? Greek Thrace?) is considered a major area of proto-Romanian ethnogenesis or merely the southernmost "spillage" of a nucleus in what is now Albania and Serbia, Kosovo, Republic of Macedonia etc.; please discuss or link the evidence that they consider the strongest for Northern Grrece, please discuss or link the southernmost limits of the hypothetical Greek proto-Romanian area. 76.208.183.45 (talk) 03:23, 29 September 2011 (UTC)

AFAIK most linguists hold mazăre is either a) a borrowing into Romanian from Proto-Albanian b) or a substratum word in Romanian (coming from PA, i.e. a borrowing from PA into Balkan Latin; Orel has the 7th century as terminus ante quem for the end of PA, and also two stages of it: Early PA - before the contact with Latin and Late PA - after the contact with Latin, but before the contact with Slavic; n.b. for many linguists the history of Romanian, as a distinct Romance language, starts after the first contacts with Slavic, i.e. after 7th century). Let's also note that Orel posits the EPA etymon *mādzula. An Albanian modh- can't be borrowed in Romanian as ma(d)z-, and also we have the Romanian rhotacism, evidence against an Old Albanian or Albanian borrowing into Romanian. Leaving the Albanian word aside, some linguists assumed for mazăre the etymon *ma(d)zel-, thus the difference between PA and Romanian substratum is not that significant, actually it is often considered they are one and the same language, perhaps two close dialects. Even Stefan Schumacher argues for such "substratum" words as borrowings from PA into Balkan Latin (he disagrees with the "substratum" concept, but that's a different discussion). Long story short, many if not most of these Albanian-Romanian words seem to have entered Romanian before the contacts with Slavic. Substratum or not, most linguists agree with this chronology. It's a fringe position to reject the obvious Albanian-Romanian connection and to invoke Baltic cognates. Daizus (talk) 20:18, 11 September 2011 (UTC)

It would be a fringe position to reject the obvious Albanian-Romanian connection in the case of Romanian mazăre and Albanian modhull, modhullë, modhë and early proto-Albanian *madzula. However I am clearly not rejecting the Albanian cognate in the article or on this talk page, nor did I say anywhere that the Romanian word is overall closer to the proposed Baltic cognate: it's not, because the Baltic cognates that I know of are both adjectives (mažulis, mažas meaning "small"), while the Romanian and Albanian words are nouns, and the theory is that these nouns denoted "something small", and the Baltic words are close cognates to the Romanian and Albanian forms. So no fringe theory there, because Albanian and Baltic have so many close cognates, and there are other examples of close Baltic cognates for Romanian substratum words, and in at least one case, the Baltic cognate does appear to be closer to the Romanian and Dacian example: Romanian mal, "shore, bank"; Dacia Malvensis for Dacia Ripensis (malva-, Dacian for "shore", cf. Latin ripa, "shore", Dacia ripensis); Latvian mala "shore". Daizus, I would rather see you editing here at Wiki often because you are needed, however your constant removal of almost all Baltic cognates from Dacian and Dacian-related articles is not representative of Romanians or Romanian linguists. Georgiev, Duridanov et al. were wrong about some of their proposed Baltic cognates given for Dacian and Thracian, but I see no evidence that they were wrong about most of them. To use a word that you used yourself, your rejection of most (in fact, nearly all) of the proposed Baltic cognates given for Dacian and Thracian would be a fringe view that you are pushing. I will come back to the Romanian language article and to other related articles, and I will see to it that proposed Baltic cognates for Romanian substratum words are mentioned when they should be mentioned. Baltic and Albanian have many, many close cognates, so many or most of the Baltic cognates do not conflict with the theory that Dacian was very close to proto-Albanian. 76.208.183.45 (talk) 19:51, 28 September 2011 (UTC)

The recent Baltomania present in some linguistic articles concerning SE Europe is usually oscilating between fringe POVs and original research, and that's the reason I keep removing it or tagging it. There's nothing unusual in rejecting these presumed Baltic cognates, you can check any history or dictionary of the Romanian language and you'll find most of them not there. Some of your suggestions were actually criticized and rejected, e.g. Romanian mal (Old Romanian malu with l between vowels) cannot evolve from an earlier *mal-.

As for mazăre, your source does not claim this Romanian word that has a close Lithuanian cognate, it does not claim that for the Albanian word, but for a Proto-Albanian one. "Closeness" is not transitive and original research is not acceptable, no matter how much you believe in these "close cognates". Daizus (talk) 12:16, 29 September 2011 (UTC)

but Romanian mal < Old Romanian *mallu would fit the phonetical rules.

there's a parallel in the Romanian word for horse: Romanian cal < Old Romanian *callu (cf. Albanian kalë, borrowed from Balkan Latin) < Balkan Latin *callus < Vulgar Latin caballus bogdan (talk) 13:18, 29 September 2011 (UTC)

The Old Romanian word was certainly *malu (not sure if attested), and indeed, a *mall- word in an ancient language is a possible etymon. But not a Dacian *malva (as suggested above, with a Latvian cognate - mala means "edge", so maybe it's only a formal resemblance) Daizus (talk) 21:43, 29 September 2011 (UTC)

Oh, and the Vulgar Latin word for "horse" was *caballu. Daizus (talk) 21:57, 29 September 2011 (UTC)

