Which Romance language sounds more Slavic?

@Q.E.D.

I read the earlier discussions on this topic in which you, SPQR and others took part and beside the (pseudo)scientific pretense they still amounted to to nothing else than cherry-picked examples meant to prove one crazy theory after another.

More on the subject of Slavic influence on Romanian.
I have picked up three songs originated in the slums of Bucharest, that people usually learn in the army (those unfortunate enough to finish their high school in times when military service was mandatory).

Since these are slum songs they cannot be suspected that they are using an academic language that willingly eliminated the words of Slavic origin. I have made liberal translations of some of the lyrics, just to give you an idea of what they are about (note that the tone is parody in all these songs).

You be the judge of the Slavic influence contained in these songs:

Femei femei (Women oh women)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5uYUqV56UM

Nu e nimeni pe strada
Ochii tristi sa mii vada
Nu e nimeni pe strada
Sa ma vada cum plang.

Doar un gabor de seara
Ce-a venit ca sa-mi ceara
Sa-si aprind-o tigara
M-a vazut lacrimand.

Femei femei
E plina lumea de nebune
Cine m-a adus pe lume?
Cine oare m-a facut?

Women oh women
This place is filled with crazy women
Whoever brought me to this world?
Whoever gave me birth?

The second song:

Ma iubeste femeile (Every woman is in love with me)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsYQ5eEYL8A

Ma iubeste femeile
Si e moarte dupe mine
Toata ziua imi sade pe cap
Nu stiu ce sa fac ca sa scap.

Every woman is in love with me
With their crazy lunacies
All day long, (bothering me) they don't stop
I have no idea how to get rid of this cr@p.

Toate ma cere, toate ma vrea
Zice ca le place destinctia mea
Eu nu stiu ce-i aia, dar dac-or vrea
Le-o dau pe toata, ce sa fac eu cu ea?

And the last one:

M-am dus sa tai un copac (I went to cut a tree)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqcdqgrG1MY

Hei m-am dus m-am dus sa tai un copac
Si a venit a venit un mic pui de drac
Si el mi-a spus mi-a spus sa nu tai copacul
C-o sa-mi scoata un ochi si-o sa-mi sparga si capul
Insa eu insa eu nu l-am ascultat
Ehei m-am dus m-am dus sa tai un copac.

Cadeee, da-te ma ca cadeee
Da-te ma ca cadeee
Cade cade cade cade cade copacul
Curge curge curge curge curge coniacul.

It's falliin', go on dude it's falliin'
Go on dude it's falliin'
It's falling falling falling falling, the tree is falling
It's flowing flowing flowing flowing, the brandy is flowing.

The three messages posted by Dan above do not contain text in romanian. The romanian language has diacritics (Ăă Ââ Îî Şş Ţţ) and those like Dan that do not use them are giving an image of the romanians as being the sloppiest people in Europe, because from all the european peoples, only the romanians have such a big percentage of the population (close to 80%) that do not write correctly their language when using the computer.

The written romanian language cannot be understood correctly without using the diacritics. However, the majority of romanians do not use them by pure slopiness and laziness. Because of that, the majority of romanian sites are written incorrectly, using a language that is a corrupt version of romanian. Writing romanian without diacritics on a linguistic forum is a shame and should not be done under any circumstances.

ravinescu said:

"The three messages posted by Dan above do not contain text in romanian. The romanian language has diacritics (Ăă Ââ Îî Şş Ţţ) and those like Dan that do not use them are giving an image of the romanians as being the sloppiest people in Europe, because from all the european peoples, only the romanians have such a big percentage of the population (close to 80%) that do not write correctly their language when using the computer.

The written romanian language cannot be understood correctly without using the diacritics. However, the majority of romanians do not use them by pure slopiness and laziness. Because of that, the majority of romanian sites are written incorrectly, using a language that is a corrupt version of romanian. Writing romanian without diacritics on a linguistic forum is a shame and should not be done under any circumstances."

