The Italianist

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Italian’s long-lost sister: the Romanian language

and why Italianists should know about it

Martin Maiden

To cite this article: Martin Maiden (2010) Italian’s long-lost sister: the Romanian
language and why Italianists should know about it, The Italianist, 30:sup2, 29-43, DOI:
10.1080/02614340.2010.11917476

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/02614340.2010.11917476

Published online: 16 Oct 2017.

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Italian’s long-lost sister: the Romanian
language and why Italianists should know
about it
Martin Maiden

La lingua loro è poco diversa dalla nostra Ittaliana, si dimandano

(= chiamano) in lingua loro Romei perche dicono esser venuti antica<mente>
da Roma ad habitar in quel paese, et se alcuno dimanda se sano parlare in
la lor lingua Valacca, dicono a questo modo: >Sti Rominest<? che vuol
dire: >Sai tu Romano?<, per esser corrotta la lingua... [Francesco della
Valle, 1530]1

Towards the end of December 1989 I found myself watching television

in the company of some Italian friends. The news was dominated by the
violent upheavals then convulsing Romania, and a wounded officer of
Ceauşescu’s nefarious secret police, the Securitate, was filmed in his hospital
bed as he was told by a visitor: ‘Ceauşescu e mort’. To this the wounded man
replied: ‘Nu te cred.’ My Italian companions reacted with equal incredulity,
but for a different reason: ‘Ma questi stanno parlando un dialetto italiano.
Che sono napoletani?’. It is a sad fact that it had taken violent revolution
to bring Romania and its language into my friends’ consciousness. To the
extent that they had any idea what the Romanian language was, that idea
was quite wrong. On my asking them: ‘Ma non sapete che il romeno è una
lingua sorella dell’italiano?’, the reply was something like ‘Ma non è una
lingua slava, come il russo?’. This was twenty years ago, but even today,
after massive Romanian migration into Italy (there are estimated to be a
million Romanians resident in Italy), one frequently gets the impression
that Italians’ ideas are little clearer about the linguistic (or ethnic) affinities
of the Romanians. And if this is true of many Italians, it is unremarkable
that many students of the Italian language are similarly uninformed.
This ignorance is neither culpable nor surprising. For centuries only
Romanians themselves seem to have been fully aware of their ‘Roman’
historical origins. Their own ethnonym român proclaims as much, but
in much of the outside world, and certainly in western Europe, they were
30   Martin Maiden

generally designated as ‘Vlachs’, or variants of that term. Interestingly,

this term itself, although it was certainly opaque by the late Middle Ages,
originates in a name used by Germanic speakers to designate ‘Romanized
peoples’, and the English word ‘Welsh’, the Polish ‘włoch’ and Hungarian
‘olasz’,2 both meaning ‘Italian’, are all related to ‘Vlach’ (the name of the
Romanian region, Wallachia, has the same etymological origin).3 At the
turn of the sixteenth century, when Italo-Romance vernaculars had existed
in writing in some cases for five hundred years, when an internationally
prestigious literary tradition based on Tuscan was already two centuries
old, and on the eve of the acceptance of the Tuscan of the Tre Corone as
the basis of the literary language (a development conventionally associated
with the publication of Bembo’s Prose delle volgar lingua in 1525) the
Romanian language was, frankly, insignificant. There was no Romanian
Dante, Petrarch or Boccaccio (as far as we know – certainly none who
ever managed to be immortalized in writing), and the Romanians seem to
have been economically insignificant (unlike the Florentines in Italy). The
first internationally renowned Romanian writer does not emerge until the
nineteenth century, in the shape of the poet Mihai Eminescu (1850-89),
and it is fair to say that even Eminescu is not exactly a household name
outside Romania. We have indirect evidence of documents being written
in Romanian in the fourteenth century, but the earliest surviving text in
the language (a brief letter reporting on the advance of the Turks, by one
Neacşu de Câmpulung), dates from 1521. Before that, we have effectively
nothing but obscurity and mystery. It is not even wholly certain (and the
issue is fraught with political sensitivities) that the Romanians and their
language developed in situ in the modern territory of Romania. The Roman
province of Dacia, which broadly corresponds to modern Romania, was
established under Trajan at the beginning of the second century and
abandoned barely three generations later, under Aurelian, between 271
and 275, when the Roman legions withdrew to the south of the Danube.
The speakers of the form of Latin that was to become Romanian remain
unidentifiable, for modern historians, for many centuries, and must at an
early date have been cut off from the western Empire and, later, from the
Roman Catholicism which permeates the culture of so many other major
Romance languages. For Romanians the language of religion (Orthodox
Christianity), and therefore of writing, was Greek and later Church
Slavonic. The movement of the Slavs into the Balkans in the fifth and sixth
centuries, further contributed to the linguistic isolation of the Romanians,
and left a profound imprint on the Romanian language.
 The Romanian language and why Italianists should know about it   31

