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Which Romance language sounds more Slavic?
Today's romania is tied politically to the balkans in the following periods:
First/I. 106-271 - About 1/3 of the territory was part of Roman Dacia.
From 271 to 1000AD is tied politically to the eastern europe as it was ruled by various eastern germanic and uralic people. In 1000AD starts the hungarian contest of Transilvania. Around 1200 starts the hungarian influence in the rest of Romania and the formation of the romanian states. In 1330 Wallachia (southern romania) declares independence from the K. of Hungary. In 1364 Moldavia (Eastern romania) declares independence from the K. of Hungary.
Second/II. 1711-1821 - Wallachia and Moldavia (but not Transylvania) are ruled by the Otoman Empire through proxy greek merchants. Due to the lack of muslim colonists the legal and social systems are not changed fundamentally like in the balkans where it was similar to the middle east since the coming of the turks.
The K of. Romania declares independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1877, however it was de facto independent long before that (unlike the balkans).
After 1918 the modern romania is created.
The Romance languages with the most Slavonic accents are the Moldavian dialects of Romanian and Portuguese from Lisbon to Southern Portugal.
The Portuguese accent from Lisbon to Southern Portugal have features of:
dropping many unstressed vowels left and right;
dark l;
jery sound of Russian/Polish;
strong, hard "sh" and "zh" sound like in Polish (due to Portuguese ending all the z and s as a hard "sh" sound);
softening of close e as ie, closed o as uo;
vowel reduction of many unstressed "a" as schwa;
loss of long vowels;
and some palatization on consonants pronounced with the tongue (k, g, t, d).
Moldavians acquired:
palatization from Russian;
pronunciation of closed e as ie, closed o as uo;
and loss of long vowels.
dropping many unstressed vowels left and right;
dark l;
jery sound of Russian/Polish;
strong, hard "sh" and "zh" sound like in Polish (due to Portuguese ending all the z and s as a hard "sh" sound);
softening of close e as ie, closed o as uo;
vowel reduction of many unstressed "a" as schwa;
loss of long vowels;
and some palatization on consonants pronounced with the tongue (k, g, t, d)
---long vowels are present in lots of Slavonic languages. Try with Czech, Slovak, Serbo-Croatian, Bosnian, Slovenian.
The most broadcast Slavonic languages are Russian and Polish. Both lack long vowels and sound like a series of "dobrsh vulk dbrich bzhpshek mientnik" (no offence intended) to many foreigners, Portuguese is also like that to my foreign ears.
However, I'm aware that most Southern Slavic languages (except Bulgarian and Macedonian or Fyromski or whatever is it called), Czech and Slovak have those long vowels.
I have a link for the foreigner's stereotype of languages consisting of consonants only, and Portuguese was on the list.
http://www.englishforums.com/English/EnglishSpeakingHearEnglish/kmzjq/post.htm
I forget the link in which a speaker of Portuguese from Lisbon mistook a Pole and Russian inside a bus in Northwestern Europe for his own. He talked to them in Portuguese only to find out that they were speaking Russian or Polish. He even said that even the Portuguese could mistake Slavs for their own people.
Romanian don't have uralic blood,
N Y chromosome haplotype has max 1% in romanians,
btw this is not god or bad...
Os brasileiros que dizem que o Português na verdade são duas línguas diferentes nunca conviveram com portugueses (pelo menos por um período considerável).
Português do Brasil e de Portugal são apenas variantes de uma mesma língua. A comunicação entre os falantes não é menos fácil que a comunicação entre um nordestino e um gaucho.
Os brasileiros que dizem que o Português na verdade são duas línguas diferentes nunca conviveram com portugueses (pelo menos por um período considerável).
--
Mas são justamente portugueses os que dizem que a gente fala ''brasileiro'', obviamente eles têm vergonha de nosso jeito de falar (me chamo, cheguei em casa, vi vocês, ele é muito devagar, a gente dançou feito louco)...Ou aceitam nossas diferenças ou não. A gente quer a conta limpa, viu?
É ridículo chamar de português só a língua artificial usada nas revistas direitistas (feito a Veja) e chamar a língua falada de ''dialeto'' (dialecto na língua de vocês).
Surprisingly after listening to the four clips I would say that intonation wise and the generally pattern and speed to the language reminds me of Caribbean Spanish that is spoken in Puerto Rico, Panama, Cuba, and The Dominican Republican with the last video reminding more of that Mexican Rap that is very popular among the Chicanos youth in Southern California (yes, my background is in Portuguese, but I get a lot of Spanish language channels in my satellite television package free with our Portuguese language package). Yes, there is some definite Slavonic patterns in the words, but Romanian definitely reminds me more of a Romance language compared to some clips that I've heard of European Portuguese.
@JGreco
"Yes, there is some definite Slavonic patterns in the words, but Romanian definitely reminds me more of a Romance language compared to some clips that I've heard of European Portuguese."
To me, neither Romanian nor EU Portuguese have a slavic sound to them. I am a native speaker of Romanian and I enjoy listening to Portuguese a lot, despite that I cannot pick up more than a word or two. Portuguese and Southern Italian dialects seem to me to closest in sound to Romanian.