Daizus, can you link a diff where I stated that Romanian mal evolved from Dacian malva? A diff in a Wiki article or on a Wiki article talk page? For now, I called the Dacian forms cognates or possible cognates (depending on how sound the identification of Malvensis and Ripensis is). Furthermore, I did post above: Dacian malva-, however I only did that for expediency on this talk page. The Dacian form may have been malwa-, malua- (Dacia Maluensis, the letter V in Latin was sometimes used like that for the letter U), mallua-, mallva-, in fact besides the toponym Malva, we have no evidence that the "a" was there at the end of the Dacian word for "shore, bank", because that toponym Malva is a toponym and may have a different type of ending from the actual word. We don't know the actual form of this apparent Dacian word for "shore, bank", and there may have been variants across Dacia and Moesia. 76.208.187.20 (talk) 22:06, 29 September 2011 (UTC)

The ending is irrelevant, the missing gemination is. Can you provide evidence and bibliography for your claim that Romanian mal = "shore" is a close cognate to Latvian mala = "edge, margin, rim" (in your words: "the Baltic cognate does appear to be closer to the Romanian and Dacian example")? Daizus (talk) 22:23, 29 September 2011 (UTC)

Yes, I had already done so at List of reconstructed Dacian words, I placed the exact page in the online version of Bardhyl Demiraj's work, which I'll link here later. The Latvian cognate mala along with the meaning "river bank", I took that meaning and that cognate directly from Bardhyl Demiraj's Albanian Inherited Lexicon where he lists it as a cognate to the Albanian word, and he also lists the Romanian word. You can check Demiraj's work online and you can see that he gives the meaning "river bank" for the Latvian word, so if that is an error, that goes back to Demiraj. Google search turns up the meaning "edge", but Demiraj had better sources than just google search. 76.208.187.20 (talk) 22:26, 29 September 2011 (UTC)

List of reconstructed Dacian words is an article with massive original research (see talk page), created by an editor some time ago, mainly to push his own view that Dacian is a Baltic language (or at least a language very closely related to the Baltic group). The indo-european.nl link does not work, however it's not about Google, but about Latvian dictionaries, grammars and other such books and resources: [5] [6] [7] Daizus (talk) 22:46, 29 September 2011 (UTC)

Well I apologize for my comment about Google Search which can imply that I was saying that you did a Google search and found only the meanings "edge, rim, margin", as I found on a quick Google search. The meaning "river bank" is there in Demiraj's work as published at indo-euopean.nl . Yes that site is often "unavailable". From my experience, you can keep trying that, and within 10 tries you often are able to view the database. Often enough it works on the first or second try. In that article, List of reconstructed Dacian words, I had mentioned the exact page online that you need to check. See also the talk page of that article where I made a direct, unaltered copy-paste of the content of that entry. However don't rely on my copy-paste, after some tries you should be able to view the database. It is worth it for the information there in general, not just the Albanian mal (mountain) entry. Now, whether further investigation will determine that that Latvian word mala is not a cognate, that's possible, but at this stage it is a proposed cognate in the literature, including Demiraj and others. 76.208.187.20 (talk) 23:02, 29 September 2011 (UTC)

On that talk page, Demiraj only lists them as cognates, not close cognates. Who else suggested it? And as long as Latvian mala = "river bank" is not attested in dictionaries, it should be either tagged as dubious, or removed (as fringe) if Demiraj is the only supporter of this view. Daizus (talk) 23:20, 29 September 2011 (UTC)

I have studied these topics on and off over the past several years, or else I would be able to name more references. But I can also name Vladimir Georgiev, 1981, pg 126 (I don't remember the name of the work). This is according to User:Boldwin, who placed that as a reference for a "Lettish word" being a cognate for the Romanian, Dacian, and I suppose Albanian forms. However, you would have to check Georgiev to see what meanings he lists for the Lettish word. I recall more references for the Latvian cognate and I'm sure there are, however I'm not sure about the meanings that Demiraj attributes, since at the moment I can only name Demiraj as certainly giving those meanings. 76.208.187.20 (talk) 23:30, 29 September 2011 (UTC)

This is what I copy-pasted from Demiraj onto that talk page, unaltered:

Albanian form: mal [m] (tg)

Meaning: mountain, rock-formation, mountain-wood

Proto-Albanian: mall-

Other Alb. forms: maje¨ / maje [f] `peak, summit, top, tip, brim, elevated place' {2}

Page in Demiraj AE: 254

IE reconstruction: molH-(i-)

Meaning of the IE root: elevated, raised place

Certainty: ? {1}

Page in Pokorny: 722

Other IE cognates: Rom. mal `shore, side (of the river)'; Latv. mala `shore, side (of the river)'

Notes: {1} Possibly, a non-IE word. {2} < PAlb. *maliiƒ (< *m(o)lH-ieh2).

So Demiraj mentions "shore, side (of the river)" for Latvian mala: all of that is from Demiraj exactly, like that, "shore, side (of the river)" with the parentheses etc. Boldwin quoting Georgiev mentions, "bank, boundary". By the way, see also what language(s) did Georgiev and Demiraj use for their publications: French, Bulgarian, Albanian, etc. 76.208.187.20 (talk) 23:40, 29 September 2011 (UTC)

Also, I will check Pokorny's Worterbuch page 722 (book version, the online versions are arranged diffferently but usually note the original page numbers), as mentioned by Demiraj. 76.208.187.20 (talk) 00:05, 30 September 2011 (UTC)

It's about Georgiev's Introduction to the history of the Indo-European languages (1981). He assumes a Dacian word mal- = "bank, coast", preserved in Romanian (same) and Albanian ( = "mountain") which corresponds to the Lettish mala = "bank, boundary". However this view is fringe in a history of Romanian language (see above, ancient mal- cannot evolve to modern Romanian mal; see also Demiraj above assuming a Proto-Albanian mall-). The Latvian word entry is still unacceptable without dictionary support. It may well be that Georgiev stretched the meaning from "boundary" to "bank", and Demiraj further more to "river bank". Daizus (talk) 06:18, 30 September 2011 (UTC)

Phonemes and comma

I have heard Romanians speak, and <ea> is in fact pronounced /æ/, not /ea/. It may have been that way in the past, but in that case through the course of linguistic evolution they were conjoined into a single sound.