It is to Italians’ credit (or at least to the credit of their Humanist

intellectuals) that it is they who were the first in western Europe to recognize
the linguistic affinities of Romanian. Italian awareness of Romanians and
their language seems to date at the earliest from the fifteenth century, and
arises in the context of the Catholic Church’s determined efforts to resist
the spread of Ottoman power in the east, and forge closer links with eastern
Christianity. Lorenzo Renzi (op. cit.) gives an excellent description of how
Humanist intellectuals in Italy came to appreciate the nature and origins of
the Romanian language. Biondo Flavio (1392-1463) appears to have been
the first to observe and comment (in 1435) on the linguistic affinities of
the language, and to realize that it had a close relationship to Italian, and a
common descent from Latin.4 Regrettably, awareness of Romanians and
their language seems to decline abruptly in the west once the Turks become
firmly established in the east (with the Romanian regions of Wallachia and
Moldova coming under Ottoman rule from fifteenth century), and the
centre of western culture itself shifts during the sixteenth century away
from Italy and the east towards France and Spain.5
Two of the constituent regions of the modern country of Romanian,
Moldova and Wallachia, remained under Turkish sway until their effective
unification in 1859. Although this precursor of the modern unified
Romanian state (Transylvania was added at the end of the First World
War) is a contemporary of the Italian unified state, the two countries form a
paradoxical pair from the linguistic point of view. The unified Italy of 1860
had a centuries-old, already internationally prestigious, standard language
which probably nobody spoke as a native language and which could be
written and spoken only by a minuscule proportion of the population.6 The
unified Romanian state of 1859 had a standard language with a relatively
short historical tradition and minimal status as an international vehicle of
culture, but which was, unlike Italian, sufficiently close to the vernacular
speech of ordinary Romanians as to be readily accessible to the population
as a whole. This may have been a local advantage for Romanians, but the
Italian language, remote as it may have been from Italians, simply outshone
Romanian. To repeat, it is not surprising that Italians, and Italianists, still
tend to know so little about Romanian.
The state of ignorance is, however, asymmetrical, for Romanians
have long been aware of their linguistic affinities to Italian. As an example,
the modern Romanian spelling system, created during the nineteenth
century and replacing an older Cyrillic one,7 is deliberately modelled, in
large measure, on that of Italian. In addition to a long-standing current
32   Martin Maiden

of cultural orientation towards Italy, the openness to, and interest in,
things Italian was rapidly evident from the early 1990s, when some
Romanians started avidly watching satellite and cable TV programmes
from Italy. A major reason for this, one suspects, was that Italian was the
western language Romanians found easiest to understand. It is probably
the case, too, that the massive Romanian emigration to Italy of recent
years is at least in part motivated by the linguistic accessibility of Italian.
It is a commonplace that Romanians (especially those with a reasonable
education) find spoken, and especially written, Italian intelligible without
too much instruction. This intelligibility is, of course, reversible, not just
for Italians but for any student of Italian.
Romanians’ particular incentives to learn Italian are, as I have
suggested, reasonably easy to understand. But it is relevant at this point to
ask why, and how, the British learn Italian.8 The answers to this question
range (I suspect) from the trivial to the sublime. People holiday in Italy and
no doubt find some acquaintance with the language useful in the purchase
of pizzas and ice cream. But many also realize that the Italian language has
been, over many centuries, the vehicle of, and the key to, a massive and
fundamental element of European culture and civilization. It would be otiose
(and impossible) even to begin to attempt to sketch this here. Yet the well-
known cultural and intellectual incentives for learning Italian do not, in my
view, wholly explain why the language proves a perennially popular choice
among university students who want to embark on a modern language they
have not studied at school.9 My sense is that it appeals to those who are
both intellectually curious and keen to learn a new language which is not
formidably difficult given a certain preparation, and can be mastered to a
high degree of competence in three or four years. In the remainder of this
essay, I want to suggest that Italianists who are so motivated may not realize
that they are in a position to go even further – into Romanian.
One reason why Italianists should know about Romanian is
that they stand on the threshold of a new culture and civilization, and
they hold the key to the door. Knowledge of Italian is simply about the
best linguistic preparation one could have for moving on to master the
Romanian language and its literature. It is a deplorable fact that while
Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci, Verdi,
Manzoni, Calvino, Primo Levi and Dario Fo may be household names (or
so one fondly imagines) in western Europe, it appears that the best-known
Romanians outside Romania are Vlad the Impaler (1431-76) and Nicolae
Ceauşescu. To this unsavoury duo we might add ‘Count Dracula’, a
 The Romanian language and why Italianists should know about it   33