"Surprisingly after listening to the four clips I would say that intonation wise and the generally pattern and speed to the language reminds me of Caribbean Spanish"
What I find surprising is that Southern Slavic languages, like Bulgarian or Serbian don't have any influence on the accent of standard Romanian (standard Romanian is the Romanian spoken in the Southern Romania, which neighbors Bulgaria and Serbia).
Here is another sample, an interview in colloquial Romanian:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=At42azcKZvs
"the last video reminding more of that Mexican Rap that is very popular among the Chicanos youth in Southern California"
I think the Mexican trumpet in the background is resposible for that :)
You can try another sample of Romanian rap:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Th_lzb6uJ6c
and a woman for balance
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBzw_mgbMlE
To answer the initial question, Romanian is the obvious choice here. Look where Romania is. It's completely surrounded by Slavic nations (and Hungary). Isolated for centuries from the Romance languages of Western Europe and having close contacts with its neighboring languages, the Romanian language absorbed a great number of Slavic words. Romanian seriously sounds kind of like a southern Italian dialect with a strong Slavic touch in my personal opinion. A simple example would be "Da, buna seara," meaning "Yes, good evening" in Romanian.
From the genetic standpoint, Romanians are really quite similar to their Balkan and Eastern European neighbors as they descend primarily from a mixture of the original indigenous Dacians (a Thracian tribe conquered by Rome), Roman soldiers and colonists who settled the territory when it was under Roman rule, and invading migratory tribes (mostly Slavs but to a lesser extent Goths, Huns, Bulgars, Cumans, Tatars and others).
As a previous poster pointed out, the "Romans" in Dacia were for the most part not Roman in the sense of being directly from Rome or Italy, but were Latin-speaking colonists who hailed from various provinces, mainly from the areas adjacent to Dacia in the Balkans or Asia Minor (i.e. Romanized Illyrians, Thracians, Greeks, etc.). These Latin-speaking soldiers and colonists intermarried with the Dacians, who in turn became increasingly Romanized. Furthermore, the inhabitants of Dacia (as well as the inhabitants of all other Roman provinces) were granted Roman citizenship in 212 AD under the Edict of Caracalla. This move served to solidify the Roman identity of the Latin-speaking population living north of the Danube, such that when the Romans pulled out in 275 AD, there still remained a population that regarded itself as Roman.
After Rome pulled out under pressure from the Germanic Goths, the area of Dacia essentially became a "no-man's land" under constant threat of invasion and attack for nearly a millenium. Many different tribes, mostly from regions further east, ravaged Dacia during that time. After the Goths came Huns out of central Asia, who in turn were followed by Slavs, Bulgars, Magyars, Cumans, Tatars, and others. Of all of these, the Slavs were by far the most numerous and unlike most of the others, they settled the land and intermarried with the Daco-Roman population.
As an aside, the Slavs who settled other areas of the Balkans where their language/culture eventually dominated (i.e. Bulgaria or ex-Yugoslavia) also intermarried with and assimilated the prior Romanized Illyrians and Thracians. As such, the Romanians and South Slavs really share the same bloodlines despite having different languages/cultures. The only difference in my opinion is that Romanians are more pre-Slavic in their ancestry (i.e. native Balkan) whereas the South Slavs presumably have more of the original Slavic ancestry since that's where their languages came to dominate. South Slavs appear to be physically intermediate between Italians or Greeks on one hand and Russians on the other, which would reflect a mixture of native Balkan and Slavic ancestry.
@Al
"Romanian seriously sounds kind of like a southern Italian dialect with a strong Slavic touch in my personal opinion. A simple example would be "Da, buna seara," meaning "Yes, good evening" in Romanian. "
The only Romanian word that ordinary people (that have no Slavic language skills) can recognize as slavic is 'Da'. I can bet most other words are dificult to recognize as Slavic. And the reason for that is that Slavic words are rarely used in conversational Romanian of today (about 5% of the words in normal conversation are of Slavic origin) and therefore hard to pick-up.
It is true that about 15-20% of the words in the Romanian vocabulary are of Slavic origin, but most of those are archaisms, that Romanians do not understand at all. In other words, with the exception of some positive meaning words (like da, iubire, drag, prietenie etc) adopted though liturgical use of Old Slavonic, few Slavic words are in use in present day Romanian. It is important to stress that Romanian borrowed little from the language of the Slavic neighbors (Bulgarian, Serbian, or Polish, Slovak in the past), but from Old Slavonic used by the Romanian Church for centuries.
When it comes to Slavic sound and accent in Romanian, only the Eastern part (Moldavia) has a Slavic tone to the language. Perhaps suprisingly the other Romanian regions are devoid of Slavic influence in pronunciation. People confuse the somewhat roughness of the Romanian language and couple it with Eastern European geography and wrongly conclude that Romanian has a Slavic accent.
Al, take a look at those youtube links I posted above and point out where you feel there is a Slavic accent. Thanks.
European Portuguese is the official Slavic sounding Romance language. Period.
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