Also, Wikipedia uses a cedilla under t and s instead of a comma, which is highly hypocritical due to how in the articles on Romanian phonology it is stated that the comma is correct. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.80.27.186 (talk • contribs)

Do you have a source for the [æ] pronunciation? — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 02:59, 5 January 2011 (UTC)

/ea/ is a diphthong, made up of two clearly distinct vowel sounds: a short [e] and a full [a] (slightly frontalized, according to sound analyses). Etymologically, this diphthong used to be a monophthong; it separated from /e/ in a certain phonetic context (stress and next vowel). Similar phenomena occurred with a change from /o/ to /oa/. To my knowledge there is no source claiming that /ea/ has become again a monophthong. As a native speaker I can assure you that I do actually pronounce it as a diphthong.

The correct diacritic sign for ș and ț is in fact the comma, but Wikipedia still uses the cedilla because there are much fewer displaying problems with it. On the Romanian Wikipedia we have switched recently to comma in all pages, but we added a piece of software that automatically sends cedilla versions of the text to all visitors who have older OS's and browsers. This has not been implemented on the English Wikipedia, so it's safer to stick with cedillas for a while. — AdiJapan 08:11, 5 January 2011 (UTC)

I agree with the two here who said that <ea> is pronounced /æ/. Of course, simply hearing Romanians talk is not a proper source. The only sources that could really be given here are online videos or recordings of Romanians talking with transcripts available. I will do my best to provide some.--UkrainianAmerican (talk) 13:07, 7 February 2012 (UTC)

You won't find any such sources, simply because the statement is obviously not true. To English native speakers' ears, <ea> might sound like [æ], but in fact that would be just a coarse approximation. For your consolation, to untrained Romanian ears the English words peek and pick sound identical. — AdiJapan 13:44, 7 February 2012 (UTC)

Hungarian influences?

Bogdangiusca, do you think you could provide some more detail regarding this change? I'm particularly concerned because your deletion of material included the deletion of a source — if it's a poor-quality source, that may be OK, but is there a better source to use in its place? As things stand right now, I fear someone is likely to come along and revert "removal of sourced material" or some such, and I think we'd all prefer to avoid that sort of altercation. — Richwales 05:56, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

For the ones who have any doubts

In Romania, the official language is Romanian.

http://www.cdep.ro/pls/dic/site.page?den=act2_2&par1=1#t1c0s0a1 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.126.34.17 (talk) 06:20, 18 November 2013 (UTC)

Proposed merge with List of countries where Romanian is an official language

List of countries where Romanian is an official language contains three very short tables, including a two-element list matching its title. It also duplicates information already found in Romanian language. QVVERTYVS (hm?) 09:34, 12 January 2014 (UTC)

It is a list, and not an article so it is different in content than this article. Compare similar List of countries where Russian is an official language and List of countries where German is an official language. Both contain "very short tables" and both contain dependent entities and organisations listed as well. I think myself that it is useful to have a place where all these places (which declare Romanian as an official language) are listed, especially because the list is ever-changing. We could argue the title of these lists, but not their relevance. --Danutz (talk) 10:42, 12 January 2014 (UTC)

Maybe rename it to legal status of Romanian then, and similarly for the other articles? QVVERTYVS (hm?) 12:24, 12 January 2014 (UTC)

That is a good suggestion. A good idea would be then to also merge it with the section on the official status of Romanian in this article and move it all to that article, and keep a shorter description in this article. That should also apply to the other languages. I'll see if I can propose this to the Village pump, to make all changes consistently and not create any editing wars.--Danutz (talk) 16:09, 12 January 2014 (UTC)

In any case, merger proposal withdrawn. Any news on the proposed renaming? QVVERTYVS (hm?) 10:19, 3 February 2014 (UTC)

Romanian language should not be merged with any article. Afro-Eurasian (talk) 01:07, 4 February 2014 (UTC)

90%

Pray where do you get these numbers? Ninety percent Latin words? I don't think the Vatican can lay that claim. --VKokielov (talk) 20:58, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

It is a contradiction with what is written few lines below, where you read that 75-80% of words can be traced to Latin and also it is provided an explanation. Bogdanno (talk) 21:15, 24 June 2008 (UTC)

I agree. This makes absolutely no sense. I think it should be deleted. Are these figures referenced? Gug 01 Gug01 (talk) 01:19, 4 November 2014 (UTC)Gug 01

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New studies

Hi guys, I am wondering if this source is considered valid. If it is, the article would need an extensive rewrite. I do not know what to make of this source. Gug01 (talk) 00:40, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

You must be joking. An online chat among anonymous people is about as far as you can get from a reliable source. See the guideline: Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources. Also see this article: Protochronism. — AdiJapan 04:12, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

That's little more than a blog for a bunch of nutjobs - excuse me - WP:FRINGE. There are several commentators on the forum who are linguists that have shot it down as pure rubbish. HammerFilmFan (talk) 04:40, 5 June 2016 (UTC)

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Contacts with other languages / Slavic languages

The section on Slavic languages is probably too big and should be summarised here and moved to its own article. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Midnight Madness (talk • contribs) 21:17, 31 January 2009 (UTC)

