A brief journey through language and history to accompany your listening to Concert românesc, exploring the Latin origins of Romanian and its fascinating evolution in the heart of Eastern Europe
A misleading title (but not too much)
You might be wondering what Concert românesc means, and while the translation of Concert is obvious, you may have realized that the word românesc has something to do with “Romanesque” and “Rome.” You’re not far off: românesc is a Romanian word that means “Romanian,” and you’re right—this language really does sound like ours. Between Italian and Romanian lies a whole jumble of Slavic languages, such as Slovenian, Serbian, Bosnian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovak, and Bulgarian. Add to that the Germanic languages from Vienna northward, and Hungarian of Mongolian descent, but following the course of the Danube you’ll finally arrive in Romania, where a Romance language is spoken once again—that is, one descended from Latin.
A Latin language… amid a thousand influences
To be honest, Romanian is a “Balkanized Romance” language, meaning it has been influenced by Greek, Turkish, Slavic, and Hungarian, but 80% of its words are of Latin origin. In Romanian, “bread” is pâine, “fire” is foc: these are the same sounds used to denote the same meaning in Italian, French (pain, feu), Spanish (pan, fuego), and Portuguese (pão, fogo) as well. The kinship among all these languages can be traced back to the ancient Romans, to the vastness of the empire, and to the spread of Vulgar Latin (that is, the unwritten language) throughout all the territories under Roman rule. And this brings us back to the initial insight regarding românesc.
From the Roman Conquest to the Birth of the Romanian Language
In this case, the clash with Roman civilization occurred in 106 AD, when Trajan conquered King Decebalus’s Dacia and transformed it into a province. The story of this feat is celebrated in that incredible “marble film” that is none other than the Trajan’s Column. It was from there that Latin began to mix with local dialects, giving rise to a form of Proto-Romanian. For the first written records, however, we must wait until the 16th century, all documents written in the Cyrillic alphabet. The Latin alphabet was officially introduced in 1860 with the Orthographic Reform influenced by the so-called Transylvanian School, which sought to emphasize the language’s Latin origins and led to the abandonment of the Slavic alphabet.
A Surprising Grammar
Despite the kinship, the structure of the Romanian language has peculiarities that set it apart quite significantly from our own. The first is that the Latin cases are preserved: nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, vocative—with the result that we are inundated with prepositions, while they deal with declensions. Articles, meanwhile, are enclitic, meaning they attach to the end of the noun: while we say “il fuoco,” Romanians add the article -ul to the end of the word foc, resulting in focul.
The most interesting aspect, in my opinion, concerns the gender of nouns: Italian divides them into two main groups, masculine and feminine: “la luna,” “il sole,” “la notte,” “il giorno,” and so on. Romanian also has a neuter gender, which, however, is considered masculine in the singular and becomes feminine in the plural. Does this distinction between singular masculine and plural feminine signify something deeper?
A desire for distinction on the one hand and a capacity for aggregation on the other? You can think about it while listening to the Concert românesc
