A Primer on the Romanian Language

As previously mentioned, one of my primary goals for my time in Romania is to learn the language, hopefully to the point where I can become at least moderately conversant with a native speaker. I am very fortunate to have found a wonderful tutor who works as a translator. This post will describe some of my impressions about Romanian. I have only had a few lessons so far, and my formal training in linguistics is somewhat limited so if anyone more knowledge about the subject thinks I say something incorrect, please let me know!

Romania sits near the eastern extent of what was the Roman empire, and is the result of Latin (which was my undergraduate minor, and has helped immensely in learning the language)mixing with Slavic languages, which surround Romania on all sides except for Moldova to the east, where Romanian is also spoken. There are many elements of Romanian which reminds me of Latin.

Much of Romanian is pronounced in a similar way to how I was taught to pronounce Classical Latin. However, the Slavic influence is obvious and I occasional think someone is speaking Russian. There are two phonemes in Romanian which are not found in English. The first is the same trilled r which occurs in Spanish. Though this same sound is found in Latin I have not been able to produce it, even after years of trying. Luckily my tutor says it will not be such a big problem if I fake it. The other sound not found in English is a vowel sound denoted by â. There is simply no equivalent sound in English. After much practice, I was finally able to produce the sound somewhat correctly by pulling my jar far back, raising my tongue to the roof of my mouth and imagining someone punching me in the gut.

In addition to â, Romanian orthography also uses ă to denote a different vowel sound. However, this one is found in English (its the initial sound in above).  Being able to produce the vowel sounds in Romanian correctly is very important, and words are often differentiated simply by one vowel sound. This has been another challenge of beginning to learn Romanian. Words in English are not usually differentiated in such a manner. I remember reading studies a whole ago discussing how native speakers of certain languages are naturally more apt to learning other languages than native speakers of some other languages. I now see the conclusions validity. I am still having great difficulty sometimes hearing the distinction between vowel sounds, even when asking someone to repeat pairs of words a few times.

Besides the additional vowels, the Romanian alphabet also contains two more characters not found in English spelling - ș  and ț. The first is pronounced like "sh" would usually be in English, and the second is pronounced like the final sound in the word "cats."

Another challenge has been that, besides the additional sounds and characters, Romanian places sounds together in ways which English does not. This has caused me to occasionally trip over my speak  but I suppose improvement with just take practice. 

Romanian actually maintains more of Latin grammar than other Romance languages, at least under my impression. For example, Romanian maintains most of Latin's extensive declension system for nouns and adjectives. Markers are present for normative, genitive, accusative, and dative cases. Another retention from Latin which was lost by other Romance languages is the presence of three grammatical genders - masculine, feminine, and neuter. Oddly, neuter  nouns decline like masculine nouns in the singular and feminine nouns in the plural. 

One very interesting feature is how Romanian deals with articles. Indefinite articles are placed before words like in English or other Romance languages.. The feminine indefinite article is o and the masculine indefinite article is un. Definite articles, on the other hand, are enclitic, attaching to the end of a noun. For example, the masculine noun hotel becomes hotelul, the hotel. The feminine noun poștă becomes poșta, the post office. Here's one of those cases where the vowel sound changes the word. 

Now that you have read through the boring linguistics talk, here are some pictures of Romania:

The last picture is of gypsy houses in Liește, near the farm I visited last weekend. The small amount of gypsies who are well off routinely demolish and rebuild their houses larger in order to show off their wealth. I also discovered that if you want to marry a gypsy girl, you basically have to buy her from her father. I heard of one case where the price was 500,000 Lei and a Maserati. 

Today I am leading a panel discussion on Romanian and Bulgarian labor in the EU and tomorrow I am leaving for a weekend in the mountain town of Soveja. More updates soon.