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    Posted: 11-Apr-2008 at 08:22
Originally posted by Cezar

  Certainly, Spartakus, but that doesn't mean we cannot debate. Since there are many thoughts and schools of opinion, why don't we analyse the consistency of these with the known facts?


We can debate, surely.
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Originally posted by Spartakus

Lucian Boia is Professor of History at the University of Bucharest.
http://www.unibuc.ro/en/cd_lucboia_en

Actually he's not professor of history, because there's no such class within the faculty of history, where he's teaching. You see, history (much like engineering or medicine) has many sub-fields and absolutely no one is an authority in them all. Some are military historians, some are classicists, some are medievalists, some are economy historians, some are historiographers. Each one has expertise in his own field (much like bridge building and electrical engineering or stomatology and oncology).
Lucian Boia has no scholarly competence in linguistics, philology, in middle ages topics, in cultural anthropology and in many fields which he was quoted for.
 
 
According to his own declaration, his initial focus was on inter-ethnic relations in Austro-Hungarian monarchy (mostly Transylvania), but since mid-70s he dropped this and started on historiography, thus bringing in his own interest also the theories of history, or the histories of ideas and culture, of mentalities. Since the 90s he was mostly preoccupied with the studies of the imaginary, of the mentalities and of modern mythologies. He's hardly an authority in what you quoted him for.
 
Also Lucian Boia's work was subjected to criticism regarding the accuracy of some of his claims. One famous of book of his, "History and myth in Romanian consciousness" (several ideas from it are present also in "Romania: borderland of Europe") received a harsh reply in another book "About the history, the truth and the myths" authored by Ioan Aurel Pop, the latter being more acquainted with the realities of Romanian Middle Ages and Early Modern Era ( http://www.mae.ro/poze_editare/CV_APop.pdf , http://hiphi.ubbcluj.ro/hiphi/publicatii/pop.htm http://www.ftr.ro/descentralizarea-sustinuta-istoric-2819.php ). The criticism (which may in itself be criticized, but AFAIK Boia didn't offer any reply to it) focuses largely on accuracy of individual claims, though also some general considerations are present in it.
 
Another "feature" of Boia's recent works is that they have a real thin bibliography and few references (many pages and claims have no reference at all!). You can check that in the book you're quoting from. Not being an expert himself, nor quoting other experts, Boia's claims cannot be held without further arguments.
 
And last but not at least, some of these books have a wholly different purpose, according to Boia's own interests. Let's read from the Introduction of "Romania: borderland of Europe" (p. 7): "This book is an attempt to answer to the question: 'What is Romania?'. What I hope to do is to describe and explain a country." and continuing on the next few pages. What is to be noticed here is that Boia simply provides his own deconstruction of Romania and its history. He is not suggesting he's writing a scholarly study on the history of Romanian language or literature or whatever other aspects of Romanian history. Thus he cannot be held as an authority for these. 
 
I wrote all these to have it once and for all clear when and how should we value "Boia's opinion". He's not to be blamed if his work is misused.
 
I will address in my next post those paragraphs you stripped and their context (because I have noticed the selection and the subtitles are rather misleading).
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Posts: 2888 		  Quote Anton Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 14-Apr-2008 at 22:10
Originally posted by Spartakus

Lucian Boia is Professor of History at the University of Bucharest.
http://www.unibuc.ro/en/cd_lucboia_en

A Romanian who hears Italian spoken can understand quite a lot (those Romanian ancestors count for something after all!);an Italian will understand much less Romanian,confused by the Slavic and oriental words and by the pronunciation.In any case,an Italian will never speak Romanian perfectly.On the other hand, many Bulgarians learn Romanian very well and speak it without an accent (precisely because the 'tone' of the two languages is similar).Are the Romanians closer to Italians or to Bulgarians?Who can say? They are brought close to the Italians, of course, by their Latin roots and by the desire  of an elite in the modern period to look towards the West.But the Thracian substrate, the Slavic component, the Orthodox faith, oriental influence and a long common history mean that they are close to Bulgarians and other Balkan peoples too.

