Older Romanian etymological dictionaries tended to assume a borrowing in many cases, usually from a
Slavic language or from
Hungarian, but etymological analysis may show that, in many cases, the direction of borrowing was from Romanian to the neighboring languages. The current
Dicționar explicativ (DEX) published by the
Romanian Academy continues to list many words as
borrowings, though the work of other linguists (Sorin Olteanu,
Sorin Paliga, Ivan Duridanov,
et al.) may indicate that a number of these are in fact indigenous, from local
Indo-European languages. Though the substratum status of many Romanian words is not much disputed, their status as Dacian words is controversial, some more than others. There are no significant surviving written examples of the Dacian language, so it is difficult to verify in most cases whether a given Romanian word is actually from Dacian or not. Many of the pre-Roman lexical items of Romanian have
Albanian parallels, and if they are in fact substratum words
cognates with the Albanian ones, and not
loanwords from Albanian, it indicates that the substrate language of Romanian may have been on the same Indo-European branch as Albanian. The Bulgarian Thracologist
Vladimir Georgiev developed the theory that the Romanian language has a "
Daco-Moesian" language as its substrate, a hypothesized language that according to him had a number of features which distinguished it from the
Thracian language spoken further south, across the
Haemus range. According to Romanian historian , there are supposedly over 160 Romanian words of Dacian origin, representing, together with derivates, 10% of the basic Romanian vocabulary. But through the scantly documented Dacian linguistic material such origin can't be proven. Attested
Dacian plant names that were collected by
Dioscorides and
Pseudo-Apuleius do not belong to the
Romanian lexicon. Below is a list of
Romanian words of possible pre-Roman origin. Some early scholars have speculated that they are of
Dacian origin, but there is no evidence for it. A number of the words are clear loanwords from attested languages. • The
Notes column contains information found in various dictionaries. "Not in current use" indicates words not found in dictionaries of contemporary Romanian. • The
Sources column indicates the linguist(s) or the works who suggested including the words in the list: • "Sala": Marius Sala,
De la latină la română (1998) *"Hasdeu":
Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu,
Etymologicum Magnum Romaniae, 1894. • "Russu": ,
Limba traco-dacilor, Editura Științifică, 1967. The words that have been identified by I. I. Russu to have cognates in
Albanian are marked with
(Alb.). • "Vraciu":
Ariton Vraciu,
Limba daco-geților, Timișoara: Editura Facla, 1980. • "NODEX":
Noul dicționar explicativ al limbii române [
The New Dictionary of the Romanian Language, Litera Internațional, 2002. In this dictionary substratum words are labeled
cuvînt autohton "native word". • "Olteanu":
Sorin Olteanu, "The TDM Palatal". • "Ciorănescu":
Alexandru Ciorănescu,
Diccionario etimológico rumano, Tenerife: Universidad de la Laguna, 1958–1966. • Sorin Paliga, Etymological Lexicon of the Indigenous (Thracian) Elements in Romanian, Bucharest: Editura Evenimentul, 2006. ==Other languages==