fictional figure loosely associated with Vlad the Impaler).10 I doubt whether
Mihai Eminescu, Romania’s ‘national poet’ (1850-89), or a dramatist
such as Ion Luca Caragiale (1852-1912), or twentieth century novelists of
the calibre of Mihail Sadoveanu (1880-1961) or Liviu Rebreanu (1885-
1944), or even Romania’s ‘national composer’, George Enescu (1881-
1955), are ‘household names’ outside Romania. The writings of, say,
Constantin Noica (1909-87) are (I suspect) not known to most western
philosophers. The dramatist Eugen Ionesco (1909-94), and the sculptor
Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957), may be rather better known – but they
were émigrés based in France. Both men have, by the way, surnames of a
deceptively Italian air, and one wonders whether they are not sometimes
taken to be of Italian origin: in fact ‘Ionesco’ originally bore that most
Romanian of suffixes, ‘-escu’, (‘Ionescu’), and ‘Brancusi’ should correctly
be adorned with its Romanian diacritics, as ‘Brâncuşi’. Herta Müller, the
winner of the Nobel Prize for literature (2009) is a Romanian who writes
about Romania, but she has done so in Germany, and in German.
I am not a literary or cultural historian, and others would be far
better able than I to give an authoritative overview of the splendours of
Romanian literature and culture. I am, rather, a linguist, and accordingly in
the remainder of this discussion I shall focus on similarities and differences
between the Romanian and Italian languages, from two perspectives. First,
I shall try to show how accessible the vocabulary of Romanian can be to
someone who already knows Italian – and for the understanding of a foreign
language the lexicon is surely of primary importance.11 Second, I shall give
an example of how the experience of learning the Romanian language can
in turn stimulate new reflections on what seems familiar in Italian.
To illustrate the accessibility of Romanian to someone who
knows Italian, we may begin with a small sample from the writings of
the writer and thinker Gabriel Liiceanu,12 in which he recalls his mentor
the philosopher Constantin Noica. I have appended to the passage a
translation into Italian designed to make its familiarity transparent: the
most obvious similarities are in bold; those that would be apparent given a
modicum of comparative-historical knowledge are underlined. The Italian
of the translation will read rather oddly and even ungrammatically, since
I have sacrificed some grammatical correctness and stylistic naturalness in
order to stay as close as possible to the original Romanian:

Îmi vine în minte imaginea lui de ieri, când l-am vizitat în chilia cu
lemne şi lighean cu apă pe sobă; avea pe cap o băscuţă, care-i dădea
un aer de papă bonom;
34   Martin Maiden

A adormit [...]. Sforăie încet [...] Are gura întredeschisă şi buzele

supte, dar fruntea, extrem de frumoasă.
Mi viene in mente l’immagine di lui d’ieri, quando l’ho visitato nel
camerino con la legna e il bacino dell’acqua sulla stufa; aveva sul
capo una papalina, la quale gli dava un’aria di papa buonuomo;
È addormentato. Russa piano. Ha la bocca socchiusa e le labbra
succhiate, ma la fronte estremamente bella.

