| ROMANIAN LANGUAGE
If you are looking for a translator from
Romanian or into Romanian, we are please
to offer the service of our extensive pool
of Romanian linguists to match your needs.
Our areas of expertise include Advertising
& PR, Technology & Engineering,
Law & Litigation Support, Banking &
Finance, Medical & Health, Automotive
& Aerospace, Food & Agriculture,
Extractive Industries, Personal Documents
and many other.
SOME FACTS
Romanian language, member of the Romance
group of the Italic subfamily of the Indo-European
family of languages. It is spoken by about
22 million people in Romania, where it is
the official language, by 3 million people
in Moldova, and by perhaps another 1 million
persons scattered in Bulgaria, Greece, Macedonia,
Albania, Yugoslavia (now Serbia and Montenegro),
and Hungary. At the present time Romanian
is written in the Roman alphabet, to which
have been added the symbols a, a, i, s,
and t. In Moldova under Soviet rule, however,
Cyrillic characters were used for Romanian.
A distinctive feature of Romanian is the
attachment of the definite article to the
noun as a suffix, as in omul (literally,
“man-the”). The oldest surviving
Romanian texts are from the 16th cent.,
and there are four major dialects of the
language.
History
The Romanian territory was inhabited in ancient
times by the Dacians, an Indo-European people.
They were defeated by the Roman Empire in
106 and part of Dacia (Oltenia, Banat and
Ardeal) became a Roman province. For the next
165 years, there is evidence of considerable
Roman colonization in the area, the region
being in close communication with the rest
of the Roman empire. Vulgar Latin became the
language of the administration and commerce.
Under the pressure of the Free Dacians
and of the Goths, the Roman administration
and legions were withdrawn from Dacia between
271-275. Whether the Romanians are the descendants
of these people that abandoned the area
and settled south of Danube or of the people
that remained in Dacia is a matter of debate.
For further discussion, see Origin of Romanians.
Due to its geographical isolation, Romanian
was probably the first language that split
and until the modern age was not influenced
by other Romance languages, so the grammar
is roughly similar to that of Latin, keeping
declensions and the neuter gender, unlike
any other Romance language.
All the dialects of Romanian are believed
to have been unified in a common language
until sometime between the 7th and the 10th
century when the area was influenced by
the Byzantine Empire and Romanian came under
the influence of the Slavic language. Aromanian
has very few Slavonic words. Also, the variations
in the Daco-Romanian dialect (spoken throughout
Romania and Moldova) are very small, which
is quite remarkable, as until the Modern
Era there was almost no connection between
Romanians in various regions. The use of
this uniform Daco-Romanian dialect extends
well beyond the borders of the Romanian
state: a Romanian-speaker from Moldova speaks
the same language as a Romanian-speaker
from the Serbian Banat.
It is also noteworthy that Romanian was
the only Romance language that was not under
the cultural influence of the Roman Catholic
Church, instead being influenced by the
Orthodox Church, Slavonic, Greek and Turkish
cultures.
|