===================

What a bunch of nonsense. Almost all Romanians do no use diacritics online. Why? because the Romanian text is 100% intelligible without diacritics. Yes, this online variety of Romanian is not phonetic anymore, but who cares, as long as the meaning is conveyed in full.

Since nearly 100% of the Romanians do not use diacritics online, this reality should be used as an opportunity for an orthography reform not as something that should be quickly swept under the carpet. So until then I will continue with satisfaction the shameful practice of writing Romanian without diacritics.

====================================
Quote from: Dan
What a bunch of nonsense. Almost all Romanians do no use diacritics online. Why? because the Romanian text is 100% intelligible without diacritics. Yes, this online variety of Romanian is not phonetic anymore, but who cares, as long as the meaning is conveyed in full.
====================================


It's not a bunch of nonsense, it's a very important clue about the true nature of some romanians. Why the majority of romanians do not use diacritics when writing on a computer? Why they want to write incorrectly and do not care about that? Why is it such a pain to use 5 supplementary letters (Ă Â Î Ş Ţ) when writing on a keyboard? Is it because romanian is 100% intelligible even without the use of diacritics, like Dan says? Let's find the answer.

The romanian writing system has a primary rule, a main "code", and the code says that each sound is designated by a specific letter. The sound A is designated by the letter A, the sound D is designated by the letter D, etc. The romanian diacritics (Ă Â Î Ş Ţ) designate specific sounds, just like the other letters of the latin alphabet (A, B, V, R, etc.). The romanian diacritics are not accents, they are signs indicating that the modified letters (Ă Î Ş Ţ) designate sounds that are different from the unmodified letters (A I S T).

The sounds designated by diacritics are presented below:

Ă = mid-central unrounded vowel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwa


Î = close central unrounded vowel (also written as Â)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_central_unrounded_vowel


Ş = voiceless postalveolar fricative
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_postalveolar_fricative


Ţ = voiceless alveolar affricate
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_alveolar_affricate

Anyone can notice from the Wikipedia articles that the sound Ă is not identical with the sound A, the sound Î is not identical with I, Ş is not equal to S and Ţ is not T. These sounds specific to romanian must have their own letters in order to avoid confusion when reading. This is why the diacritics were invented and this is why they should be used.

The romanian keyboard mapping just replaces the signs [ \ ] ; ' from the US english mapping with Ă Â Î Ş Ţ, so these letters become readily available (the aforementioned signs will be written from now on with the help of AltGr, the right side Alt key). So, it's very easy to have diacritics on a keyboard, this should not be a technical problem for romanian computer users, because it is not a problem at all for other european computer users.

Now let's take one sample from a recent message written by Dan.

=====================
Dan's writing:

Nu e nimeni pe strada
Ochii tristi sa mii vada
====================

And now let's use the true romanian writing.

###################
Correct writing:

Nu e nimeni pe stradă
Ochii trişti să mi-i vadă
##################

The word "strada" from Dan's message means in romanian "the street" (noun with definite article). However, the song uses the word "stradă", which means "street" (noun not articulated). The word "tristi" used by Dan does not exist in romanian, the correct word is "trişti" (plural of the english "sad"). The word "sa" used by Dan means in romanian "his/her". But the word present in the song is actually "să", which means "to" in english (like in "to see something"). The word "vada" used by Dan does not exist in romanian. The word used in the song must be written "vadă", which means "see".

The conclusion is that in just two little sentences Dan has made four mistakes. Just imagine what number of mistakes appears in a text of bigger size.

So, why the majority of romanians write incorrectly and do not care at all about that, just like Dan, who says "who cares"? One common excuse is that "the meaning is conveyed in full", used also by Dan. Actually this excuse is a lie, the meaning is not conveyed in full, it is deduced from the context and sometimes the context is not clear enough to understand the true meaning. On the contrary, "the meaning is conveyed in full" only when writing correctly, with diacritics. The romanian written without diacritics loses precision and also loses emphasis, expressiveness. It is an amputated language, without the force and clarity of the correctly written language.