 
I doubt this is actually true. In any case it has nothing to do with slavonic -- I know quite a few Romanians and Bulgarians speaking Russian -- it is horrible. They are probably worst Russian speakers.
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Posts: 2888 		  Quote Anton Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 14-Apr-2008 at 22:14
Originally posted by Spartakus

Well, they were illiterate ,but your claim that they did not have access to the Slavonic culture is also easily dismissed. In Church, the Holy Communion and other liturgies were held in Slavonic, because the Holy Scripture was written in Slavonic. My grandmother, who never learned Ancient Greek knows by heart the majority of the liturgies of the Church, which were written in Ancient Greek.


 
I have couple of Greek friends, quite educated, claiming they do not understand Ancient Greek.
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Posts: 1791 		  Quote Decebal Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 15-Apr-2008 at 15:55
Originally posted by Anton

Originally posted by Spartakus

Lucian Boia is Professor of History at the University of Bucharest.
http://www.unibuc.ro/en/cd_lucboia_en

A Romanian who hears Italian spoken can understand quite a lot (those Romanian ancestors count for something after all!);an Italian will understand much less Romanian,confused by the Slavic and oriental words and by the pronunciation.In any case,an Italian will never speak Romanian perfectly.On the other hand, many Bulgarians learn Romanian very well and speak it without an accent (precisely because the 'tone' of the two languages is similar).Are the Romanians closer to Italians or to Bulgarians?Who can say? They are brought close to the Italians, of course, by their Latin roots and by the desire  of an elite in the modern period to look towards the West.But the Thracian substrate, the Slavic component, the Orthodox faith, oriental influence and a long common history mean that they are close to Bulgarians and other Balkan peoples too.

 
I doubt this is actually true. In any case it has nothing to do with slavonic -- I know quite a few Romanians and Bulgarians speaking Russian -- it is horrible. They are probably worst Russian speakers.
 
I can't say too much for Romanians speaking Bulgarian (though I do remember it sounding very foreign to me during my childhood when I used to watch Bulgarian TV every day). Italian however is a breeze for Romanians. I, as a Romanian who went to Italy on vacation, could understand it without any training whatsoever; after two weeks I could actually have a conversation in Italian... In my opinion, Romanian is much much closer to Italian than it is to Bulgarian. I have also had conversations in Romanian around Italians and they told that they couldn't understand much.
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Posts: 4489 		  Quote Spartakus Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 15-Apr-2008 at 17:38
Originally posted by Chilbudios

Originally posted by Spartakus

Lucian Boia is Professor of History at the University of Bucharest.
http://www.unibuc.ro/en/cd_lucboia_en

Actually he's not professor of history, because there's no such class within the faculty of history, where he's teaching. You see, history (much like engineering or medicine) has many sub-fields and absolutely no one is an authority in them all. Some are military historians, some are classicists, some are medievalists, some are economy historians, some are historiographers. Each one has expertise in his own field (much like bridge building and electrical engineering or stomatology and oncology).
Lucian Boia has no scholarly competence in linguistics, philology, in middle ages topics, in cultural anthropology and in many fields which he was quoted for.
 
 
According to his own declaration, his initial focus was on inter-ethnic relations in Austro-Hungarian monarchy (mostly Transylvania), but since mid-70s he dropped this and started on historiography, thus bringing in his own interest also the theories of history, or the histories of ideas and culture, of mentalities. Since the 90s he was mostly preoccupied with the studies of the imaginary, of the mentalities and of modern mythologies. He's hardly an authority in what you quoted him for.
 
Also Lucian Boia's work was subjected to criticism regarding the accuracy of some of his claims. One famous of book of his, "History and myth in Romanian consciousness" (several ideas from it are present also in "Romania: borderland of Europe") received a harsh reply in another book "About the history, the truth and the myths" authored by Ioan Aurel Pop, the latter being more acquainted with the realities of Romanian Middle Ages and Early Modern Era ( http://www.mae.ro/poze_editare/CV_APop.pdf , http://hiphi.ubbcluj.ro/hiphi/publicatii/pop.htm http://www.ftr.ro/descentralizarea-sustinuta-istoric-2819.php ). The criticism (which may in itself be criticized, but AFAIK Boia didn't offer any reply to it) focuses largely on accuracy of individual claims, though also some general considerations are present in it.
 
Another "feature" of Boia's recent works is that they have a real thin bibliography and few references (many pages and claims have no reference at all!). You can check that in the book you're quoting from. Not being an expert himself, nor quoting other experts, Boia's claims cannot be held without further arguments.
 
