Nov

30

Eastern Romance languages

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The Eastern Romance languages, sometimes known as the Vlach languages, are a group of Romance languages that developed in Southeastern Europe from the local eastern variant of Vulgar Latin.


History

Several hundred years after the Roman Empire’s dominance of the region, the local form of Vulgar Latin developed into Proto-Romanian, a language which had most of the features of modern Romanian. Due to foreign invasions (see Romania in the Dark Ages) and the migration of Vlach shepherds (see Vlachs in Wallachia), around 800CE and 1200CE Proto-Romanian split into four separate languages: Daco-Romanian (today’s Romanian), Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian and Istro-Romanian. While under Soviet rule, Eastern Moldavia came to be known as an independent nation, Moldova, with its own language, Moldovan.


Common features

This group was one of the earliest to be isolated. As such, they contain a few words which were replaced with Germanic borrowings in Western Romance languages, for example, the word for white is derived from Latin “albus” instead of Germanic “blank”.

They also share a few sound changes with the western Romance languages: some with Italian, such as [kl] > [kj] (Lat. clarus > Rom. chiar, Ital. chiaro) and also a few with Dalmatian, such as [gn] > [mn] (Lat. cognatus > Rom. cumnat, Dalm. comnut). However, most of them are original, see: Latin to Romanian sound changes.

The languages that are part of this group have some features that differentiate them from the other Romance languages, notable being the grammatical features shared within the Balkan linguistic union as well as some semantic peculiarities, such as lume (”world”) being derived from Latin lumen (”light”), inimă (”heart”) being derived from Latin anima (”soul”), etc.

They also contain a Paleo-Balkanic substrate of a few hundreds of words, shared with Albanian (considered to be of Dacian origin) and 70 early Slavic borrowings, but the Hungarian language words are found only in Romanian and Istro-Romanian.


Languages

  • Romanian (known officially as Moldovan in the Republic of Moldova)
  • Aromanian
  • Megleno-Romanian
  • Istro-Romanian


See also

  • Romanian substratum words
  • List of Romance languages

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