The article says there’s a difference to the situation on the Germanic lines but I see no clear expectation why, could this be clarified? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.72.186.51 (talk) 20:12, 26 December 2017 (UTC)

Early history section, quotations

Many of the quotations in the Early history section are in Romanian. Most of them were probably not originally written in Romanian, since they are taken from the works of Croatian, Polish, Italian, Saxon etc. authors. I think that this is somewhat misleading. 81.175.244.139 (talk) 11:50, 15 March 2016 (UTC)

That a work by an Italian on the Romanian language could be translated into Romanian FOR a Romanian-speaking audience about their native language is not only logical, but expected, anon IP. 50.111.62.5 (talk) 10:09, 9 December 2017 (UTC)

See for example the statement

"the Polish chronicler Stanislaw Orzechowski (Orichovius) notes in 1554 that în limba lor "walachii" se numesc "romini" (In their language the Wallachians call themselves Romini)."

with reference

" "qui eorum lingua Romini ab Romanis, nostra Walachi, ab Italis appellantur" St. Orichovius, Annales polonici ab excessu Sigismundi, in I. Dlugossus, Historiae polonicae libri XII, col 1555" .

The reference makes it clear that there is a Latin source, while the article text with the modern Romanian translations appears as if the Romanian text is the source. This is misleading or even incorrect. In case of this example the modern Romanian translation could be replaced by the Latin source or be removed.

Even statements with alleged Romanian sources like

"In Palia de la Orăștie (1582) stands written «.[...] că văzum cum toate limbile au și înfluresc [etc.]" and in Letopisețul Țării Moldovei written by the Moldavian chronicler Grigore Ureche we can read: «În Țara Ardialului [etc.]» ("In Transylvania there live not solely Hungarians or Saxons, but overwhelmingly many Romanians everywhere around.")."

might be misleading or incorrect as it could be a modern Romanian translation and not the real text. -Darumeis (talk) 07:35, 10 January 2018 (UTC)

Prehistory section

The "Prehistory" section presents the Daco-Roman continuity theory as the only widely accepted scholarly view about the origin of the Romanian language, although this is not the case (for further info I refer to the academic works cited in the Origin of the Romanians). Furthermore, the section claims that the military terms of the inherited Latin vocabulary of the Romanian language could only be preserved in Dacia Traiana because 2 legions stationed in this province to the north of the Danube. However, in the lands to the south of the Danube (for instance in Illyricum) there were more legions and the same territories were under Roman rule for 600 years (while the Romans abandoned Dacia Traiana after 180 years). Furthermore, certain military terms were most probably not directly inherited from the Latin language, but were (re-)borrowed from the Albanian language most probably in Illyricum /for instance, Romanian sat ("village") < Albanian fshat("village") < Latin fossātum ("ditch"), (I refer to works cited in the article History of Romanian/. Borsoka (talk) 17:47, 14 May 2018 (UTC)

Likewise, when the user Cristian Mihail added to this section his own source, his addition seemed very hard to be interpreted and commensurated with anything he would like to suggest or see, moreover the opposite could be concluded....he states the the so-called "Roslerian-theory" is challenged/annihilated because of his explanation...

1st - He states the similar changing of the RO/ALB & RO/LAT "l" interwovels is followed with the LATER Slavic stratum where this change is not present

2nd - After this sentence, as the conclusion of it he states this proves that the RO-ALB common words is a proceed of a LATTER sratum in the Balkan region, and this would support the continuity of Romanians in the Nordic-Danubian region...????

Then, is the Slavic stratum later/latter? or what? As we know there are early South-Slavic effects on the Romanian language and as well effects later when they came up to the North, suggested by one of he theories....

If the Romanian-Albanian similarities would be a latter stratum, how could this support the continuity of the Romanians in the Nordic-Danubian region, unless the Albanians were not living there, the North of the Danube?

If it is seriously not suggested the Albanians would be natives in the North of the Danube and in the Balkans they contacted with the ancestors of Romanians, then how could they have continuity on the North?

I suggest to delete this addition or someone should check the original source I cannot access because this is a complete mess....(KIENGIR (talk) 12:56, 15 May 2018 (UTC))

EncBrit

Verginia's star: While I agree to most of your other edits to this article, which are mostly removals of unsourced and/or unnecessary information, I disagree with this edit. Firstly, the statement that the term "Romanian" is sometimes used also in a more general sense is supported by a link showing that Encyclopædia Britannica actually does use the term in exactly this way. Secondly, the removal of the sentence leaves the continuation without context: Starting a section with "The four languages" without having mentioned any languages does not make sense. The whole section clarifies that even if the term "Romanian" sometimes is used differently, this article is only concerned with dialects of "Romanian" in the narrower (and more commonly used) sense. --T*U (talk) 07:58, 17 May 2018 (UTC)

Talk page of the now merged into here article Daco-Romanian

This stub adds no useful information to that in the article on the Romanian language. Romanian language can mean one of two things:

• the Daco-Romanian dialect spoken in Romania and some other countries, and

• the group of all four Eastern Romance languages.

