The proposed substratal elements in Romanian are mostly lexical items. The process of determining if a word is from the

substratum Substrata, plural of substratum, may refer to: *Earth's substrata, the geologic layering of the Earth *''Hypokeimenon'', sometimes translated as ''substratum'', a concept in metaphysics *Substrata (album), a 1997 ambient music album by Biosphere * ...

involves comparison to

Latin Latin ( or ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally spoken by the Latins (Italic tribe), Latins in Latium (now known as Lazio), the lower Tiber area aroun ...

, languages with which Romanian came into contact, or determining if it is an internal construct. If there are no matching results, a comparison to Albanian vocabulary,

Thracian The Thracians (; ; ) were an Indo-European speaking people who inhabited large parts of Southeast Europe in ancient history.. "The Thracians were an Indo-European people who occupied the area that today is shared between north-eastern Greece, ...

remnants or

Proto-Indo-European Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European language family. No direct record of Proto-Indo-European exists; its proposed features have been derived by linguistic reconstruction from documented Indo-Euro ...

reconstructed words is made. In addition to

vocabulary A vocabulary (also known as a lexicon) is a set of words, typically the set in a language or the set known to an individual. The word ''vocabulary'' originated from the Latin , meaning "a word, name". It forms an essential component of languag ...

, some other features of Eastern Romance, such as

phonological Phonology (formerly also phonemics or phonematics: "phonemics ''n.'' 'obsolescent''1. Any procedure for identifying the phonemes of a language from a corpus of data. 2. (formerly also phonematics) A former synonym for phonology, often prefer ...

features and elements of grammar (see Balkan sprachbund) may also be from Paleo-Balkan languages. Romanian developed from the

Common Romanian Common Romanian (), also known as Ancient Romanian (), or Proto-Romanian (), is a comparatively reconstructed Romance language evolved from Vulgar Latin and spoken by the ancestors of today's Romanians, Aromanians, Megleno-Romanians, Istro-Roma ...

language, which in turn developed from

Vulgar Latin Vulgar Latin, also known as Colloquial, Popular, Spoken or Vernacular Latin, is the range of non-formal Register (sociolinguistics), registers of Latin spoken from the Crisis of the Roman Republic, Late Roman Republic onward. ''Vulgar Latin'' a ...

. According to a widely accepted theory, the territory where the language formed was a large one, consisting of both the north and the south of the Danube (encompassing the regions of

Dacia Dacia (, ; ) was the land inhabited by the Dacians, its core in Transylvania, stretching to the Danube in the south, the Black Sea in the east, and the Tisza in the west. The Carpathian Mountains were located in the middle of Dacia. It thus ro ...

Moesia Moesia (; Latin: ''Moesia''; ) was an ancient region and later Roman province situated in the Balkans south of the Danube River. As a Roman domain Moesia was administered at first by the governor of Noricum as 'Civitates of Moesia and Triballi ...

, and possibly

Illyria In classical and late antiquity, Illyria (; , ''Illyría'' or , ''Illyrís''; , ''Illyricum'') was a region in the western part of the Balkan Peninsula inhabited by numerous tribes of people collectively known as the Illyrians. The Ancient Gree ...

), more precisely to the north of the Jireček Line. Other scholars place the origin of the Romanian language in the

Balkan Peninsula The Balkans ( , ), corresponding partially with the Balkan Peninsula, is a geographical area in southeastern Europe with various geographical and historical definitions. The region takes its name from the Balkan Mountains that stretch throug ...

, strictly south of the

Danube The Danube ( ; see also #Names and etymology, other names) is the List of rivers of Europe#Longest rivers, second-longest river in Europe, after the Volga in Russia. It flows through Central and Southeastern Europe, from the Black Forest sou ...

. ''The Cambridge History of the Romance Languages'', published in 2013, came to the conclusion that the "historical, archaeological and linguistic data available do not seem adequate" to determine the territory where the development of the Romanian language began.

