Stratigraphy

The Layers of a Word

Who left every Romanian word, and when

Romanian is the only Romance language that grew up surrounded by Slavs, under Ottoman suzerainty for centuries, first written in Church Slavonic and in Cyrillic letters, administered in turn from Buda and Vienna, schooled in Greek, and then deliberately rebuilt on a French model. Everything that passed through left words behind, and the words can still be sorted by who brought them.

Two counts that disagree

The question of who gave Romanian the most has two answers, and both are correct. Count the words in the dictionary and French wins easily: of the 47,654 lexemes whose donor can be named, 59.9 per cent come from French, while inherited Latin accounts for only 4.7 per cent. Count the words in a conversation instead and the ranking flips: Latin holds 78.0 per cent of what gets said, French 9.8 per cent.

The gap comes from frequency. French supplied a great many rare words; Latin supplied a few unavoidable ones. The prepositions, pronouns, numerals and auxiliaries recurring in almost every sentence are largely inherited from Latin. French filled the dictionary; Latin holds the sentence together.

The speech and writing percentages cover the words reached by the classification: 87.2 per cent of the spoken corpus and 78.8 per cent of the written one. The 47,654 lexemes feed the aggregate statistics; public search retains 15,658 words occurring at least once per million.

Distinct words in the dictionaryWords in a conversation

French 59.9% 9.8%

Inherited Latin 4.7% 78.0%

Hungarian 4.5% 0.4%

The later Slavic neighbours 4.4% 0.7%

Church Slavonic 4.4% 3.0%

Ottoman Turkish 3.5% 0.4%

German 3.1% 0.8%

Greek 2.6% 0.5%

The same two strata, two questions, two rankings that turn over. French filled the dictionary; Latin holds the sentence together.

The section

The strata sit in the order they were laid down, oldest at the bottom. Band thickness shows how much of the language each one holds, and the switch changes the question: how many distinct words the donor gave, or how much running text those words occupy.

Unknown 2.8%
Internal formation 2.3%
English 2.3%
French 59.9%
Italian 2.0%
Learned Latin 2.5%
German 3.1%
The later Slavic neighbours 4.4%
Ottoman Turkish 3.5%
Greek 2.6%
Hungarian 4.5%
Church Slavonic 4.4%
The neighbouring Slavs 0.7%
Inherited Latin 4.7%
The substrate 0.3%

Switch between the first two and the French band shrinks from more than half to less than a tenth, while Latin swells into its place.

Turkish words stayed in the kitchen

The strata are not distributed evenly across registers, and the difference makes historical sense. Turkish words are 1.9× more frequent in film dialogue than in encyclopedic prose. French words are 2.6× more frequent in encyclopedic prose than in dialogue. One language, two opposite fates.

The explanation lies in how each got in. Turkish came through trade and the household, and there it stayed: in what is eaten, what is put on a bed, and how boredom is expressed. French came through school and through law, and stayed in the office. Nobody wrote this rule anywhere; it is simply the consequence of the road each stratum took into the language.

How the state changed its vocabulary

The literary prose in the corpus stops in 1949, because copyright closes the archive. Fundamental laws have no such problem: they are public, dated to the day, and can be read as a series. Nine texts, from 1848 to 2003, show the exchange of strata in the only register that crosses the two centuries without a break.

The Slavonic chancery vocabulary disappears between 1848 and 1866. The French share climbs from 8.1 per cent to 36.0 per cent and peaks under communism. Four centuries of suzerainty left hundreds of words from the market and household, but almost nothing in the constitutional vocabulary measured here.