The completely opaque elements in this short passage are: loanwords

from Greek (chilia and possibly lighean, although the latter is found in a
number of Balkan languages and it is not necessarily a direct loan from
Greek) and from Turkish (sobă), the onomatopoeic verb a sforăi and a word
possibly inherited from an ancient Thracian substratum (buză). There are
also some less immediately obvious differences. For example, the Romanian
definite article comes at the end of the noun (imaginea, chilia, buzele, gura,
fruntea), and while the preposition de has many of the uses of its Italian
counterpart ‘di’, strikingly this does not include possession, which is
indicated by a genitive case-ending, e.g. gura fetei, ‘la bocca della ragazza’.
As a general rule, however, what new-comers to a foreign language
principally need in order to understand the sense of texts and utterances
in that language is to be able to recognize the lexical content (the
‘vocabulary’). There are various quite subtle grammatical differences
between the Romanian and the Italian texts above, but these hardly
impede comprehension. For example, unlike Italian, Romanian does
not in general have distinct forms for adverbs, using instead a form
identical to the masculine singular of the adjective – hence extrem above
is ‘estremamente’ but also ‘estremo’. On the other hand, if a Romanian
adverb modifies an adjective it is followed by the preposition de: extrem
de frumoasă is ‘estremamente bella’. These are niceties which have to be
mastered by anyone wanting to acquire an active use of Romanian, but
not in themselves barriers to comprehension. We shall see shortly that any
of the lexical items which are not immediately recognizable in the text
above may be so given just a little extra knowledge, which can sometimes
be applied to the recognition of many other initially unfamiliar words.
The pronoun îmi ‘to me’ has a more recognizable positional variant
mi (although these forms in Romanian are specific to the indirect object,
and there is a distinct direct object form, mă). Lui is a masculine pronoun,
but unlike Italian, it is a genitive or dative one, not a subject or object
form. Different as it may now look, the third person singular dative
 The Romanian language and why Italianists should know about it   35

pronoun (here -i, but in its fuller form îi) goes back to a form that would
originally have sounded almost exactly the same as modern Italian ‘gli’.
Lemne ‘firewood’ begins to look like a long-lost friend if one knows that
Latin -gn- usually becomes -mn- in Romanian (so one can instantly guess
what part of the anatomy a pumn is, and a word like semn quickly reveals
itself as the Romanian equivalent of ‘segno’). Apă ‘water’ does not sound
so very different from its Italian counterpart (and if apă is ‘acqua’, one
can work out what numeral is represented by patru). The past participle
supte is from Latin feminine plural suctas: given this example, it should
be easy to work out what is one drinking if one drinks lapte, and what
is one doing to one’s hair if one uses a piepten. The relative pronoun
care is the etymological counterpart of Italian ‘quale’: extrapolating
from this example we should have no difficulty, then, in guessing what
sort of foodstuff sare is (and also miere),13 what is one going up if one
is one on a scară, and what the thing above us is which Romanians call
cer. And to what Italian word might gură be related?: actually to ‘gola’,
from Latin gula – although the meaning has slipped in Romanian from
‘gola’ to ‘bocca’. It might, perhaps indelicately, be added at this point
that Romanian does have the word bucă, cognate with ‘bocca’, except
that in this case we have a potentially embarrassing ‘false friend’, for the
Romanian meaning is that of Italian ‘natica’ (the Latin etymon bucca
meant ‘cheek’, so that the divergent semantic history of this word in the
two languages is perhaps not that difficult to understand).
I shall explore shortly the lexical similarities and differences between
the two languages in a little more breadth, extending our purview to
some aspects of morphology as well. The picture is, as in our example
above, a rather paradoxical one, with a very high degree of transparency,
punctuated, sometimes even in very basic vocabulary, by words that are
wholly opaque from an Italian point of view because they have been
borrowed from Slavic, Hungarian, Greek or Turkish. I ought to say
that historical linguists can often be a little sniffy about demonstrating
linguistic affinities and similarities by means of comparing vocabulary
lists, partly because vocabulary resemblances can be the result of recent
borrowing, rather than a matter of ancient shared inheritance (the word
bonom in the text cited above is a case in point, being a recent loan from
French ‘bonhomme’). Indeed, over the past couple of hundred years there
has been wholesale borrowing of vocabulary from French and Italian,
a consequence of Romania’s strong cultural re-orientation towards the
Romance-speaking west. This had made for a layer of lexical transparency
36   Martin Maiden