And last but not at least, some of these books have a wholly different purpose, according to Boia's own interests. Let's read from the Introduction of "Romania: borderland of Europe" (p. 7): "This book is an attempt to answer to the question: 'What is Romania?'. What I hope to do is to describe and explain a country." and continuing on the next few pages. What is to be noticed here is that Boia simply provides his own deconstruction of Romania and its history. He is not suggesting he's writing a scholarly study on the history of Romanian language or literature or whatever other aspects of Romanian history. Thus he cannot be held as an authority for these. 
 
I wrote all these to have it once and for all clear when and how should we value "Boia's opinion". He's not to be blamed if his work is misused.
 
I will address in my next post those paragraphs you stripped and their context (because I have noticed the selection and the subtitles are rather misleading).


I never said Boia is an authority. I use him as a source , and not as evidence, as you claimed in an earlier post of yours,for the simple fact that he tells in a few and understandable words what i believe. Of course can people disagree with him, that's the whole point of science. Someone writes a book and some other criticize it , sometimes by writing another book .A few examples:Roesler vs Xenopol, for the Romanian case, Paparigopoulos vs Fallmerayer, for the Greek case, and so on.Now, i presented what he believes. So, claims of misuse should not be appointed to me again, because it will be nothing more than a simple provocation.Really, i could post the entire book. I could post entire paragraphs, as i already did, entire chapters. But what would be the point ? In the end, according to you, we should not post nothing and just recommend books.Well, this is not the way to make a discussion in a Internet forum.

Originally posted by Anton


I have couple of Greek friends, quite educated, claiming they do not understand Ancient Greek.


There is a problem. First of all, there is not one Ancient Greek language or dialect. Surely, for a modern Greek it is very difficult to understand a text from the Classical period, but he can understand to a huge degree the Hellenistic koine, the language in which the Bible is written, which is also Ancient Greek.


Edited by Spartakus - 15-Apr-2008 at 17:41
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Posts: 1900 		  Quote Chilbudios Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 15-Apr-2008 at 18:35
Originally posted by Spartakus

I never said Boia is an authority. I use him as a source , and not as evidence, as you claimed in an earlier post of yours,for the simple fact that he tells in a few and understandable words what i believe.
If he's not an authority, he's not a reliable source. If he's not reliable, spamming in this thread from his books suggests trolling rather than a real contribution. In a debate on Romanian language we should invoke linguists and philologists, not historiographers sold as "reliable" by the disingenuous label "Professor of History".
 
And he doesn't tell what you believe, really. He's not suggesting any "resemblence with the Slavs" as you erroneously and biasedly summarized. The chapter from which you quoted so much is entitled "An Island of Latinity" (pp. 28-59). He said quite clearly on page 57 "the Romanian language is unmistakeable, with its predominantly Latin note but also its appreciable Slavic colouring". and also on the same page "Of all other languages, the closest to Romanian is Italian". After this last claim Boia announces a paradox and then writes what you quoted from page 58. Distorting an author's view to support a controversial position which otherwise has no arguments is, again, an act of trolling. A discussion should not be disrupted in such a way.
 
So, claims of misuse should not be appointed to me again, because it will be nothing more than a simple provocation.
It's actually an accusation. You're abusing sources to support your view.
 
Really, i could post the entire book. I could post entire paragraphs, as i already did, entire chapters.
You only posted some shreds from some paragraphs, rather misleading than illuminating. You avoided to mention that for Boia Romanian is actually a neo-Latin language, with a predominant Latin note, having Italian as its closest language.


Edited by Chilbudios - 15-Apr-2008 at 18:39
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Posts: 4489 		  Quote Spartakus Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 15-Apr-2008 at 18:52
Originally posted by Chilbudios

If he's not an authority, he's not a reliable source. If he's not reliable, spamming in this thread from his books suggests trolling rather than a real contribution. In a debate on Romanian language we should invoke linguists and philologists, not historiographers sold as "reliable" by the disingenuous label "Professor of History".


First of all, we have cleared out that you have a problem with this man. You do not have to continue repeating the same things. Secondly, we are not debating about the Romance character or latin origin of modern Romanian, but about Romanian ethnic identity.

 
Originally posted by Chilbudios


And he doesn't tell what you believe, really. He's not suggesting any "resemblence with the Slavs" as you erroneously and biasedly summarized.