Lexical items

The study of the substrate involves comparative methods applied to: # Albanian and its reconstructed ancient precursor –

Proto-Albanian Proto-Albanian is the ancestral reconstructed language of Albanian, before the Gheg– Tosk dialectal diversification (before ). Albanoid and other Paleo-Balkan languages had their formative core in the Balkans after the Indo-European migrat ...

– an Indo-European language and the only surviving representative of the

Albanoid Albanoid or Albanic is a branch or subfamily of the Indo-European languages, Indo-European (IE) languages, of which Albanian language varieties are the only surviving representatives. In current classifications of the IE language family, Albania ...

branch, belonging to the Paleo-Balkan group of antiquity.Fine, JA. ''The Early medieval Balkans''. University of Michigan Press, 1991. pp. 10–11
Google Books
/ref> Albanian varieties are today spoken by approximately 6 million people in the Balkans, primarily in

Albania Albania ( ; or ), officially the Republic of Albania (), is a country in Southeast Europe. It is located in the Balkans, on the Adriatic Sea, Adriatic and Ionian Seas within the Mediterranean Sea, and shares land borders with Montenegro to ...

Kosovo Kosovo, officially the Republic of Kosovo, is a landlocked country in Southeast Europe with International recognition of Kosovo, partial diplomatic recognition. It is bordered by Albania to the southwest, Montenegro to the west, Serbia to the ...

North Macedonia North Macedonia, officially the Republic of North Macedonia, is a landlocked country in Southeast Europe. It shares land borders with Greece to the south, Albania to the west, Bulgaria to the east, Kosovo to the northwest and Serbia to the n ...

Serbia , image_flag = Flag of Serbia.svg , national_motto = , image_coat = Coat of arms of Serbia.svg , national_anthem = () , image_map = , map_caption = Location of Serbia (gree ...

Montenegro , image_flag = Flag of Montenegro.svg , image_coat = Coat of arms of Montenegro.svg , coa_size = 80 , national_motto = , national_anthem = () , image_map = Europe-Mont ...

and

Greece Greece, officially the Hellenic Republic, is a country in Southeast Europe. Located on the southern tip of the Balkan peninsula, it shares land borders with Albania to the northwest, North Macedonia and Bulgaria to the north, and Turkey to th ...

. Albanian, especially the Tosk dialect, also represents one of the core languages of the Balkan Sprachbund. # Thraco-Dacian or

, a language that although almost unattested has left traces in toponomy and inscriptions. #

, if none of the other languages yielded any results.

Comparative methods applied to Albanian

In general, words assumed to belong to substratum can be placed into two categories: those related to nature and natural world *

terrain Terrain (), alternatively relief or topographical relief, is the dimension and shape of a given surface of land. In physical geography, terrain is the lay of the land. This is usually expressed in terms of the elevation, slope, and orientati ...

: , , , , ; *

bodies of water A body of water or waterbody is any significant accumulation of water on the surface of Earth or another planet. The term most often refers to oceans, seas, and lakes, but it includes smaller pools of water such as ponds, wetlands, or more ra ...

: , ; *

flora Flora (: floras or florae) is all the plant life present in a particular region or time, generally the naturally occurring (indigenous (ecology), indigenous) native plant, native plants. The corresponding term for animals is ''fauna'', and for f ...

: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ; *

fauna Fauna (: faunae or faunas) is all of the animal life present in a particular region or time. The corresponding terms for plants and fungi are ''flora'' and '' funga'', respectively. Flora, fauna, funga and other forms of life are collectively ...

: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ; and those used in pastoral life for: *

food Food is any substance consumed by an organism for Nutrient, nutritional support. Food is usually of plant, animal, or Fungus, fungal origin and contains essential nutrients such as carbohydrates, fats, protein (nutrient), proteins, vitamins, ...

: , , , , , , , ; *

clothing Clothing (also known as clothes, garments, dress, apparel, or attire) is any item worn on a human human body, body. Typically, clothing is made of fabrics or textiles, but over time it has included garments made from animal skin and other thin s ...

