An Etymological Dictionary of the Romanian Language

Sorin Paliga graduated from the University of Bucharest in 1980. He studied Czech and English, also Slovene, Polish, and Portuguese. His main interests were primarily focused on Central European cultures and languages (mainly Czech, Slovak, and Slovene), but also on southeast Europe and its fascinating evolution from the Neolithic Revolution (8th millennium BCE) until now. His doctoral thesis analyzed the Romance and Pre-Romance (Thracian and Illyrian) influences in South Slavic (1998). Many of the published works cover linguistic and historical problems of Southeast and Central Europe, and are available on academia.edu and researchgate.net. He has translated books from Czech, English, and French. The Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs awarded him the special prize for his activity in promoting Czech culture abroad in 2009.

Tabula Gratulatoria xv


Abbreviations, Etymological Dictionaries and References xvi


a. Abbreviations...............................................................................................................................xvi


b. Etymological and Bilingual Dictionaries with Etymological Relevance.........................................xxi


c. General References (Studies, Books)...........................................................................................xxiv


d. Author’s Studies and Books......................................................................................................xxxiii


Chapter I. General Considerations 1


A New Etymological Dictionary of Romanian. Why?.............................................................................6


Histories of the Romanian Language....................................................................................................12


A Historical View of the ‘Romanian Etymological Problem’.................................................................14


Thracians, Romanians, Albanians, Slavs: Ethnicity in Central and Southeast Europe............................17


General Problems..........................................................................................................................17


The Languages Spoken in the Antiquity........................................................................................19


The Slavic Homeland....................................................................................................................22


The Structure of the Slavic Vocabulary..........................................................................................29


Albanian and Albanians................................................................................................................31


‘The Homeland of the Romanians’................................................................................................36


The Vlachs (Vlakhs). Are They ‘A Kind of Romanians’ or ‘Genuine Romanians’?.................................38


Back to Linguistics...............................................................................................................................41


The ‘Balkan Linguistic Union’ (Balkansprachbund).......................................................................47


Romanian, Its Origins and Its Neighbors......................................................................................49


The Structure of the Romanian Vocabulary...................................................................................55


Chapter II. The Strata of the Romanian Vocabulary 59


The Romanian Language: Its Stratification and the Statistical Data......................................................60


The Latin Heritage...............................................................................................................................61


The Substratum Heritage......................................................................................................................62


Words Shared with Albanian of Non- Latin Origin...............................................................................62


The Slavic Influence.............................................................................................................................63


Statistical Data...................................................................................................................................63


1.a. The Old Latin Heritage..........................................................................................................63


1.b. The New Modern Borrowings of Latin Origin.......................................................................64


2. The Chaotic Group Labeled ‘Unknown Etymology’ (‘et. nec.’) in DEX.................................65


3. The Romanian- Albanian Common Heritage..........................................................................65


4. Re- organizing the ‘et. nec.’ Data as Substratum Elements......................................................66


5. The Slavic Influence from the Statistical Perspective...............................................................66


6. The Hungarian (Magyar) Influence........................................................................................67


7. The Turkish Influence............................................................................................................67


The Swadesh List for Romanian...........................................................................................................67


An Alternative List of 100 Roots...................................................................................................75


Analysis of the Two Lists...............................................................................................................85


Analysis of the Three Scenarios......................................................................................................87


Chapter III. Place- Names and Personal Names 89


Place Names.......................................................................................................................................89


Personal Names..................................................................................................................................94


Chapter IV. The Romanian Language: Structure, Heritage, Etymological Problems 97


A Brief Synthesis.................................................................................................................................97


The Nominal Sphere............................................................................................................................97


Noun.................................................................................................................................................97


Adjective and Adverb.........................................................................................................................100


Pronoun...........................................................................................................................................101


Article..............................................................................................................................................103


The Definite Article of Nouns and Adjectives......................................................................104


The Definite Article in Albanian v. Romanian.....................................................................105


The Definite Article of Demonstratives and Adverbs...........................................................107


Two Exceptional Forms: tată/ tata ‘father’ and popă/ popa ‘a priest’......................................108


The Definite Article of Personal Names...............................................................................109