How come is it possible that the other europeans "care" to write correctly, but the romanians like Dan do not care? Why the french, danish, poles, czechs, hungarians, spaniards, etc. can write with the diacritics of their languages and the majority of romanians can't? French language cannot be understood without accents or cedillas? Polish language cannot be understood without its diacritics? Of course they can. For the native population of any european country, their mother tongue could be understood more or less when it is written without diacritics. It is also the situation of romanian, which can be understood by romanian natives when it is written without diacritics. But it is a correct writing? No, it's not, it's a writing with plenty of ortographical errors. That's why such a writing is not used by the majority of europeans. You don't see a majority of germans, norwegians, swedish, french, etc. writing without diacritics. Why the situation is completely reversed in Romania? The answer is simple, the other europeans are not sloppy and lazy when writing on a computer, and they want to write correctly, offering a good image of themselves. The majority of romanians do not care about their language or about their image in the eyes of the other europeans, they are sloppy and lazy when it comes to writing correctly.


====================================
Quote from: Dan
Since nearly 100% of the Romanians do not use diacritics online, this reality should be used as an opportunity for an orthography reform not as something that should be quickly swept under the carpet. So until then I will continue with satisfaction the shameful practice of writing Romanian without diacritics.
====================================


Yeah, sure... It's like saying " We romanians are sloppy and lazy and don't want to be otherwise, so deal with it and accomodate the writing to our sloppiness and laziness". How come no other european people wants to modify the ortography of its language in order to get rid of the diacritics? Oh, right, no other european people is sloppy and lazy when writing on a computer. Just to think, the romanians are the only ones that discovered the joy of writing without diacritics, all the other europeans don't know what they're losing in terms of "productivity" by using additional letters, instead of using only the english alphabet... Well, maybe the other europeans want to write correctly in their languages, a thought that obviously never crossed the mind of many romanians and even if this did cross their mind, they are unrepentant in their determination to write incorrectly.

But speaking of an ortographical reform in order to replace the diacritics with something else, this actually was attempted in the 19th century. Some latinization extremists argued that the sounds Ă Î Ş Ţ are not of latin origin, so they must be eradicated from the language. Well, these sounds are probably not of latin origin (although some argue otherwise), but what is the problem of them being of dacian or slavic origin? Should also the governement expel all the people who cannot demonstrate they are descending from italic romans? The country will be almost emptied of its population. In the 19th century anything was attempted in order to get rid of these "nonlatin" sounds, but nothing worked, they are an essential part of romanian phonology. Then it was attempted to write them with original latin letters (without diacritics), which also failed, because no one has discovered a suitable group of letters to be used for writing the sounds Ă or Î. The sounds Ş or Ţ could theoretically be written CH and TS (like in french) or SH and TZ (like in english), but that would completely modify the appearance of romanian and it's strongly opposed by those that want romanian to ressemble latin as much as it could.

So in conclusion, the existing writing (with diacritics) is the best for the language, why should it be modified ? Only because the native speakers (actually writers) are sloppy and lazy and don't care if they are perceived like that? The use of computers has to trigger an ortographical reform of the romanian language with all the hassles that derive from that? Would it not be easier if the romanians learned how to write correctly in their language, by activating the romanian language keyboard mapping that is present in all the major operating systems (Windows, Linux, Mac) from a long time ago ? Of course it would be easier, but sloppiness and laziness are hard to overcome for some people, better change the ortography... This "solution" to the romanian laziness (err, diacritics) problem is so ridiculous, that no rational person should suggest changing the ortography instead of educating the romanian population how to write correctly, just like the other europeans. It's not hard at all, there are romanian computer users that do write with diacritics, it's a very natural and easy way of typing, with the very important bonus of writing in the only correct version of the romanian language.

I apologize, I do not know English well.

I have doubts and a question. 1. What is the purpose of this topic? 2. There are a Slavic Language?

I learned some Russian. But I can not distinguish the Czech language, nor the Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, etc.