: , , , ; *

housing Housing refers to a property containing one or more Shelter (building), shelter as a living space. Housing spaces are inhabited either by individuals or a collective group of people. Housing is also referred to as a human need and right to ...

: , , ; *

body Body may refer to: In science * Physical body, an object in physics that represents a large amount, has mass or takes up space * Body (biology), the physical material of an organism * Body plan, the physical features shared by a group of anim ...

(some initially used for livestock): , , , , , ; * related activities: , , , , , , , , . Other words from substratum are: , , , , , , , , , (adj.), , . Words possibly of substratum but not generally agreed among linguists are: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

Comparative methods applied to Thraco-Dacian and/or other Indo-European languages

The comparative method can be extended to other languages of the Indo-European family, including ones from which Romanian could not have borrowed directly or indirectly, in order to reconstruct Thraco-Dacian substratum words. This yields results with varying degrees of probability. Between 80 and 100 words belong to this category. Substratum words like ''mal'' (1. shore, bank; 2. ravine, reg. a raised portion of land smaller than a hill and with abrupt sides) have almost identical correspondents in Albanian ''mal'' (mountain), but they can also be related to toponyms like Dacia Maluensis later renamed by Romans to Dacia Ripensis (''rīpa'' - meaning bank, shore - has been inherited in Romanian as ''râpă'' - the abrupt side of a hill). All river names over 500 km and half of those between 200 and 500 km derive from pre-

substratum, according to linguist and philologist Oliviu Felecan. Similarly, linguist Grigore Brâncuș states that almost the entire major hydronymy has been transmitted from Dacian to Romanian. Other linguists have pointed out that the present Romanian forms of these hydronyms indicate that they were borrowed from

Slavs The Slavs or Slavic people are groups of people who speak Slavic languages. Slavs are geographically distributed throughout the northern parts of Eurasia; they predominantly inhabit Central Europe, Eastern Europe, Southeastern Europe, and ...

Hungarians Hungarians, also known as Magyars, are an Ethnicity, ethnic group native to Hungary (), who share a common Culture of Hungary, culture, Hungarian language, language and History of Hungary, history. They also have a notable presence in former pa ...

Phonetic, morphological and syntactic features

A couple of phonetic changes have been agreed on as substratum influence: * the fricative post-alveolar consonant ''ș'' - /ʃ/ - comes from the voiceless fricative ''s'' in a soft position for example Lat. ''serpens''> Rom. ''șarpe''. * rhotacism of n consonant, seen only marginally in Romanian, is a general rule for lexical items of Istro-Romanian and

Tosk Albanian Tosk ( sq-definite, toskërishtja) is the southern group of dialects of the Albanian language, spoken by the ethnographic group known as Tosks. The line of demarcation between Tosk and Gheg (the northern variety) is the Shkumbin River. Tosk is ...

prior to the contact with

Slavic languages The Slavic languages, also known as the Slavonic languages, are Indo-European languages spoken primarily by the Slavs, Slavic peoples and their descendants. They are thought to descend from a proto-language called Proto-Slavic language, Proto- ...

(before ). Several other have been attributed to the influence of substratum by some researchers, but there is no general consensus among scholars. For example, the development of "ă" vowel: linguists Al. Phillipide and Grigore Brâncuș consider the spontaneous evolution of unstressed "a" from words like Lat. ''camisia''>Rom. ''cămașă'', and stresses "a" before a /n/ or a consonant cluster beginning with /m/, a vowel found also in Bulgarian and Albanian, as the substratum influence in Romanian, while linguist Marius Sala points this changes can also be seen as the tendency of the oral language to differentiate between forms of a

paradigm In science and philosophy, a paradigm ( ) is a distinct set of concepts or thought patterns, including theories, research methods, postulates, and standards for what constitute legitimate contributions to a field. The word ''paradigm'' is Ancient ...