"However, I believe  that Ioan Bogdan was right.Where the Romanian language is concerned, the Slavs' contribution was clearly more important than that of the Dacians; moreover , it is far from certain  that the Slavs were any less numerous than the Roman colonists.However, it is important to remember that a people cannot be reduced to biological data ('blood') ,or even to linguistic data.The racial-linguistic approach of the Romantic period now seems completely out of date.In speaking about the Slavs, we cannot ignore the profound cultural impact of the Slavonic model in the Romanian Middle Ages.With the exception  of language (and even here we must note a significant Slavic infusion and the use of Slavonic as a language of culture), the Romanian lands in the Middle  Ages come across as similar to the Slavic countries of the region.It is not France and Italy that Wallachia and Moldavia resemble so much as Bulgaria and Serbia.
 A people does not remain fixed over time.It is a fluid synthesis and in any case a cultural,not a biological, one.Ancestral inheritance is continually diluted, and contemporary connections are more important than origins.Ancestors end up counting less for themselves and more for the ways in which we use them to mark our identity.It is certain that the Romanians of today resemble the British (different as they are) more than they do the Dacians and the Romans.In fact, they do not resemble the latter at all:they lived 2000 years ago, and had a quite different mentality and way of life than we do. Marc Bloc's remark,quoting an Arab proverb, is very apt:' People resemble their times more than they resemble their fathers'."

 
You know English i suppose, don't you?


 



Edited by Spartakus - 15-Apr-2008 at 18:52
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Posts: 1900 		  Quote Chilbudios Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 15-Apr-2008 at 19:17

Now let's address Boia's points on Romanian and other languages.

When studying the lexical dimension of a language, counting all the words from a language is rather meaningless, as most of the words are virtually unused (or used in very rare and specific occasions) by the most of the speakers. Asserting a very important interaction between Greek and English based on words like "stomatology" is absurd.
That's why, using both frequency but also areas of interest, the linguists elaborated and defined an concept which is named 'core vocabulary' or 'main word base' (these are rough translation, there might be already a terminology in English but I'm not aware of it). This core vocabulary includes basic actions, activities and tools, human body parts, human relations, colors, some common animals and plants, etc. but also other necessary language elements like prepositions and conjunctions, pronouns, etc.
For Romanian language, one of the most recent and important evaluations was performed by Marius Sala ( http://www.racai.ro/awd/awd8/sala1.html ) in colaboration with a collective of scholars in 1988 in Vocabularul reprezentativ al limbilor romanice (The representative vocabulary of the Romanic languages). They analyzed nine Romanic languages and compared their core vocabularies.
For Romanian, they counted more than 2500 words which etymologically come from:
Romanic elements: ~70% (I rounded most numbers in case we will discuss more on them; trust me, not to inflate the Romanic influence - after all, this percent was originally of 71.66%)
~30% from Latin
~20% from French
~15% from scholarly Latin (Church Latin, that is)
~4% from Italian
Slavic elements: ~14%
~9% from Common Slavic
~2.5% from Bulgarian
+ several other contributions, all the other percents are smaller, save for some 2.5% or so of unknown origin.
What is to be remarked here is that in this core vocabulary the words from Common Slavic (from the hypothetised Slavo-Romanian symbiosis) are ranked 4th, after Latin, French and scholarly Latin.
But what's more interesting, that the Slavic superstrate corresponds roughly to the Germanic superstrate in French and Italian (having even the same rank!). This was proven by this study, but this fact was noticed long time ago (one of the first was W. Meyer-Lbke in a conference held in 1930 entitled Rumnisch und Romanisch, who pointed also to several such pairs: bogat = "rich" in Romanian comes from Common Slavic, but the French riche and the Italian ricco, the Spanish rico, etc. come from Germanic or a păzi = "to guard" comes from Common Slavic, but the French guarder, the Italian guardare, the Spanish guardar come from Germanic).

With this observation we have just dismissed one preconception of Boia. An Italian trying to speak/understand Romanian won't be bothered too much by Slavic words, anyway, not much more than Romanians are bothered by Germanic words when they try to speak/understand Italian.

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Posts: 1900 		  Quote Chilbudios Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 15-Apr-2008 at 19:23
Originally posted by Spartakus

You know English i suppose, don't you?
You either have a short memory or you are really a shameless guy. Your bad luck is that scripta manent. You earlier pointed out to page 58 claiming that Boia identifies some resemblence with the Slavs on that page. I've already proven this is no true and that entire quote was taken out of its context, which was that Romanian is predominantly a Latin language and that Italian is its closest neighbour.
 
we are not debating about the Romance character or latin origin of modern Romanian, but about Romanian ethnic identity.
This thread is called "Romanian ethnic identiy and language". From four paragraphs you quoted from Boia, two are about Romanian language.