French

Inherited Latin

Church Slavonic

The later Slavic neighbours

Percent of the words whose donor can be named

View as table

Year	Document	French	Inherited Latin	Church Slavonic	The later Slavic neighbours
1848	Proclamația de la Islaz	8.1%	81.9%	3.3%	0.6%
1866	Constituția României	19.6%	71.4%	0.8%	0.2%
1923	Constituția României	24.0%	64.3%	1.0%	0.1%
1938	Constituția României	24.6%	63.4%	1.2%	0.1%
1948	Constituția Republicii Populare Române	33.7%	52.9%	2.3%	0.5%
1952	Constituția Republicii Populare Române	37.2%	49.6%	3.7%	1.1%
1965	Constituția Republicii Socialiste România	36.5%	48.7%	2.7%	1.7%
1991	Constituția României	35.8%	52.5%	1.5%	0.4%
2003	Constituția României, revizuită	36.0%	52.8%	1.2%	0.3%

The fifteen strata

The substrate

before AD 106 · Whoever was here before Rome

The only stratum whose donor has no name, because the language these words come from was never written down. A word lands here by elimination: Latin cannot explain it, Slavic cannot explain it, and Albanian has a relative for it, since Albanian rests on the same pre-Roman substrate. There are about a hundred and twenty in the whole language, and they cluster where a shepherd works: landforms, trees, parts of an animal, the tools of a sheepfold. Since the proof is negative, disagreement is the norm: for 24 of the words here, dexonline simply says the origin is unknown.

Words: 126
Spoken: 0.3%
Written: 0.2%

Most frequent

Inherited Latin

106 – seventh century · Rome, then a thousand years of talking

The bedrock. Few words and nearly all of the text: 78.0 per cent of what is spoken and 60.9 per cent of what is written. These words came in through the mouth and were worn down by use rather than copied out of a book: aqua became apă, noctem became noapte, oculus became ochi. The surprise is that the core Christian vocabulary is Latin rather than Slavonic: biserică comes from basilica, Dumnezeu from Domine Deus, and cruce, înger and a boteza travelled the same road. Christianity reached this territory before the Slavs did, and Church Slavonic arrived on top of it later, as the language of the liturgy.

Words: 2,238
Spoken: 78.0%
Written: 60.9%

Most frequent

The neighbouring Slavs

sixth to tenth centuries · Slavic villages among Romanian ones

A stratum of cohabitation. The Slavs who settled among Romanians left words picked up by ear, from the yard and the field, and the stratum gives itself away by register: need, throat, bath, money. It shows in how the words are used now, 2.2× more often in speech than in writing.

Words: 338
Spoken: 0.5%
Written: 0.2%

Most frequent

Church Slavonic

tenth to seventeenth centuries · The church and the princely chancery

The language Romanian was written in before it was written in Romanian, in Cyrillic letters, until the 1860s. One stratum holding two institutions: the liturgy gave rai, iad, duh, post, praznic, and the chancery gave boier, vamă, pravilă, hrisov, logofăt. The unexpected part is how deep into intimacy it reached. A iubi, prieten, a trăi and dragoste all come from the language of the service. The predictable part is that the chancery vocabulary died: in the Islaz proclamation of 1848, Slavonic words hold 3.3 per cent of the text; in the constitution of 1866 they hold 0.8 per cent.

Words: 2,085
Spoken: 3.0%
Written: 2.6%

Most frequent

Hungarian

eleventh to nineteenth centuries · Transylvania, eight centuries of neighbours and administration

The word for city is Hungarian and the word for village is Latin, which says plainly enough where power was kept and where life was kept. The stratum gave gând, chip, fel, marfă, hotar, meșter. It also gave a tool: the verbal suffix -ui, with which Romanian has been manufacturing verbs ever since, including from roots that were never Hungarian. A locui is Hungarian and a chibzui is Hungarian, but the verb-making machine stayed in the language and now works on its own account.

Words: 2,142
Spoken: 0.4%
Written: 0.6%

Most frequent

Greek

tenth century to 1821 · Byzantium, then the Phanariot princes

Two channels more than five centuries apart. Byzantium sent words through the church; then, between 1711 and 1821, the Porte appointed Greek princes from Istanbul's Phanar quarter to Bucharest and Iași, with an administration and a school system in Greek. A hundred and ten years of Greek rule left a thinner stratum than anyone would guess: 2.6 per cent of the lexemes with a known donor. Like Hungarian, it left a tool behind, the ending -isi, out of which Romanian built a chivernisi and a economisi.