which is relevantly recent, and would not have been possible three or four
hundred years ago, at the time when Italians first became aware of the
linguistic affinities of Romanian. The verb a reuşi ‘to succeed’ looks like
French ‘réussir’ and Italian ‘riuscire’ because it is borrowed from Italian
(the French word is also a borrowing from Italian);14 likewise stradă ‘street’,
and numerous other fairly basic terms. Such borrowings do not, it must be
said, always reveal quite as secure a grasp of the source language as those
effecting them might have liked to claim: the Romanian eronat, ‘erroneous,
wrong’, is clearly based on French ‘erroné’ under the misapprehension
that the -é ending marks a past participle (cf. Fr. ‘chanté’, Romanian cântat
‘sung’); the Italian ‘erroneo’ should have shown otherwise.
We cannot here explore and compare the entire Romanian and Italian
lexicons, but we may examine similarities and differences within one ‘core’
semantic domain, the human body and mind. Boxed forms in table below
share a common etymon between the two languages. On the whole, they
not only share a meaning but also have a recognizable similarity of form,
although in some cases the effects of historical sound changes have blurred
the similarities. Knowing, for example, that in Romanian original (early
Romance) /di/ and /ti/ have become, respectively, z (nowadays pronounced
/z/) and ţ (pronounced /ts/) can be helpful.

Italian Romanian Comments

capo cap
cervello creier
pensare a gândi Romanian word of Hungarian origin.
sentire a simţi
fronte frunte
occhi ochi
vedere a vedea
orecchie urechi
udire a auzi Both from Latin audire.
naso nas
guance obraji Romanian word of Slav origin (and the Italian of
Germanic).
denti dinţi
lingua limbă
collo gât Romanian word of problematic (perhaps Slav)
origin, meaning both ‘collo’ and ‘gola’.
gola gât
 The Romanian language and why Italianists should know about it   37

mangiare mânca Cf. Old Italian ‘manicare’. Modern ‘mangiare’ is

an early loan from French.
bere a bea
parlare a vorbi Romanian word from Slavic.
dire a zice
nuca ceafă Romanian word probably from Turkish (and
ultimately Arabic); Italian word also ultimately
from Arabic.
spalle umeri Romanian from Latin umerus.
braccia braţe
gomiti coate Both from Latin cubitum.
mani mâini Can also mean ‘braccia’ in Romanian.
tenere a ţine
dita degete
unghie unghii
petto piept
cuore inimă Romanian word from Latin anima ‘soul’.
polmoni plămâni
fegato ficat
ombelico buric
ginocchi genunchi
sedere a şedea
caviglie glezne Romanian word from Slavic.
gambe picioare Romanian word from Latin petiolus ‘stalk’. The
fact that the same word is used for both ‘leg’ and
‘foot’ possibly reflects Slav semantic influence,
however, cf. also ‘hand’, above.
piedi picioare
andare a merge Romanian word from Latin mergere, ‘to sink’!
camminare a umbla Romanian word has same origin as Italian
‘andare’, namely Latin ambulare.
correre a alerga Romanian word of controversial origin, but
possibly from a Latin *allargare.
ammalato bolnav Romanian word from Slavic.
sano sănătos
nascere a se naşte The Romanian form is reflexive (possibly based
on Slavic models). The non-reflexive form ‘a naşte’
means ‘partorire’.
vivere a trăi Romanian word from Slavic.
morire a muri
38   Martin Maiden

So far I have sketched some lexical similarities between Italian and

Romanian, trying to emphasize that, despite occasional, and far from
negligible, discrepancies, there is a great deal of common ground and that
Romanian really is accessible – with a little effort – to those who know
Italian. The same is true of most of the grammar of Romanian, although
this is not the place to essay even the most superficial overview of it.15 In
what follows, however, I should like to take just one single phenomenon
from the grammatical structure of Romanian, with a view to showing not
only the similarities with Italian, but also how, for linguists, comparison
of Italian and Romanian can throw novel light on Italian, and suggest new
avenues of comparative research. That is the formation of the plural in
nouns and adjectives.
Romanian shares with Italian the use of the vowels -i and -e at the ends
of words to distinguish plural from singular. This characteristic distinguishes
them from most other well-known Romance languages, where the plural
tends to be indicated by final -s. Where they differ is that Romanian also has
extensive and often unpredictable ‘root allomorphy’ (variation in the form of
the root of the word according to grammatical meaning). Italian has some of
this (e.g., porco – porci ˡpɔrko – ˡpɔrtʃi, uomo – uomini) but Romanian can not
only match this (e.g., porc – porci ˡpork ˡportʃ, om – oameni) but far surpass
it, with extensive patterns of alternation affecting vowels and consonants,
some of which are illustrated below.16 Particularly where variation in the root
vowels is concerned, Romanian is structurally17 closer to many Italian dialects,
than it is to standard Italian, since many such dialects have what is known
as ‘metaphonic’ alternation of the root vowel,18 according to grammatical
property (cf. central Italian dialects masculine niru ‘nero’ vs. feminine nera,
singular verde vs. plural virdi). Consider the following examples:

Italian Sing. Plu. Sing. Plu. Sing. Plu. Sing. Plu.

Masc. chiaro chiari nero neri cavallo cavalli
Fem. chiara chiare nera nere strada strade
Romanian
Masc. clar clari negru negri cal cai
Fem. clară clare neagră negre stradă străzi

Italian Sing. Plu. Sing. Plu. Sing. Plu. Sing. Plu.

Masc. verde verdi molle molli dente denti
Fem. verde verdi molle molli valle valli
Romanian
Masc. verde verzi moale moi dinte dinţi
Fem. verde verzi moale moi vale văi
 The Romanian language and why Italianists should know about it   39

Returning to the inflectional endings, there is a further respect in

which Romanian is like Italian, but even more like some Italian dialects.
Italian noun plural formation is more complex and unpredictable than
that of other well-known standard Romance languages by virtue of having
some rather unpredictable endings. These idiosyncrasies are, however,
sufficiently small in number to be fairly easily memorizable as a list. I refer
to plurals such as arma – armi, ala – ali, and particularly the list of a score
or so of nouns like uovo, which are masculine in the singular yet have
plurals that are feminine, and end in what looks like a feminine singular
ending, -a. But Romanian can, so to speak, ‘beat this hands down’. It
has not two ‘aberrant’ feminine plurals in -i corresponding to singulars
in -ă, but probably hundreds. These occur mainly, but not exclusively, in
feminine nouns referring to inanimates. For example:

Singular Plural
aripă aripi ‘ala’
coadă cozi ‘coda’
groapă gropi ‘fossa, buca’
lună luni ‘luna, mese’
oglindă oglinzi ‘specchio’
roată roţi ‘ruota’

When a noun in feminine singular -ă will form its plural in -i, and
when in -e, is simply not predictable by any rule in Romanian. Even
the general rule that these plurals in -i occur in inanimate nouns is not
watertight, as witness:

Sing. Plu.
găină găini ‘gallina’
ţigancă ţigănci or ţigance ‘zingara’
vacă vaci ‘vacca’

The resemblance to – and difference from – Italian is even more

dramatic in the case of nouns which have masculine singulars and feminine
plurals. These number in Romanian not twenty or so, but probably
thousands (and new examples are continually being formed). These cannot
be memorized as a list. Even the usually valid generalization that the nouns
that behave in this way have inanimate reference is not watertight, since
a significant minority of inanimates have ‘regular’ masculine plurals in -i
(e.g., metru – metri, stâlp – stâlpi ‘palo’, pas – paşi ‘passo’). Worse, even if
40   Martin Maiden

one knows that some masculine noun has a feminine plural, there is still
(on the whole) no way of predicting which of two possible endings that
plural will take. For there is not only the feminine plural ending -e, but
also -uri, the latter being limited just to the class of nouns with masculine
singular inanimate reference:19

Masc. sing. Fem. plu.

ac ace ‘ago’
braţ braţe ‘braccio’
catalog cataloage ‘catalogo’
cearşaf cearşafuri ‘lenzuolo’
dar daruri ‘dono’
deget degete ‘dito’
dialog dialoguri ‘dialogo’
ecou ecouri ‘eco’
fir fire ‘filo’
lac lacuri ‘lago’
loc locuri ‘luogo’
os oase ‘osso’
ou ouă20 ‘uovo’
pod poduri ‘ponte’
sat sate ‘villaggio’
telefon telefoane ‘telefono’
timp timpuri ‘tempo’
val valuri ‘onda’
zvon zvonuri ‘voce, pettegolezzo’

