Linguistic nerdiness
Sep. 8th, 2003 08:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
inulroI 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).
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).
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no subject
Date: 2003-09-09 09:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-09-09 09:57 am (UTC)Incidentally, did you notice the link I posted to writing systems at http://www.omniglot.com/writing/undeciphered.htm ?