Words: 1,224
Spoken: 0.5%
Written: 0.9%

Most frequent

Ottoman Turkish

fifteenth to nineteenth centuries · Trade and the household

Four centuries of Ottoman suzerainty left cafea, ciorbă, iaurt, dulap, cearșaf, geam, tavan, papuc, mahala, bacșiș, chef and haz. The Porte took tribute and appointed princes without directly administering Wallachia and Moldavia. The political relationship also left historical terms such as firman and pașalâc, while most of the words entered through trade and the household. In film dialogue they are 1.9× more frequent than in encyclopedic prose, and across the nine constitutional texts measured, from 1848 to 2003, they are effectively absent.

Words: 1,652
Spoken: 0.4%
Written: 0.2%

Most frequent

The later Slavic neighbours

sixteenth to twentieth centuries · Bulgarians, Serbs, Ukrainians, Russians, Poles

Borders first, then empires. Russian arrives twice, with the occupation and administration after 1828 and again with the Soviet decades, and it is the only stratum in which communism is visible in the figures: in official text it climbs from 0.1 per cent in the 1938 constitution to 1.7 per cent in that of 1965, then falls back.

Words: 2,117
Spoken: 0.7%
Written: 0.6%

Most frequent

German

twelfth to twentieth centuries · The Saxons, the Habsburg administration, the workshop

Saxons reach Transylvania from the twelfth century, Austrian administration after 1699, and technical vocabulary with industry. From here come șurub, ștecher, bormașină, chelner, șpriț, cartof and rucsac. German words appear more often in encyclopedic writing than in conversation.

Words: 1,473
Spoken: 0.8%
Written: 1.3%

Most frequent

Learned Latin

1780–1900 · Scholars, on paper and on purpose

Unlike the Latin words inherited through speech, learned Latinisms were taken from books and introduced deliberately. The Transylvanian School used the language's Latin descent as a political argument, and later Timotei Cipariu and the Laurian–Massim dictionary of 1871–1876 tried to re-Latinise the vocabulary to the point of absurdity and were mocked for it. What survives are the doublets: the same Latin word arriving twice, with different meanings. From digitus, deget and digital; from gravis, greu and grav; from directus, drept and direct; from frigidus, frig and frigid. In each pair, the first word was inherited and changed through use; the second is the learned borrowing.

Words: 1,190
Spoken: 1.8%
Written: 3.4%

Most frequent

Italian

1800–1930 · Music, art, banking

A small stratum, easy to recognise by domain: the score, the stage, the bank. The generation of 1848, educated in Italy and inclined to see Italian as an elder sister of the language, also brought in part of the political vocabulary of the moment.

Words: 960
Spoken: 0.7%
Written: 1.3%

Most frequent

French

1830–1918 · Education, government and the prestige of Paris

French influence was adopted by Romanian elites in the nineteenth century. Young people studied in Paris, the civil code of 1864 followed the Napoleonic model, and the state was built to French patterns. The language adopted much of the vocabulary of politics, administration and abstraction along with them. Official documents show the scale of the change: French words account for 8.1 per cent of the 1848 proclamation, 19.6 per cent of the 1866 constitution, largely modelled on the Belgian one of 1831, and 36.0 per cent of the constitution now in force. The highest share appears in the 1952 Constitution, at 37.2 per cent, because many administrative terms used under Romanian communism are French in origin: planificare, industrializare, colectivizare.

Words: 28,546
Spoken: 9.8%
Written: 25.8%

Most frequent

English

from 1960, mostly after 1990 · Prestige and the screen

English borrowings grew especially after 1990 through technology, media and popular culture. The page's dictionary contains 1,100 English words, or 2.3 per cent of the total.

Words: 1,100
Spoken: 0.4%
Written: 0.5%

Most frequent

Internal formation

from the sixteenth century · Romanian, on its own

Words created in Romanian from existing elements, through compounding or derivation. They appear when the language needs a new name.

Words: 1,118
Spoken: 0.9%
Written: 1.0%

Most frequent

Unknown

no date · Nobody can say

No established origin exists for 1,345 lexemes. Their share in conversation is strongly affected by one very frequent word, the conjunction dar.

Words: 1,345
Spoken: 1.8%
Written: 0.4%

Most frequent