The Italian plural ending -a continues the Latin neuter plural -a,
reanalysed as a feminine ending (this was replaced in Romanian by a
‘regular’ feminine plural ending -e), while Romanian -uri is ultimately
derived from the end portion of Latin neuter plurals such as tempus –
tempora, corpus – corpora.21
The case of plural formation nicely points up a number of issues.
On the one hand, we see that the two languages are fundamentally very
similar. On the other, the Romanian facts cast the Italian facts in a novel
and revealing perspective for linguists. For we have seen that what looks
merely marginal and exceptional, a kind of grammatical junk pile of
oddities from the point of view of the student of Italian, can in a closely
related language be general and pervasive. Anyone used to Italian is
 The Romanian language and why Italianists should know about it   41

bound to think that the need to memorize the plural of a noun alongside
its singular is something exceptional and even bizarre – but in Romanian
it is normal. I have never witnessed an Italian groping for the plural
of a noun, but Romanians often do. To recount an anecdote, in recent
conversation with an outstandingly erudite and articulate Romanian
scholar, the topic of the Roman ‘chariot’ (Romanian car) somehow arose.
My interlocutor produced a characteristically fluent display of learning
about Roman warfare and racing, until the word for ‘chariot’ had to be
used in the plural. He simply stopped dead in mid-sentence. Only when
he had ascertained from a dictionary that the plural was care did he feel
able to continue. Such occurrences are really quite common. Bizarre as
this kind of linguistic behaviour may sound to someone used to Italian, the
two languages are simply at opposite ends of a historical and geographical
continuum, and it is important to realize that, in fact, Italian could have
ended up like Romanian. In the Middle Ages Tuscan had far more nouns
of the osso – ossa type than it has now.22 We are not used to thinking of
Italian as ‘peripheral’, but in this respect it is, and the comparison with
Romanian allows us to see it. Tuscan is simply on the edge of a linguistic
area embracing virtually all of central and southern Italy and which is far
more like Romanian. In these dialects the number of nouns of that type
remains a great deal higher than in modern Italian, and some of them, again
unpredictably, have plurals in -ora (a form cognate with Romanian -uri).23
For example, from Veroli in Lazio24 ‘ring’ aˡnɛllu – PL aˡnɛlla or aˡnɛlləra
(or regular masculine aˡneʎi), ˡprato ‘meadow’ – PL ˡprata, ˡorto ‘orchard’ –
PL ˡɔrtəra. While these resemblances between southern and central Italian
dialects and Romanian are well known to Romance linguists, there is still
no really comprehensive study reviewing and interpreting25 the fate of
these forms, and of the treatment of their attendant unpredictabilities,
on both sides of the Adriatic and in dialects as well as standard varieties.
The distribution of feminine plural -i corresponding to singulars in -a/-ă
is similarly interesting and in need of a comparative-historical review. It is
precisely this tension between fundamentally shared phenomena, and the
extremely different way in which they can be manifested between Italian
and Romanian, the juxtaposition of the familiar and the strange, that can
serve as a stimulus to further comparative and diachronic reflection on
both languages.
Clara Cooper did more than teach Italian outstandingly. In many
cases, she was also opening a door for students for whom Italian was a new
language, and one they had chosen to study out of cultural and linguistic
42   Martin Maiden

curiosity. As I observed earlier, Italian has long been an attractive ‘new

language’ at university; it is not the linguistic ‘north face of the Eiger’, and
one can learn it – given a Clara as a teacher and the right previous linguistic
background – to an extremely high standard within a few years. In this
essay I have sought to assert a simple, and most certainly not original,
point: that given a knowledge of Italian one can take that same spirit of
linguistic and cultural curiosity a step further, into yet another linguistic
and cultural domain, and that in taking that step one can actually see
Italian itself in a slightly different light.
University of Oxford

