Substrate in Romanian

The study of the substrate involves comparative methods applied to: Albanian varieties are today spoken by approximately 6 million people in the Balkans, primarily in Albania, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Serbia, Montenegro and Greece. Albanian, especially the Tosk dialect, also represents one of the core languages of the Balkan Sprachbund. • Thraco-Dacian or Thracian, a language that although almost unattested has left traces in toponomy and inscriptions. • Proto-Indo-European, if none of the other languages yielded any results. those related to nature and the natural world • terrain: , , , , ; • bodies of water: , ; • flora: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ; • fauna: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ; and those used in pastoral life for: • food: , , , , , , , ; • clothing: , , , ; • housing: , , ; • body (some initially used for livestock): , , , , , ; • related activities: , , , , , , , , . Other words from substratum are: , , , , fluier, , , , , (adj.), , . Words possibly of substratum but not generally agreed among linguists are: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . 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-Latin 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. ) has preserved the substrate form of their names instead of the Latin form. Other linguist say that the Romanian form of the names of these rivers indicate, that they are loanwords in Romanian mainly from Slavic and Hungarian. ==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 prior to the contact with Slavic languages (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, 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 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. Many of the possible 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. ==Other languages==

The Bulgarian Thracologist Vladimir Georgiev developed the theory that the Romanian language has a "Daco-Moesian" language as its substrate, a hypothesised language that according to him had a number of features which distinguished it from the Thracian language 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, Poland, the Czech Republic (Moravian Wallachia), Slovakia and Ukraine, the name being derived from the Romanian word for cheese (brânză). == See also ==