Singer Marina Voica is coming from Russia 40 years ago. And now has strong Russian accent. Instead, another Russian woman, wife of Marcel Pavel, to learn Romanian and not completely solid thick Russian accent.


Knowing little Russian I can approach the accents refer this language. And then I wonder: how can a man who does not know Russian, Croatian, Bulgarian, etc.. to refer to a Slavic accent who speaks English?

If Romanian would have more words slave then I should I can understand the Serbs, Poles, Ukrainians, etc..! : )

that asshole is a troll, (ravinescu) is not romanian

even the online romanian newspaper DO NOT USE diacritics

http://www.romanialibera.ro/editie-Nationala/domeniu-prezidentiale2009.html

that is a major romanian online newspaper not using diacritics ar other diashit, BECAUSE Romanian without diashit is 100% intelligible.

ban the trolls

PS the only DIACRITIC is in the title ROMANIA LIBERA. The rest of the online newspaper containing millions of articles and visitations does NOT CONTAIN A SINGLE DIACRITIC (accent)

http://www.romanialibera.ro/editie-Nationala/domeniu-it.html

ban the trolls

România Liberă is one of the last remnants among the online newspapers that continue to use the writing without diacritics. But the majority of newspapers that have a site use the correct writing. Anyone can see that by visiting the following links:

Major newspapers use diacritics:

Adevărul
http://www.adevarul.ro/

Cotidianul
http://www.cotidianul.ro/

Evenimentul Zilei
http://www.evz.ro/

Gîndul
http://www.gandul.info/

Jurnalul Naţional
http://www.jurnalul.ro/

Ziarul Naţional
http://www.ziarulnational.com/

Curierul Naţional
http://www.curierulnational.ro/

The sport newspapers are also written with diacritics:

Gazeta Sporturilor
http://gsp.ro/

ProSport
http://www.prosport.ro/

And even the tabloids are written with diacritics:

Libertatea
http://libertatea.ro/

Cancan
http://cancan.ro/

Click
http://click.ro/

=======================

This trend among romanians to not write with diacritics online is completely out of touch with the european situation. And it creates a very bad image for the romanians, who proud themselves with the fact that romanian is descending from latin, but are not capable of writing their own language correctly.

It must be said that diacritics are used for all the printed materials available in Romania. There are no books, newspapers, magazines, etc. available on paper that are written without diacritics. Even the newspapers that do not use diacritics on their web sites are using them on their print (paper) version.

There are no discussions about removing the diacritics from romanian, because they are essential for the correct understanding of the written language. So the determination of some romanians to not use them is plain stupid, this goes nowhere and eventually they will be forced to write correctly. Why not begin now, maybe the bad ortographical reputation of the romanians will disappear if they show that they can respect the writing rules of their own language.

A German said that Portuguese is one of the most Slavonic ways to pronounce a Latin language:

http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=154676

A Russian said that Portuguese from Portugal has more in common with her language, but Brazilian Portuguese has different rhythm and has nothing in common with Russian.

http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=154676&page=4

@ravinescu

All Romanian online newspapers used to write without diacritics until just a few years ago. You can still find online editions cached from 2005, 2006 and they have no diacritics. It was in the last couple of years that the journalist associations decided to use the diacritics in a consistent way.

Adevarul, Jurnalul National and Evenimentul Zilei are arguably the 3 largest daily newspapers. See these online editions from 2005-2007 - they do not use diacritics:

http://web.archive.org/web/20070206223426/http://jurnalul.ro/

http://web.archive.org/web/20060106033650/http://evz.ro/

http://web.archive.org/web/20050523015159/http://www.adevarulonline.ro/

and as previously noted, a large daily newspaper like Romania Libera still does not use diacritics.

So please ravinescu, do not try to misinform the non-Romanian speakers on this forum. Romanian is perfectly inteligible without diacritics. Personally, I am not against the use of diacritics, just that I think that the current choice of diacritics is not the most appropriate. When Romanian transitioned from Cyrillic alphabet to Latin alphabet, writing reforms were made almost every decade, only the Communists put a stop on this ongoing process.