As Romanian language gives information particularly on the Daco-Romanian dialect, I don't see any point in having this stub here. Unless there is no opposition, I will turn the stub back to a redirect. --AdiJapan 06:55, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

It's supposed to be a "NPOV-ing" page for Romanian and Moldovan "languages", but I don't think it is needed as it's a consensus in linguistics that Romanian = Moldovan, so I agree with that. bogdan 09:55, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

Usage of Daco-Romanian

Linguists use the name "Daco-Romanian" to disambiguate "Romanian" when are also discussed other Eastern Romance dialects/languages south of the Danube (Macedo-Romanian, Megleno-Romanian, Istro-Romanian). It is always a perfect synonym for "Romanian". bogdan 17:14, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

Agree.--Bonaparte 17:42, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

No it is not. 30 years ago there was Moldovan language, regardless artificial or not. If there is a term, there is an article that explains its usage. It is a common way in wikipedia to create smaller articles from large ones, not to merge everythin into a single big one. mikka (t) 18:58, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

Is more than a synonim. Is identical.--Bonaparte 19:07, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

No its is not. mikka (t) 19:08, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

I would like some references. bogdan 19:09, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

Please take a look into the history section of Moldovan language. Please don't forget that with langauges what is true today, could have been different yesterday. mikka (t) 19:11, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

Mikka you have to prove that Daco-romanian is not romanian!--Bonaparte 19:09, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

No, it is you have to prove that Moldovan language never existed. So far you failed. mikka (t) 19:12, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

Every linguist I ever read put an equal sign between Romanian and Daco-Romanian. Daco-Romanian is simply another name for Romanian and that's it. bogdan 19:18, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

No we won! You failed.--Bonaparte 19:13, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

Bonaparte, please stay out of this, you're not helping. bogdan 19:18, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

Even if the usage is identical (here I am inclined to agree, since "moldovan language" linguistically is a variety of Romanian), still, this article makes sense in that it may contain explanation why and when the term was introduced. Deleting an existing article into a redirect is a political move that has nothing with encyclopedia purposes of providing information. mikka (t) 19:16, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

I still haven't seen your references. bogdan 19:24, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

I still haven't seen what is false in the artile. I only see that the article is a still stub: it does not explain who introduced this term and why. I amd very puzzled why you think that this information is so uninteresting that it may be completely dismissed. I also basically agreed that they are identical linguistically. But for political purposes there historically existed officially separate ro: and mo: languages. And my reference is Moldovan language. mikka (t) 19:30, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

There are few things wrong like The latter term was introduced in the Soviet Union based on regional varieties local to the territory of the Soviet Union., but this is not the problem.

I see no point in having this article, it's a duplicate of Romanian language. bogdan 19:38, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

I will agree for a redirect only if the term is explained in full in Romanian language: why the term was introduced etc. Only then this will justify the redirect. Otherwise it is just a political action. mikka (t) 19:49, 27 November 2005 (UTC) <--- NOTE: This account has been confirmed by a CheckUser as a sock puppet of Altenmann, and it has been blocked indefinitely. What a time-waster this whole argument was.

OK. The article should contain a "Classification and related languages" section that should discuss this. bogdan 20:10, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

Article deletion

Deletion of articles without votes of deletion is not allowed in wikipedia. We have smaller articles and on a more trivial issues than this one, like, bung and stopper. mikka (t) 19:08, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

another proof of BIAS edits

Again you make bias edits Mikka, this is another proof of your bias edits.--Bonaparte 19:26, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

I am not making any edits. I am restoring your deletion of information. mikka (t) 19:31, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

page protection

G'day guys,

I note that this page was protected, "to deal with vandalism". The thing that every edit warrior forgets is that his opponent is not a vandal, but another good faith editor who happens to feel just as passionately as he does. Edit warring is not vandalism, it's edit warring. And it takes two to war. I see no vandalism here.

Mikkalai, I'm very concerned about the way you protected this page. You have clearly been very deeply involved in this article, and we are not meant to protect in such circumstances except in cases of simple vandalism. Of course, if the nascent edit war continues, the page may need to be protected again anyway ... but it won't have anything to do with vandalism, and both you and User:Bonaparte will end up blocked. Have a nice day. fuddlemark (fuddle me!) 19:48, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

I am very deeply involved with Bonaparte, who deletes information. Anyway, thanks for reminding me the policy. mikka (t) 19:52, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

Clarification

It is a MAJOR MISTAKE to consider Latin as the basis of all the so-called Latin languages! Here's the reason: https://plus.google.com/u/0/115254974114157068545/posts/fLbMGPTabPb (romanian and english subtitle) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Wiltis (talk • contribs) 11:45, 23 December 2018 (UTC)

First of all, Daco-Romanian IS NOT A LANGUAGE, it could be a term similar to other romance languages to clasify a group of languages shuch as Gallo-Romance languages or Ibero-Romance languages. So, the correct term I think it should be Daco-Romance. In the case of Romanian it is rarely used because technicaly THERE IS NO GROUP TO CLASIFY because it is only one language of Roman and Dacian descent and that is Romanian.

Actually, there are more languages "Roman and Dacian": Daco-Romanian, Macedo-Romanian, Megleno-Romanian and Istro-Romanian. It's just that for each, the name is derived from the region where they live (Dacia, Macedonia, Meglena and Istria). In a linguistic treatise which discusses all four, simply "Romanian" would be ambiguous. bogdan 20:50, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

Now you could all start again for the n-th time and argue that there is also Moldovian, but that is a political separation and not a linguistic one to which the term Daco-Romance could be used. One could use it to maintain a symentry betwen the clasification of western romance languages and eastern romance languages. About languages spoken South of the Danube, I doubt they sould be categorised in the same Daco-Romance category. --Orioane 20:23, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

First of all, this "clarification" only deserves a separate article, since this is exactly what encyclopedia is about:clarification of things, rather than sweeping them under the carpet according to certain political agendas. And I am not "starting again"; I never denied that mo: was a political schtick. Please see my only contribution to the topic, Moldovan language#Romanizators and Originalists. mikka (t) 20:32, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