Notes
1 8
As cited in L. Renzi, ‘Ancora sugli umanisti italiani
e la lingua rumena’, Romanische Forschungen 112
(2000), 1-39, p. 5. Renzi further reports a marginal
note, apparently in della Valle’s hand, which adds,
rather unkindly: >Sono però genti barbare, è di rei
costumi.<
2
The related Hungarian term ‘oláhok’ designates the
Romanians.
3
See B. Müller, ‘Bezeichnungen für die Sprachen,
Sprecher und Länder der Romania’, in Lexikon der
romanistischen Linguistik Vol. ii,1, ed. by G. Holtus, M.
Metzeltin and C. Schmitt (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1996),
pp. 134-51 (pp. 143-44).
4
Renzi, p. 19f.
I do not mean to suggest, of course, that these
incentives do not also exist for Romanians!
9
In Britain, at least, Italian is not widely taught in
schools.
10
On Vlad and Dracula, see for example L. Boia,
Romania (London: Reaktion, 2001), pp. 226-31.
11
Matters are of course different when it comes to
active mastery of a foreign language.
12
G. Liiceanu, Jurnalul de la Păltiniş (Bucharest: CR,
1983).
13
Lest things seem too easy, I should point out that in
Romanian both of these words are feminine.
14
The older Romanian word, a izbuti, is in contrast

5
Renzi, p.12f. This does not mean that the Romanians
and their language were totally forgotten thereafter
by Italian and other intellectuals. See for example
T. Ferro, ‘Francesco Griselini e i romeni’, in Latino,
romeno e romanzo. Studi linguistici (Cluj: Dacia,
2003), pp. 25-36.
quite opaque, and probably of Slavic origin.
15
For informative general introductions see, for
example, G. Mallinson, ‘Rumanian’, in The Romance
Languages, ed. by M. Harris and N. Vincent, (London:
Routledge, 1988), pp. 391-419, or M. Avram and M.
Sala, May We Introduce the Romanian Language To

6
See M. Maiden, ‘The definition of multilingualism in
historical perspective’, in Multilingualism in Italy. Past
and Present, ed. by A. L. Lepschy and A. Tosi (Oxford:
Legenda, 2001), pp. 31-46.
You? (Bucharest: Editura Fundaţiei Culturale Române,
2000).
16
It should be added that Romanian also goes
beyond Italian in a respect which has no counterpart

7
in the Italo-Romance noun and adjective. It has a
The fact that the language was written in Cyrillic can
special form indicating genitive and indirect object in
only have compounded the impression that it was
the singular of feminine nouns and adjectives, usually
different from any western European language.
identical to the plural (e.g., o stradă lungă ’una strada
 The Romanian language and why Italianists should know about it   43
lunga’ but unei stră zi lungi ‘di/a una strada lunga’).
In the determiners (e.g., in definite articles and
demonstrative adjectives) there are special genitive-
dative forms for each of masculine and feminine,
singular and plural (e.g., calului ‘del / al cavallo’, cailor
‘dei / ai cavalli’).
17
Whether this resemblance has a common historical
explanation is a complex issue which cannot be
explored here. I am inclined to think not.
18
See L. M. Savoia and M. Maiden, ‘Metaphony’, in
The Dialects of Italy, ed. by M. Maiden and M. Parry
(London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 15-25.
19
Even this generalization ultimately lets us down,
since there is actually a very small number of feminine
nouns also taking this plural ending.
20
This ending is a positional variant of final -e.
21
See further M. Maiden, ‘Inflectional morphology
of the noun and adjective’, in The Dialects of Italy,
ed. by M. Maiden and M. Parry, pp. 68-74, and
‘Morphological persistence’, in The Cambridge
History of the Romance Languages, ed. by M. Maiden,
J.C. Smith and A. Ledgeway, (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, forthcoming), Chapter 4.
22
See M. Maiden, A Linguistic History of Italian
(London: Longman, 1995), pp. 103-04.
23
See also G. Rohlfs, Grammatica storica della lingua
italiana e dei suoi dialetti. Morfologia (Turin: Einaudi,
1968), pp. 35-41, and M. Maiden, ‘Inflectional
morphology of the noun and adjective’, in The
Dialects of Italy, ed. by M. Maiden and M. Parry, pp.pp.
71-73), and M. Maiden, ‘Morphological persistence’,
in The Cambridge History of the Romance Languages.
24
C. Vignoli, Il vernacolo di Veroli (Rome: Società
filologica romana, 1925), p. 45f.
25
H. Wilkinson, ‘The Latin neuter plurals in Romance
(I-VII)’, Ronshu, 26 (1985), 137-50; 27 (1986),
157-71; 28 (1987), 33-46; 29 (1988), 47-61;
30 (1989), 109-22; 31 (1990), 113-27; 32 (1991),
35-50 offers an excellent descriptive overview.