Edited by Chilbudios - 15-Apr-2008 at 19:32
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Posts: 4489 		  Quote Spartakus Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 15-Apr-2008 at 19:36
Originally posted by Chilbudios

I've already proven this is no true and that entire quote was taken out of its context, which was that Romanian is predominantly a Latin language and that Italian is its closest neighbour.


You have proven nothing at all.
 

Originally posted by Chilbudios

This thread is called "Romanian ethnic identiy and language". From four paragraphs you quoted from Boia, two are about Romanian language.


There also about Romanian language, but not of Romanian language's character which is undeniably a Romance language.


Edited by Spartakus - 15-Apr-2008 at 19:37
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Posts: 1900 		  Quote Chilbudios Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 15-Apr-2008 at 19:50
There also about Romanian language, but not of Romanian language's character which is undeniably a Romance language.
But this thread is also about Romanian's language character, too. You actually quoted Boia in two paragraphs talking about Slavic influence on Romanian, that is Romanian's language character.
 
You have proven nothing at all.
Actually I did. I localized your quote in the book and I showed how you distorted the position you quoted. The author claimed rather the opposite ("predominantly Latin") of what you have claimed ("resemblance with Slavs").
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Posts: 4489 		  Quote Spartakus Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 15-Apr-2008 at 21:24
Originally posted by Chilbudios

But this thread is also about Romanian's language character, too. You actually quoted Boia in two paragraphs talking about Slavic influence on Romanian, that is Romanian's language character.


Nope, it isn't. You see , you can say , for example, that Turkish have a huge Arabic and Persian influence, but they are still Turkish, a language part of the Uro-Altaic group of languages, not of the Indo-European ones (Persian) or the Semitic ones (Arabic).What i wanted to show is the linguistic influence of Slavic in Romanian.
 
Originally posted by Chilbudios


Actually I did. I localized your quote in the book and I showed how you distorted the position you quoted. The author claimed rather the opposite ("predominantly Latin") of what you have claimed ("resemblance with Slavs").


Nope, you have not.Your quote is "Of all other languages, the closest to Romanian is Italian". Yes, but this quote only shows the side of the rode. The other side is "But the Thracian substrate, the Slavic component, the Orthodox faith, oriental influence and a long common history mean that they are close to Bulgarians and other Balkan peoples too."
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Posts: 1900 		  Quote Chilbudios Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 15-Apr-2008 at 23:56
Nope, it isn't. You see , you can say , for example, that Turkish have a huge Arabic and Persian influence, but they are still Turkish, a language part of the Uro-Altaic group of languages, not of the Indo-European ones (Persian) or the Semitic ones (Arabic).What i wanted to show is the linguistic influence of Slavic in Romanian.
A language's character is not only the group which is part of (or in case you follow some scholar's definition, please bring it on).
You were earlier mocking me by attacking my understanding of English, let's see then what the term "character" really means, shall we?
The Slavic influence in Romanian, likewise the Persian influence in Turkish or the French influence in English are an "essential" and "distinguishing" "quality", "feature", "attribute" of these languages, therefore inevitably shaping the language's character.
 
Nope, you have not.Your quote is "Of all other languages, the closest to Romanian is Italian". Yes, but this quote only shows the side of the rode. The other side is "But the Thracian substrate, the Slavic component, the Orthodox faith, oriental influence and a long common history mean that they are close to Bulgarians and other Balkan peoples too."
Actually I quoted Boia also with "the Romanian language is unmistakeable, with its predominantly Latin note but also its appreciable Slavic colouring" (p. 57). Any "side of the rode" falls under "predominantly Latin note" which is a characterization Boia gives to Romanian language on the whole. Considering both quotes are in the same post and even more in the same paragraph written by me only few posts before this one I consider this reply of yours, again, as an act of trolling.
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Posts: 4489 		  Quote Spartakus Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 16-Apr-2008 at 00:09
Originally posted by Chilbudios

The Slavic influence in Romanian, likewise the Persian influence in Turkish or the French influence in English are an "essential" and "distinguishing" "quality", "feature", "attribute" of these languages, therefore inevitably shaping the language's character.