A reform is needed after 70 years of stagnation. The spoken language evolved since then. And the need is even more acute if we want to reintegrate in the Romanian society the emigrants and their children, which constitute a significant percentage of the population. In particular ş and ţ should be replaced, as they confuse the most the persons accustomed to Romance languages and trying to understand Romanian. We have plenty of choices on how these two characters can be represented. We can revert the process that led to them from Latin to Romanian or just follow the pronunciation rules from other Romance languages.

@Dan said

"A reform is needed after 70 years of stagnation. The spoken language evolved since then. And the need is even more acute if we want to reintegrate in the Romanian society the emigrants and their children, which constitute a significant percentage of the population. In particular ş and ţ should be replaced, as they confuse the most the persons accustomed to Romance languages and trying to understand Romanian. We have plenty of choices on how these two characters can be represented. We can revert the process that led to them from Latin to Romanian or just follow the pronunciation rules from other Romance languages. "


Why change the pronunciation of Romanian so that it sounds more like the rest of the latin languages? What about just reintroducing the Cyrillic alphabet? After all it works pretty well for the Romanian language and it can be used to accurately represent the Romanian pronunciation in a much better way than the existing alphabet.

==========================
Quote from: Dan
All Romanian online newspapers used to write without diacritics until just a few years ago. You can still find online editions cached from 2005, 2006 and they have no diacritics. It was in the last couple of years that the journalist associations decided to use the diacritics in a consistent way. Adevarul, Jurnalul National and Evenimentul Zilei are arguably the 3 largest daily newspapers. See these online editions from 2005-2007 - they do not use diacritics. And as previously noted, a large daily newspaper like Romania Libera still does not use diacritics.
=========================


Yes, of course the romanian web (not only the newspapers) was almost devoid of diacritics until a few years ago, nobody could say otherwise. However, since then a strong trend to use diacritics has gained ground and the number of sites that use the correct romanian writing is growing day by day. You just demonstrated this by correctly showing that the three largest newspapers did not use diacritics on their sites some years ago, and now they do use them. But not only newspapers use diacritics on their current sites, ordinary people also do it, for example those that have personal blogs. Also, the romanian sites of foreign companies/corporations like Microsoft, Google, Nokia, Philips are written with diacritics and that was the case from the beginning. The software localized in romanian has diacritics, and I am speaking about the translations made by volunteers, but also by paid translators (hired by Microsoft, Google, Adobe, etc.).


==========================
Quote from: Dan
So please ravinescu, do not try to misinform the non-Romanian speakers on this forum. Romanian is perfectly inteligible without diacritics. Personally, I am not against the use of diacritics, just that I think that the current choice of diacritics is not the most appropriate. When Romanian transitioned from Cyrillic alphabet to Latin alphabet, writing reforms were made almost every decade, only the Communists put a stop on this ongoing process.
=========================


I am just telling the truth, romanian is not perfectly intelligible without diacritics, otherwise people had abandoned them a long time ago. But this did not happen, for a very simple reason, romanian writing cannot be taught without using diacritics. You cannot teach children how to write in romanian if the alphabet does not contain specific letters for the sounds Ă Î Ş Ţ, that are used very frequently in romanian speech. If a child cannot distinguish between "sa" and "să" he cannot understand basic principles of romanian grammar. The same thing is true for countless situations, for example "ii" and "îi" are not the same thing, just like "in" is not the same as "în" or "si" is not identical to "şi". These groups of letters are pronounced differently because they do not designate identical concepts. So, if "sa" is not the same thing as "să", why should the romanians that use computers write them both as "sa"? This does not happen when writing by hand and this does not happen in printed books, newspapers or magazines. Why is writing on a computer different with regard to writing by hand? The same orthographical rules apply to the romanian language written by hand or on a computer. And before the computer, some people (secretaries, for example) wrote on typing machines. Documents written on typing machines always had diacritics. Why was it possible to use diacritics when typing on a typewriter, but now that anyone has a computer, some romanians think that it is not possible? A computer is a very advanced typewriter, so it is easier to use diacritics on a computer that on a typing machine. All the europeans do it, with the exception of a large part of romanians. Who is right, hundreds of millions of europeans or less than ten million romanians that use computers?


