Romanian lexis


The lexis of the Romanian language, a Romance language, has changed over the centuries as the language evolved from Vulgar Latin, to Proto-Romanian, to medieval, modern and contemporary Romanian.

Proto-Romanian

Romanian has inherited a number of about 10.000 lexical items from its ancestral language, Latin. These comprise most basic concepts of society, for example:
Many words have not only changed their shape, but also their meaning during their evolution from Latin to Romanian. Such are:
By the later Middle Ages, a great number of Slavic loanwords had already entered Romanian.
Among the basic Slavic loanwords are:
In the 19th century, as the Romanian society transitioned from rural and agricultural towards urban and industrial, the lexis underwent a vigorous enrichment with loanwords from its Romance relatives, French and Italian. Many scholarly and technical terms were also imported from Neo-Latin. Some words, especially of Greek and Turkish origin, fell into relative disuse or acquired an ironic connotation. The Slavic part of the lexis, of earlier entry and more deeply anchored into the language, survived relatively unscathed.
Among the words which entered the language:
A statistical analysis sorting Romanian words by etymological source carried out by Macrea based on the DLRM showed the following makeup:
If the analysis is restricted to a core vocabulary of 2,500 frequent, semantically rich and productive words, then the Latin inheritance comes first, followed by Romance and classical Latin neologisms, whereas the Slavic borrowings come third.
Romanian has a lexical similarity of 77% with Italian, 75% with French, 74% with Sardinian, 73% with Catalan, 72% with Portuguese and Rheto-Romance, 71% with Spanish.

Turkish

Large parts of modern-day Romania were under Ottoman suzerainty for several centuries. As a result, exchanges in language, food and culture occurred, and Romanian has absorbed several words of Turkish origin. A small ethnic Turkish minority exists in Dobruja.