, comparable to the development of similar central vowels in Portuguese or Neapolitan. Likewise, the morphological and syntactical features attributed to substratum, identified by comparison to Albanian and other languages of the Balkan sprachbund, are subject to scholarly debate since the grammatical structure of the ancient languages of the Balkans, except Greek, is unattested.

A difficult research topic

Numerous language studies and research papers discuss the problems of the Substrate in Romanian, considered by some to be the most controversial and difficult part of Romanian language since its nature and development could explain the evolution of Latin to Romanian. Some linguists (including Sorin Olteanu, Sorin Paliga and Ivan Duridanov) propose that a number of words presented as borrowings from a Slavic language or from Hungarian in standard literature may have actually developed from reconstructed (not attested) words of local

Indo-European languages The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the northern Indian subcontinent, most of Europe, and the Iranian plateau with additional native branches found in regions such as Sri Lanka, the Maldives, parts of Central Asia (e. ...

and they were borrowed from Romanian by the neighboring languages. Though the substratum status of many Romanian words is not much disputed, their status as Dacian words is controversial, some more than others since there are no significant surviving written examples of the

Dacian language Dacian () is an extinct language generally believed to be a member of the Indo-European languages, Indo-European language family that was spoken in the ancient region of Dacia. The Dacian language is poorly documented. Unlike Phrygian languag ...

. Many of the possible pre-Roman lexical items of Romanian have Albanian parallels, and if they are in fact substratum words

cognates In historical linguistics, cognates or lexical cognates are sets of words that have been inherited in direct descent from an etymological ancestor in a common parent language. Because language change can have radical effects on both the soun ...

with the Albanian ones, and not

loanwords A loanword (also a loan word, loan-word) is a word at least partly assimilated from one language (the donor language) into another language (the recipient or target language), through the process of borrowing. Borrowing is a metaphorical term t ...

from Albanian, it indicates that the substrate language of Romanian may have been on the same Indo-European branch as Albanian.

Other languages

The Bulgarian Thracologist Vladimir Georgiev developed the theory that the Romanian language has a " Daco-Moesian" language as its substrate, a hypothecised language that according to him had a number of features which distinguished it from the

Thracian language The Thracian language () is an extinct and Attested language, poorly attested language, spoken in ancient times in Southeast Europe by the Thracians. The linguistic affinities of the Thracian language are Classification of Thracian, poorly unde ...

spoken further south, across the Haemus range. There are also some Romanian substratum words in languages other than Romanian, these examples having entered via Romanian dialects. For example, Bryndza is a type of cheese made in Eastern

Austria Austria, formally the Republic of Austria, is a landlocked country in Central Europe, lying in the Eastern Alps. It is a federation of nine Federal states of Austria, states, of which the capital Vienna is the List of largest cities in Aust ...

Poland Poland, officially the Republic of Poland, is a country in Central Europe. It extends from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Sudetes and Carpathian Mountains in the south, bordered by Lithuania and Russia to the northeast, Belarus and Ukrai ...

, the

Czech Republic The Czech Republic, also known as Czechia, and historically known as Bohemia, is a landlocked country in Central Europe. The country is bordered by Austria to the south, Germany to the west, Poland to the northeast, and Slovakia to the south ...

(Moravian Wallachia),

Slovakia Slovakia, officially the Slovak Republic, is a landlocked country in Central Europe. It is bordered by Poland to the north, Ukraine to the east, Hungary to the south, Austria to the west, and the Czech Republic to the northwest. Slovakia's m ...

and

Ukraine Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It is the List of European countries by area, second-largest country in Europe after Russia, which Russia–Ukraine border, borders it to the east and northeast. Ukraine also borders Belarus to the nor ...

, the name being derived from the Romanian word for

cheese Cheese is a type of dairy product produced in a range of flavors, textures, and forms by coagulation of the milk protein casein. It comprises proteins and fat from milk (usually the milk of cows, buffalo, goats or sheep). During prod ...

(''brânză'').

References

{{Romanian language History of the Romanian language Linguistic strata