Sorry about being a little bit aggresive, it runs in the family. :D. I try to express myself better thist time after a little brainstorming. So here it is: My opinion is, that the term Daco-Romanian is wrong. It is never used in Romanian, and I think it originated from a wrong translation of a protolanguage from which Romanian originated, called in Romania Daco-Romană to simbolise the simbiose of the Latin spoke by roman colonists with elements from the Dacian language. A better translation would be Daco-Roman. So MY opinion is that this article should be renamed to Daco-Roman to emphasize this fact, and another article Daco-Romance languages may be created. Hope to be more clear now, if not, that is why the Talk Pages are. --Orioane 20:49, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

• All the more the article should sit here, to explain what's this word about. When you replace it by a redirect with nothing else written, you assume that the word is OK. mikka (t) 04:13, 28 November 2005 (UTC)
• Actually, Elementa linguæ daco-romanae sive valachicae was published in 1802 and Samuel Micu used this word even earlier, in 1780s. mikka (t) 04:25, 28 November 2005 (UTC)

I don't think the Soviets actually used this term, "Daco-Romanian". From what I recall, they put Moldovan in Eastern Romance languages, with Romanian. bogdan 20:50, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

While we are at this, the issue here and at Romanian language is certainly a mess. The latter one says that Istro-Romanian etc. are dialects of Romanian (in sect. "Classification and related languages"). So what? Istro-Romanian is a dialect of Daco-Romanian (which is you say =Romanian)? mikka (t) 04:09, 28 November 2005 (UTC)

I changed it back. They are sometimes named dialects, especially in 19th and early 20th century works. Nowadays, usually they are named "languages". (You know, many of today's "languages" of Italy were also "dialects" back then) bogdan 05:11, 28 November 2005 (UTC)

Also, what about "limba romana comuna" (protoromanian)? It looks like political bickering is much more fun for some people tahn to describe their own language. mikka (t) 04:32, 28 November 2005 (UTC)

See Proto-Romanian language. bogdan 05:11, 28 November 2005 (UTC)

Sorry, midnight; bad for brain. Need a break. mikka (t) 05:45, 28 November 2005 (UTC)

How's this:

• Daco-Romanian is a term used for the Romanian language spoken to the North of the Danube, the region that contains the former Roman province of Dacia, to make a distinction between the Eastern Romance group of languages spoken North of the Danube and those spoken in the Balkans when the term Romanian is used to classify the entire group of languages.

If you (Mikka and Bogdan) agree with it we should add it to the page.

--Orioane 08:30, 28 November 2005 (UTC)

All Moldovan topics aside here, there is the fact that "used for the Romanian language north of the danube" implies quite strongly that to the SOUTH of the danube, Romanians are speaking the same language, which is no longer the opinion of most experts. --Node 01:47, 29 November 2005 (UTC)

You did not read carefully to the end. The sentence ends "...when 'Romanian' is used to classify the entire group...", so there is no contradiction to your "most experts". mikka (t) 04:03, 29 November 2005 (UTC)

I have no objections. bogdan 09:54, 28 November 2005 (UTC)

My only objection was against vigorous deletion of this page without giving any explanations what the heck it means. mikka (t) 09:56, 28 November 2005 (UTC)

Still, is anyone willing to describe the usage of this term in 18-19th centuries? mikka (t) 04:04, 29 November 2005 (UTC)

Well, the story goes like this. With Romanian nationalism also appeared a pan-romanian movement. The Romanian state (before 1918, and after) helped Romanians abroad, and the word "Romanian" was considered in a broad sense. Not only those speaking Romanian proper, but also Aromanians (also called Macedo-Romanians), Megleno-Romanians, and Istro-Romanians. At the same time, linguists chose to consider that the Romanian language includes Macedo-Romanian, Megleno-Romanian, and Istro-Romanian as dialects (they are quite close, even if not really mutually intelligible). Therefore, they needed a name for proper Romanian, and chose the name "Daco-Romanian". That's all. The name "Daco-Romanian" is today's "Romanian". Some notes: Many of the Macedo-Romanians (Aromanians) immigrated to Romania, and many were settled in Dobrogea and the Cadrilater (there may also have been population exchanges, but I am not sure). If I'm not very mistaken, Toma Caragiu and Hagi the football player are of Aromanian descent. Also, you must know that the Romanian state keeps even today some ties with these "Greater Romanian" communities. User:Dpotop

Daco-romanian as group

Please comment on the correctness of the following phrase:

In formal classifications (disputed) that list Romanian and Moldovan as separate languages, "Daco-Romanian" is used as a supergroup for the two.

I am pretty much sure that Soviets didn't classify so, but I've seen something like this on web. To what extent it is correct? 00:58, 3 December 2005 (UTC) signed by User:Mikkalai

Can you, please, give me the source? I'd really like to read it. Then only I can comment (until now, I never saw such a classification). User:Dpotop

Note I am not saying it is correct or notably accepted. Well, first of all I was wrong about Soviets.

C. Tagliviani, Le origini delle lingue neolatine. Bologna, 1952. (?) М.С.Гурычева, Сравнительно-сопоставительная грамматика романских языков. Итало-романская подгруппа. М., Наука, 1966 These two girls proposed called "substrate-based" classification, and I don't know who of them said that Daco-romaninan: Romanian, Moldavian & extinct Dalmatian language.

In Russian: http://etheo.h10.ru/roma01.htm Looks nonstandard to me.

Indirect: http://www.farsarotul.org/nl25_5.htm says "he also published on practically all the languages of the Balkans, especially Albanian (including both Shqip and Arvanitika), Daco-Romanian (including Moldavian)" implying Mold as a sep lang.

