One of my regrets when studying Classics was that I didn’t learn very many of the old schoolboy mnemonics that helped successive generations learn Latin and Greek paradigms. The only one I really remember is “Dick’s fat duck’s fur” for the irregular Latin imperatives dic ‘say!’, fac ‘do!’, duc ‘lead!’ and fer ‘carry!’. It recently [...]
One of the fun aspects of reading Old Church Slavonic texts is encountering vocabulary that has disappeared from most modern Slavonic languages, but which persists as a loanword into Romanian even in the everyday conversational language. I thought I had found another example in Matthew 20:30–34: и сє дъва слѣпьса сѣдѧшта при пѫти слъішавъша ꙗко [...]
As I am working hard to expand my Romanian vocabulary and am furiously absorbing words from all the various texts I read, I was reminded of this XKCD strip. The foreign learner often has no way to know that the vocabulary he learns from older texts is now obsolete. When I recently compared, for example, [...]
While the intonation of Romanian in the Republic of Moldova does not greatly differ from across the border in Romania’s province of Moldavia, several decades in the USSR instilled the Moldovan language with a great many Russian calques. I was quite taken aback the first time I heard someone use the exhortation daţi să… ‘let’s’, a translation of Russian давай instead of the standard Romanian hai să. Doing a little research on the topic, I came across an article by Angela Arama that is a strident call to do away with these calques and return to a more traditionally Romanian way of speaking.
This post might not interest readers who don’t know the Romanian translation of the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, but a video posted on YouTube of the liturgy (specifically the Great Litany) in Aromanian makes for a convenient comparison of Romanian and Macedo-Romanian. There’s not much recorded material in Aromanian on the internet, especially [...]
The Crestomație de literatură română veche edited by I. C. Chițimia and Stela Toma (Cluj-Napoca: Editura Dacia, 1984) that I picked up for cheap last year in a Cluj antiquary has so much trivia on Slavonic hangers-on in the early modern Romanian lexicon that I could do an endless series of posts here. Less visible [...]
Yesterday I bought in a Cluj used bookstore a Crestomație de literatură română veche (Cluj-Napoca: Editura Dacia, 1983), a selection of early Romanian-language documents edited with commentary, and printed on surprisingly good paper for the Ceaușescu era. As one might expect, the chrestomathy begins with the letter of Neacșu of Câmpulung, the first attestation of [...]
A couple of years ago I read a fascinating paper by the Slavicist B.O. Unbegaun entitled ‘Les noms de la neige en roumain’, collected in Selected Papers on Russian and Slavonic Philology ed. R. Auty & A. E. Pennington (Oxford, 1969). While this theme is especially interesting to me because Cluj lies almost exactly on the isogloss between the words nea and omăt, I thought this paper would appeal to a fairly wide audience, and I felt it didn’t deserve to lie forgotten in an old Festschrift. So, I have translated it here into English. There’s probably a great deal of Franglish, but I’m tired and will further edit later.
I find it rather odd that Romanian has /f/ in some borrowings from Common Slavonic and Hungarian when the CS original had /x/. I don’t think I’ve come across this kind of shift in any other languages. To give examples: CS praxŭ ‘dust’ ∼ Ro. praf ‘dust, powder’. CS vrŭxŭ ‘top, summit’ ∼ Ro. vârf [...]
I am fascinated by cases where multisyllabic words are worn down to a nub. In his textbook Historical Linguistics (London: Arnold, 1996) Larry Trask gives the following as the introduction to an exercise in Chapter 3: This is thought to be the history of the French word cent over the last 6000 years or so: [...]