We obviously do not mean the same thing by using the word character. Again, the issue here is not the language itself but it's influences.
 
Originally posted by Chilbudios


 Actually I quoted Boia also with "the Romanian language is unmistakeable, with its predominantly Latin note but also its appreciable Slavic colouring" (p. 57). Any "side of the rode" falls under "predominantly Latin note" which is a characterization Boia gives to Romanian language on the whole.


Predominantly latin, yes, but with strong Slavic influence, nonetheless.
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Posts: 1900 		  Quote Chilbudios Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 16-Apr-2008 at 00:31
We obviously do not mean the same thing by using the word character. Again, the issue here is not the language itself but it's influences.
The meaning of the word "character" must be contained by one of those definitions; in any other situation you chose the wrong word.
The influences are part of the language itself. There's no Romanian without Slavic influences, that would be some sort of a Balkan Late Latin. Maybe it's just a matter of semantics, but even so, we can't speak of any influences without addressing the entity they alter. It's a logical impossibility. When you say that Romanian has a strong Slavic influence we must discuss the language on the whole, otherwise the epithet "strong" gets meaningless.
Also let's remember that this discussion is over Boia's book and the chapter which you quoted from addresses the Romanian language, not only the Slavic influence on it.  
 
Predominantly latin, yes, but with strong Slavic influence, nonetheless.
Strong, yes, but strong is a vague term. Please note that Boia called this "strength" "Slavic colouring". I also made earlier some observation about the contribution of Slavic to Romanian's core vocabulary (and pointed out a similarity between the Slavic superstrate and the Germanic superstrate from the other Romance languages). And I will make some more observations in a future post where I will answer in detail to the claims made by Boia when he characterized the influence of Slavic on Romanian.


Edited by Chilbudios - 16-Apr-2008 at 00:39
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I have an amateurish question. Is it possible to speculate as to the percentage of Latin, and in contrast, Slavic words in the current Romanian language?
 
I did notice this bit:
 
Romanic elements: ~70% (I rounded most numbers in case we will discuss more on them; trust me, not to inflate the Romanic influence - after all, this percent was originally of 71.66%)
~30% from Latin
~20% from French
~15% from scholarly Latin (Church Latin, that is)
~4% from Italian
Slavic elements: ~14%
~9% from Common Slavic
~2.5% from Bulgarian
 
How is that delineation accomplished?


Edited by Seko - 16-Apr-2008 at 00:39
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Chilbudios View Drop Down
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Posts: 1900 		  Quote Chilbudios Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 16-Apr-2008 at 00:46
Originally posted by Seko

I have an amateurish question. Is it possible to speculate as to the percentage of Latin, and in contrast, Slavic words in the current Romanian language?
I guess so, I will look for some estimates for the entire word base (though I'm not sure how the archaisms, i.e. old words falling out of use, are dealt).
 
Romanic elements: ~70% (I rounded most numbers in case we will discuss more on them; trust me, not to inflate the Romanic influence - after all, this percent was originally of 71.66%)
~30% from Latin
~20% from French
~15% from scholarly Latin (Church Latin, that is)
~4% from Italian
Slavic elements: ~14%
~9% from Common Slavic
~2.5% from Bulgarian
 
How is that delineation accomplished?
The authors of that study chose a representative word base (called "representative vocabulary" - i.e. the most frequent words and also covering all the essential - I know, it may be relative, just think how Internet is evolving - areas of interest). For each word they traced their etymology and identified the language from which Romanian loaned or inherited that word. Many words have certain etymologies. Few have unknown origin (but they were listed separatedly) or debateable etymologies (that's another reason for why I didn't insist on listing the accurate figures).
 


Edited by Chilbudios - 16-Apr-2008 at 00:49
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Posts: 8595 		  Quote Seko Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 16-Apr-2008 at 00:53
Thanks for your response. In a sense they took a sample (2500 words) and evaluated each according to a root language, etymology. Another question. Do you feel the sample is representative of current Romanian? If so, then this study may prove conclusive. If not, perhaps other studies would provide further details.
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Posts: 2888 		  Quote Anton Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 16-Apr-2008 at 01:02
Chilbudios, I find it hard to believe that you don't use Turkish words in general conversations. Is it really true? Or you count only words used by teachers in front of girls in finishing schools :)

Edited by Anton - 16-Apr-2008 at 01:03
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