Summing Up......................................................................................................................110


Verb.................................................................................................................................................110


The Verbs a fi ‘to be’, a aveá ‘to have’ and the Suppletive Forms a vrea, a voi ‘to wish, will’..........112


Conclusions................................................................................................................................115


Numeral...........................................................................................................................................116


Non- Inflected Forms..........................................................................................................................116


Derivational Means............................................................................................................................117


Reduplication...................................................................................................................................117


Affixes: Prefixes and Suffixes...............................................................................................................118


Conclusions.....................................................................................................................................120


Chapter V. Romanian Phonetics and Phonology 121


The Specific Vowels of Romanian.......................................................................................................122


The Consonantal System of Romanian...............................................................................................126


Diphthongs and Triphthongs.............................................................................................................127


The Phonemes [oe] and [oe̯]................................................................................................................127


Letter i.............................................................................................................................................128


Historical Phonetics...........................................................................................................................128


Some Basic Problems of Phonetic Evolution...............................................................................129


Colloquial Latin..........................................................................................................................130


Tentative Phonetic Reconstructions for Thracian................................................................................133


Vocalism...................................................................................................................................133


Consonantism.............................................................................................................................134


The Indo- European Sonants ḷ ṛ ṃ ṇ............................................................................................136


A General Tableau.......................................................................................................................136


The Slavic Phonetic Inventory............................................................................................................137


Vocalism...................................................................................................................................137


Consonantism.............................................................................................................................137


Interferences Between Proto- Romanian, Thracian and Slavic..............................................................138


Treatment of Proto- Romanian Vowels................................................................................................138


Treatment of Proto- Romanian Consonants........................................................................................139


Addenda 143


I. A Note on Romanian Spelling.....................................................................................................143


II. A Comparative Analysis of the Transcriptions Used for the Romanian Dialects...........................145


PART II


The Etymological Dictionary in alphabetical order 153


PART III


Addenda 529


Glossary...........................................................................................................................................529


– Prehistoric Roots.............................................................................................................................536


– Pre- Indo- European Roots................................................................................................................539


– Proto- Boreal (‘Nostratic’) Roots......................................................................................................554


– Indo- European Roots......................................................................................................................575

This etymological dictionary constitutes a novel and provoking contribution to the field, and is likely to prove useful for those of those unfamiliar with specific problems posed by Eastern Romance linguistics. The inclusion of introductory chapters devoted to history, phonetics and morphology, and statistical charts, will be welcomed by non-expert readers.

Sorin Paliga’s Etymological Dictionary of Romanian seeks to fill a gap in contemporary lexicography in so far as it approaches the very complex case of Romanian considering all perspectives and applying the techniques of contemporary historical and comparative linguistics. It takes account of the difficulties inherent in the special position of Romanian as a Romance language situated in a Sprachbund comprising languages both related and unrelated to Indo-European, and specifically surrounded by South-Slavic languages and Hungarian.
As everybody knows, the question of the identification of Romanian with the Romance dialect of the Pannonian Plain, which infiltrated into Transilvania after the decline of the Roman Empire, or, alternatively, with the Latin dialect spoken in Dacia and more southern regions after the comparatively late Roman conquest, is subject to intense debate, and this makes the description of the history of the language and the study of its connections more difficult than that of other Romance languages.
The most daring part of this kind of work is, of course, the assumed existence of a substrate language or group of languages that we know very little about, as well as the uncertainties about its initial locus and spread in the so-called “dark ages”. As is well known, several attempts to identify this substrate have been made: Hans Krahe’s Alteuropäisch covered the best part of Europe, and, in spite of the meagre or nonexistent written evidence for these dialects, Dacian, Illyrian and Pannonian (a label accepted by some scholars but without direct testimonies) are conceivable candidates.
In sum, this etymological dictionary constitutes a novel and provoking contribution to the field, and is likely to prove useful for those of the author’s colleagues unfamiliar with specific problems posed by Eastern Romance linguistics. The inclusion of introductory chapters devoted to history, phonetics and morphology, and statistical charts, will be welcomed by non-expert readers.
Blanca María Prósper
University of Salamanca
Departamento de Filología Clásica e Indoeuropeo