Linguistic nerdiness

[inulro]

I just watched a documentary on the Ceaucescu regime on UK History. The programme wasn't terribly interesting in itself, but I ended up glued to it because of the language.

Some of you may know that I used to study linguistics.

Romanian is the Romance language that nobody tells you about. It's on the list on the first day, but that's about the extent of it. We studied where the vowels went and how verbs formed in French, Spanish and Italian (Portuguese tended to go by the wayside as well but at least I know it just went further downhill from Spanish) when the regional languages grew out of Latin. I've also never been able to work out geographically just how Romania ended up having a Romance rather than Slavic or Germanic language.

I was looking into travel to Romania a few months ago and came across a web site in Romanian. It looks a bit like Italian with odd accents. Most of the programme I just watched was in Romanian with subtitles. It's the first time I've heard Romanian spoken. It does indeed sound a lot like Italian - the nouns and adjectives do anyway. I can make neither head nor tail of the verbs, and a there's odd words that sound german - particularly the word for "nobody".

It's really cool. If I had the time and working brain cells my next big project would be learning Romanian for no good reason. I may well spend some time tomorrow looking for websites about the evolution of the language. Having said that, I was doing better at making out bits of the language from the subtitles than I should have been able to do, possibly better than I was doing at deciphering French TV the other month. (No subtitles, but I used to be fluent in French).

But for now, I'm still somewhat broken post-Exile (though my right knee has thankfully stopped hurting as of this afternoon) and I'm off to bed before I fall asleep in this chair (an experience from which my back would never recover).

Comments

[sheepthief.livejournal.com]

So is Romainian what the gypsies of central europe speak? I've heard the gypsies of Slovakia talking and I suppose it sounded a little like Italian though much more harsh and aggressive.

[inulro.livejournal.com]

Nope! I'm not sure what sort of language Romany is - that's another question they don't thank you for asking in undergrad linguistics classes. But I'm pretty sure it's only very distantly related.

[sheepthief.livejournal.com]

You prompted me to go and have a quick rummage, and the first thing google came up with was http://www.romani.org/local/romhist.html which reckons Indian origins. Which is interesting. Of course the usual disclaimers apply regarding information gleaned from the internet, but you already know that.

Incidentally, did you notice the link I posted to writing systems at http://www.omniglot.com/writing/undeciphered.htm ?

[nils.livejournal.com]

Romania ended up with a Romance language because it was a Roman-controlled territory for several centuries - much in the same way as France, really. I couldn't tell you why the natives there picked up Latin while the ones in Yugoslavia didn't, but I'm sure there's an explanation for it...

If you're interested in obscure languages, there's always Rheto-Romance, one of four offical languages in Switzerland...

[quercus.livejournal.com]

Five official languages in Switzerland - there's also the military language, a sort of roll-your-own Esperanto glued together from the others. It didn't work too well, and they've dumped it now (for English, AFAIK)

[inulro.livejournal.com]

I'd forgotten about that - you hear about it in basic intro to Switzerland stuff, but I don't remember the linguistics of it ever coming up.

[nils.livejournal.com]

I only know about it because the University of Oslo (where I studied Linguistics, amongst other things) offer a course in it (just a build-on module if you've already studied another Romance language, IIRC). I always found it fascinating that they've made it an official language even though hardly anyone speaks it...

[inulro.livejournal.com]

I suspect a greater percentage of the population spoke it at some nebulous point in the past.