It is quite possible that this theory is thoroughly obsolete, so that there are no traces on web. I don't see big contradiction: If Soviets created a new language, it would be only natural for them to devise a supergroup, which looks totally plausible bearing in mind insignificant difference between mo: & ru: mikka (t) 11:50, 3 December 2005 (UTC)

Ok, I read the two links (the first one using the automatic translator of Altavista). The second only says "Romanian (including Moldovan)". This expression can also be interpreted as "including Moldovan readers as Romanian". More interesting is the first link, which first states the same "Moldovan is Romanian", but then composes Istro-Romanian with Romanian to form the "Daco-Romanian group". This is not without justification, given that Istro-Romanian is the closest to Romanian of the other three Eastern Romance languages/dialects. However, I feel uncomfortable accepting this in the "Daco-Romanian" article, as it seems to be a "research-related" use of the word (and again, there is no mention of the "Moldovan language" as a separate language in any of the two links). I do not have acces to the printed references. Therefore, my oppinion is to preserve the status que for the article. User:Dpotop

Also my opinion is to preserve the status quo of this article. Bonaparte talk & contribs 15:27, 3 December 2005 (UTC)

Separate article?

I said (at the top of this talk page) that this article doesn't give any useful info in addition to the article Romanian language. Now, after many enriching edits, it does. However, in my opinion it still doesn't deserve a separate article. I believe that the generally accepted way of doing things on Wikipedia is that articles should define concepts rather than terms. If this is right, then read again:

Daco-Romanian [...] is the term used to identify the Romanian language in contexts where distinction needs to be made between the various [...] languages or dialects [...].

So the article is about a term, and admits that the concept considered is the Romanian language. I would say it is obvious that it belongs there. --AdiJapan 13:50, 3 December 2005 (UTC)

We have enormous number of articles about "terms", starting with really huge one "fuck", which is about a yet another term for sexual intercourse. The article in question clearly shows that the usage of the term does not always coincide with "Romanian language". Also, the article conains elements of the history of the term, with potential for expansion ( e.g., this talk page hints at it possible usage in Soviet linguistics; Not to say I see a ridiculous lack of interest in Romanian wikipedians here in Romanian linguistics: it took an "irridentist chauvinist communist anti-Romanian anti-Semitism vandal" to dig out the Micu reference). mikka (t) 18:03, 3 December 2005 (UTC)

It is in wikipedia policies to delegate topics out of bug articles into smaller ones, not vice versa. For example, we have separate Romanian grammar, Romanian phonology, etc. mikka (t) 18:03, 3 December 2005 (UTC)

I got your point. Cool, we can keep it here. (And by the way, you know how to pick your examples...) --AdiJapan 19:51, 3 December 2005 (UTC)

I agree with Mikka. This article should exist. Dpotop 20:20, 3 December 2005 (UTC)

Subsection 'Phonetic changes' needs cleanup

The changes described are deeper than just phonetic, e.g. surface phonetic [ke] or [ki] to [tʃe] or [tʃi] is presented, but restructuring of /ke/ or /ki/ to /tʃe/ or /tʃi/ reports what gives Romanian its form with regard to those evolutions. The conflation eventually leads to statements such as /ks/ → [ps] (rather than /ks/ > /ps/) and (undifferentiated as to level) e and o → ea and oa, which half explicitly, half implicitly combine to claim that an item such as coapsă is phonemically/structurally/underlyingly (take your choice) /koksa/, pronounced [koapsa] (with no information on stress). The section is actually Phonological changes, and needs re-working by someone who knows both diachronic and synchronic phonology of Romanian. Barefoot through the chollas (talk) 16:08, 16 May 2019 (UTC)

Fringe

All major theories can be presented in the article, but we should respect WP:DUE. The theory which claims that Romanian is the direct descdendant of the Dacian language is fringe. We can edit WP based on reliable sources (primarily on sources written by respected scholars and published in peer-reviewed books). Borsoka (talk) 00:49, 17 November 2018 (UTC)

I understand there is a reason for your challenging. But I do not completely understand how is fringe defined, except that more reliable sources should be presented for a particular theory.

WP:Fringe says:"Because Wikipedia aims to summarize significant opinions with representation in proportion to their prominence, a Wikipedia article should not make a fringe theory appear more notable or more widely accepted than it is. Statements about the truth of a theory must be based upon independent reliable sources "

Maybe a fringe theory should be left, but any statements about the truth of the theory should not be made without the respective sources? Even if fringe, should it be deleted or not given undue weight, e.g. reduced to one sentence? It's still merely represented as the third marginal theory in the bottom of the article. --Marchond (talk) 01:08, 17 November 2018 (UTC)

For the time being, the theory is not verified by reliable sources. So reliable sources should be added to verify it. Borsoka (talk) 01:23, 17 November 2018 (UTC)

It is published in: Journal of Romanian Linguistics and Culture. ISSN-L 2392-6627. This journal has an editorial team, so it is peer-reviewed. How reliable it is, is a matter of a long debate, probably as long as the long time dispute in Romania between the supporters of the two theories. --Marchond (talk) 11:58, 17 November 2018 (UTC)

Yup, it's WP:FRINGE/PS or pseudohistory even speaking of Romanian scholars only. E.g. we have no way of knowing hundreds or thousands native words used for thousands of years in Dacia. Tgeorgescu (talk) 13:33, 17 November 2018 (UTC)