=============================
Quote from: Dan
A reform is needed after 70 years of stagnation. The spoken language evolved since then.
=============================


The spoken language has not evolved a bit from 70 years ago. The sounds Ă Î Ş Ţ designated by diacritics are exactly the same as 70 years ago, actually they are the same as those used hundreds of years ago. They are here to stay, the romanian language cannot be conceived without their presence.


==========================
Quote from: Dan
And the need is even more acute if we want to reintegrate in the Romanian society the emigrants and their children, which constitute a significant percentage of the population.
==========================


Come on, be serious, do you really think that romanian emigrants will want to be reintegrated in the romanian society by returning home? They left the country, they do not intend to come back and their children have no intention to learn romanian, they want to learn only the language of their new country. How many descendants of italians in the USA want to learn italian? A very small percent, if at all. But let's accept that some romanian emigrants will want to return to Romania. They will understand very easily the need to write with diacritics, because in Italy, Spain or France (countries with the largest percentages of romanian immigrants) almost all that write on a computer use them, so the romanians that learned to write on a computer in Italy, Spain or France will find very normal that when writing in romanian they should also use diacritics.


==========================
Quote from: Dan
In particular ş and ţ should be replaced, as they confuse the most the persons accustomed to Romance languages and trying to understand Romanian. We have plenty of choices on how these two characters can be represented. We can revert the process that led to them from Latin to Romanian or just follow the pronunciation rules from other Romance languages.
=========================


Ha, ha, ha, since then a language must adapt to the wishes of the non-natives that want to learn it? And what wishes should be taken into account, those of the french, spaniards, chinese, germans or englishmen? Ş and Ţ confuses the non-romanians, so the language must be changed in order for those to learn it more easily... I never laughed so hard recently. This did not happen in any language until now. Romania has a population of more than 20 million people, but in order to ease the learning of romanian by the less than 2-3000 thousand non-romanians that want to learn it every year, the writing must be changed. Romanians have a reputation of servility with regard to foreigners, but this is really taken to the extreme... And actually Ş an Ţ are very easily understood by foreigners, because Ş is SH (like in english) or CH (like in french) and Ţ is TZ (like in english) ot TS (like in french). Even Ă is very well understood by those that know english, because it is the schwa, frequently encountered in english words. The only problem is with Î (written also as Â), pronounced like the "e" in the english "roses", that however is very easy to pronounce by those that know russian (where Ы = Î) or polish (where Y = Î).

Dan, you really have some strange ideas about the romanian orthography and how it should be changed. What linguist in his right mind would want to reverse the process of evolution of romanian from latin? It cannot be done, it was tried on a small scale in the 19th century and was a monumental failure, because it complicated the language and transformed it into an artificial language (a sort of esperanto). Nobody wants to repeat the linguistic mistakes of the relatinization from the 19th century. And no romanian linguist wants to replace the diacritics with groups of letters, because it would be non-practical to write 2 letters (CH, TS) instead of 1 letter (Ş, Ţ). And why do that, only because some romanians are lazy and do not want to write with diacritics, like the rest of europeans? It would have been understandable if it was a painful effort, but is is not, just enable the romanian keyboard mapping included in the operating system and you're ready to go.

P.S.

The diacritics are a big problem for many romanians, because they are accustomed to write without them. Why did this happen only in Romania and not in other european countries? You can find the answer in a thoroughly documented article written in english about the drama of the romanian diacritics in the computer age.

http://kitblog.com/2008/10/romanian_diacritic_marks.html

Those that know the romanian language could also read a very heated discussion about the use of diacritics:

http://forum.softpedia.com/index.php?showtopic=138688&view=findpost&p=7513462