Re-latinization of Romanian
Romanian adopted a Latin-based alphabet to replace the Cyrillic script and borrowed many words from French as well as from Latin and Italian, in order to acquire the lexical tools necessary for modernization.
This deliberate process coined words for recently introduced objects or concepts (neologisms), added Latinate synonyms for some Slavic and other loanwords, and strengthened some Romance syntactic features.
[3] Significant Romanian diasporas developed in other European countries (especially in Italy and Spain) and in North America, Australia and Israel.
[8][9] Scholars who propose that the Roman province of Dacia Trajana (which existed to the north of the river for about 165 years) was an important venue of the Romanians' ethnogenesis accept the continuity north of the Danube, a theory also supported by scholars who consider that the origins of the Romanians included territories located not only in Dacia, but also in areas south of the Danube (which were under Roman rule for centuries).
[15] Romanian along with Spanish and Portuguese retained more archaic lexical items from Latin than other Romance languages, most probably due to their peripheral position.
[19][20] Scholars assume that Albanian was closely related to the likely Thracian[21] or Thraco-Dacian[22] substrate languages, whose Romanization gave rise to the development of Romanian, or descends from it.
[26] Flavio Biondo was the first scholar to have observed (in 1435) linguistic affinities between the Romanian and Italian languages, as well as their common Latin origin.
[29] In the early 19th century, the Slovene linguist, Jernej Kopitar, suggested that Romanian emerged through the relexification either of an ancient Balkan language or of a Slavic idiom, instead of directly developing from Vulgar Latin.
[30] Linguist Anthony P. Grant writes that Wexler's hypothesis is not "completely convincing", stating that the "rise of Romanian still seems to be a case of language shift, analogous to the rise of English in England", with the Romanian's substratum equivalent to British Celtic, the Balkan Latin stratum similar to Anglo-Saxon, and the South Slavic superstratum equivalent to the Norman French role.
[21] Linguist Posner attributed to Friedrich Diez, who was one of the first German scholars systematically studying Romance philology, the opinion of Romanian ("Wallachian") being a semi-Romance language in the early 19th century.
[43][44] In 1978, Alexandru Niculescu opted for the label occidentalizare romanică ("Romance Westernization"), while Vasile D. Țâra described the process in 1982 as the "Latin-Romance direction in the modernization of the Romanian literary language".
[43] Ioana Moldovanu-Cenușă emphasizes the differences between the "Roman Westernization", which took place in Moldavia and Wallachia under the influences of the Age of Enlightenment, and the "re-latinization" carried out by the representatives of the Transylvanian School and of the "Latinist current".
[47] Scholars of the Transylvanian School were the first to make concerted efforts to eliminate certain non-Romance features of the language in the late 18th century.
[5] They were Greek Catholic (or Uniate) intellectuals tutored in Vienna and Rome who were determined to manifest the Latin origin of Romanians.
[48] Their spelling system was primarily designed to demonstrate the Latin roots of the Romanian words, ignoring their contemporary pronunciation.
[48] Re-latinisation reached the Wallachia in the early 19th century, when Ion Heliade Rădulescu introduced large numbers of Italian neologisms.
[56] These were neologisms build as internal lexical formations, created by derivation of the Latin-inherited "root words" from the Romanian groundstock.
[57] For instance, the loan translations bărbătesc and femeiesc (from the Romanian words for man and woman respectively) soon vanished to give place to the loanwords masculin and feminin as labels for two grammatical genders.
[62] It also added a large number of loanwords from French, Italian, and Latin, representing nowadays about 20% of the entire lexis with semantic fields such as Modern World (58%), Law (35%), Emotions and Values (29%), or Clothing and Grooming (27%) being the main areas of distribution in accordance to the changes of the time (post-Ottoman legal system, global development of new technologies and so on).
[37] The revival of the true infinitive and the gradual disappearance of use of reflexive verbs in impersonal passive situations are attributed by scholars to the influence of Western Romance languages.