Agree with Borsoka and Tgeorgescu. Any discussion of Romanian being descended from anything other than Latin is insanely fringe and alien to actual scientific discourse. If nationalist fantasies get published by peer-reviewed journals, this is more in the realm of national embarassment...--Calthinus (talk) 19:25, 19 November 2018 (UTC)

Ok, the background: we don't directly know the Dacian words, but some Romanian words are thought to be of Dacian origin, because they lack any other alternative etymology and also by comparison with Albanian. These being said, we don't know Dacian words used for thousands of years since Dacians had no writing and therefore there is no evidence to support such claim. Tgeorgescu (talk) 21:37, 3 September 2020 (UTC)

Article doesn't reproduce accurately the information contained in the source

The source provided in the article: Andreose, Alvise; Renzi, Lorenzo (2013). "Geography and distribution of the Romance languages in Europe". In Maiden, Martin; Smith, John Charles; Ledgeway, Adam (eds.). The Cambridge History of the Romance Languages, Volume II: Contexts. Cambridge University Press. pp. 283–334. ISBN 978-0-521-80073-0.

On page 287, we find:

"In contrast, extensive 'neo-Romanized areas are fond north of the Danube. The area of colonization of Dacia essentially correspond to modern Western Romania (Transylvania, Banat, western Muntenia. The thesis of 'continuity', according to which Romanian continues the Latin of Dacia (a Roman province from 107 to 275AD when it was abandoned by Aurelian), is not universally accepted. Some scholars hold that Romanian was formed wholly or in part to the south of the Danube, and the current location of Romanian is the result of internal migrations"

The original information from page 287 is not enough accurately reproduced in the article. We should work on this and find a better version. I'll introduce a tag up to the resolution. Horea Vêntilă (talk) 09:16, 4 September 2020 (UTC)

Don't expect Wikipedia:Close paraphrasing, that's not allowed here. What exactly is inaccurate, content-wise? –Austronesier (talk) 09:25, 4 September 2020 (UTC)

Please be nice, work together, don't patronize. Thank you.

If you really want to contribute to this article, be assured I am more than enthusiastic in winning your expertise.

The problem with the paragraph in the article is, that it doesn't reproduce accurately the pieces of information referred to.

The original source says that:

1. The thesis of 'continuity' is not universally accepted.

2. Some scholars hold a different thesis

3. This thesis holds that Romanian was formed wholly or in part to the south of the Danube

4. the current location of Romanian is the result of internal migrations

The paragraph that we should make better, reads:

1. the "continuity theory" asserts that the development of Proto-Romanian included the lands now forming Romania

My comment: The source doesn't say what actually the "continuity theory" asserts. This is the article's claim.'

2. "immigrationist" theory says that Proto-Romanian was spoken in the lands to the south of the Danube

My comment: This is definitely not what the source says. The source says: Romanian was formed wholly or in part to the south of the Danube

3. Romanian-speakers settled in most parts of modern Romania only centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire

My comment: This is fully a new piece of information, not supported by the source

As it stands, the paragraph cannot be considered a serious piece of information based on sources.

Looking forward for your team work.

Horea Vêntilă (talk) 10:39, 4 September 2020 (UTC)

If you read the other cited source (Petrucci), you will find verification. Please also take into account that the article is about the Romanian language, so we do not need to explain all details of the debate about the venue of the formation of Proto-Romanian. What is a scholarly consensus, that the venue is uncertain. The continuity theory holds that at least some north-Danubian regions of present-day Romania played an important role in the development of the language, the immigrationist theory says that Proto-Romanian quite obviously developed in the Balkans. Borsoka (talk) 11:44, 4 September 2020 (UTC)

The citation of Petrucci is definitely wrong and it has nothing to do with any of the topics discussed here. Please find the right pages from Petrucci, if they exist, or either drop this wrong reference.

You say: we do not need to explain all details of the debate about the venue of the formation of Proto-Romanian OK, then why did you insert details over the debate about the venue of the formation of Proto-Romanian ? If it is unnecessary, why evoking it ? Otherwise, if you mention the debate over the venue of Proto-Romanian, than you have to mention all three main theories. It's as simple as that. If you feel there is too much room for this topic, then we could synthetically mention all three theories in a single paragraph. Wenn we decide to provide information about the original areas of the Proto-Romanian, than we must provide a complete piece of information, not a truncated one.Horea Vêntilă (talk) 12:30, 8 September 2020 (UTC)

If you read Petrucci, you will find the info. No, we do not need to present all theories, because the main difference is the role of north-Danubian regions. All theories agree that the land to the south of the Danube waa an important venue of the development of the Romanian language. Borsoka (talk) 13:31, 8 September 2020 (UTC)

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Kateybeck.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 08:20, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Huge omissions in the history section

Literally the most significant and striking facts about the history of Romanian from a comparative point of view aren't mentioned in the history section and are only touched upon in the lexis section, namely that there was an extremely long period, beginning with the fall of the Roman Empire, during which Romanian largely wasn't used in writing or for official purposes, that Romanian wasn't the official and literary language of the Romanian principalities until the 18th century, and that Church Slavonic was their official and literary language until then. Instead, the section is cluttered by an endless series of quotes that apparently all serve to drive home only one point, namely ... that Romanian speakers existed (no joke, I thought they were just suddenly dropped in Romania by an alien ship). Oh, and, of course, the inevitable message that 'all your Moldova are belong to us'. 79.100.144.23 (talk) 20:22, 24 July 2022 (UTC)

Do you have a Reliable Source(s) that you would like to discuss using to improve the article? Because otherwise, your post is useless. 50.111.25.27 (talk) 01:09, 11 August 2022 (UTC)