# What are the things that were inherited from Latin to Romanian but not other Romance languages?



## febris

What kind of things (grammar elements, word etc.) is only inherited to Romanian but not other major Romance languages from Latin? Like vocative case in Romanian, pronounced H etc.


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## Ben Jamin

febris said:


> What kind of things (grammar elements, word etc.) is only inherited to Romanian but not other major Romance languages from Latin? Like vocative case in Romanian, pronounced H etc.


As far as I  know these are: retention of noun declension and the neuter gender of nouns.


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## Penyafort

The neuter gender of nouns isn't completely exclusive, as there are traces of it in collective nouns in Central Italy and Western Iberian, most notably in Asturian, where it's known as _neutro de materia_.


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## Red Arrow

The word for cake: placenta > plăcintă
This word was lost in the Western Romance language and was reintroduced into these languages in the late 17th century with a medical meaning.


febris said:


> pronounced H etc.


Romanian only pronounces the H in loanwords from Greek, Hungarian, English, the Slavic languages and the Turkic languages. It doesn't pronounce (and doesn't write) the H in words inherited from Latin.

habere - avere
herba - iarbă
heri - ieri
heros - erou
hibernum - iarnă
homo - om
honor - onoare
hora - oară
horribilis - oribil
hospes - oaspete
hostis - oaste
humanus - uman
humilis - umil


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## Olaszinhok

Penyafort said:


> The neuter gender of nouns isn't completely exclusive,


Romanian neuter is a _combination_ of the other two genders. More specifically, neuter nouns behave in the singular as masculine nouns and in the plural as feminine nouns. These nouns are traditionally called "neuter" by Romanian grammarians. Something similar actually occurs in Italian as well, but Italian has no neuter.  Some Italian words are masculine in the singular and feminine in the plural: _uovo uova_ (egg - eggs) _dito - dita_ (finger - fingers)- _osso - ossa_ (bone- bones) and so forth. Unlike Romanian, Italian also preserves the Latin ending in -a typical for neuter nouns in the plural.
However, it must be said that "neuter" nouns are much more common in Romanian than in Italian.


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## Red Arrow

Romanian inherited the diphthong au from Latin.

*Latin - Romanian - Italian - French - Spanish - Portuguese*
aurum - aur - oro - or - oro - ouro/oiro
taurus - taur [taur] - toro - taureau [toʁo] - toro - touro/toiro
laus - laudă - lode - los (obsolete) - / - /

There are also learned borrowings from Latin like pauper, but they don't count.


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## Penyafort

Red Arrow said:


> Romanian inherited the diphthong au from Latin.
> 
> *Latin - Romanian - Italian - French - Spanish - Portuguese*
> aurum - aur - oro - or - oro - ouro/oiro
> taurus - taur [taur] - toro - taureau [toʁo] - toro - touro/toiro
> laus - laudă - lode - los (obsolete) - / - /



Same in *Occitan*: aur, taur(e), laus.


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## Red Arrow

Penyafort said:


> Same in *Occitan*: aur, taur(e), laus.


I doubt Occitan counts as a major Romance language?


febris said:


> What kind of things (grammar elements, word etc.) is only inherited to Romanian but not other *major* Romance languages from Latin? Like vocative case in Romanian, pronounced H etc.


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## Awwal12

Olaszinhok said:


> More specifically, neuter nouns behave in the singular as masculine nouns and in the plural as feminine nouns. These nouns are traditionally called "neuter" by Romanian grammarians.


So the morphology has been lost but the category itself still has been preserved.


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## Olaszinhok

There are some exceptions in Romanian too, to be honest.​A productive plural morpheme for neuter nouns is -e, which is also a common feminine plural ending. Moreover, a large part of feminines take -i in the plural (like masculines). These facts show that plural morphemes do not directly encode gender, so we have to resort to declension classes. There is only one declensional type *(singular -/-u, pl. -uri)* typical for neuter nouns.


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## Red Arrow

I disagree with Olaszinhok. There are 9 possible plural formations for Romanian neuter nouns (excluding stem changes) and 8 of them are typical for neuter nouns:

1. consonant => consonant + uri
2. consonant => consonant + e
3. u => uri
4. (i)u => (i)e
5. u => uă
6. i => ie
7. i => iuri
8. e => e

9. iu => ii (resembles masculine nouns: u => i)

This means neuter nouns are a very distinct group in Romanian with their own plural formations, unlike in Italian and Spanish where they are just a small group of words that are masculine in the singular form and feminine in the plural form.

Romanian nouns - Wikipedia


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## Olaszinhok

Red Arrow said:


> Spanish


Spanish? Spanish plurals are the most regular ones amongst the languages I know and there is no trace of neuter._ Lo, esto, eso y aquello _could be related to the neuter but this is another story.
Spanish and Italian have a completely different pluralisation, after all. There is a certain resemblance between Romanian and Italian plurals, instead.


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## Red Arrow

I thought Spanish had a new "neuter" words like Italian. Thank you for correcting me.


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## Penyafort

Red Arrow said:


> I doubt Occitan counts as a major Romance language?



Fine. The word is not in the title, though.

However, if you were a student of medieval literature, Occitan would be a major language while Romanian would be an irrelevant one. Everything is relative in life.


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## Apollodorus

Red Arrow said:


> Romanian only pronounces the H in loanwords from Greek, Hungarian, English, the Slavic languages and the Turkic languages. It doesn't pronounce (and doesn't write) the H in words inherited from Latin.
> 
> habere - avere
> herba - iarbă
> heri - ieri
> heros - erou
> hibernum - iarnă
> homo - om
> honor - onoare
> hora - oară
> horribilis - oribil
> hospes - oaspete
> hostis - oaste
> humanus - uman
> humilis - umil


Are all these words inherited directly from Latin or via other languages like Italian or French?


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## Red Arrow

Apollodorus said:


> Are all these words inherited directly from Latin or via other languages like Italian or French?


All come directly from Vulgar Latin, according to Wiktionary. In case it's loaned from Italian or French, then the Romanian word is placed under the Italian or French one in the "descendants" box. In case it is loaned from New Latin, then it's marked as "learned borrowing".


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## Red Arrow

In fact, when we look at Romanian loanwords from French, the h is usually pronounced.
Category:Romanian terms borrowed from French - Wiktionary
hotel - Wiktionary
heroină - Wiktionary

Compare native *oaste* (=host) and the loanword *hotel*. Compare native *erou* (=hero) and the loanword *heroină* (=heroin, female hero). Romanian borrowed French words like how Dutch and English borrowed French words.


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## Apollodorus

Red Arrow said:


> All come directly from Vulgar Latin, according to Wiktionary.



I was just asking because terms like heros - erou ("hero"), horribilis - oribil ("horrible"), humanus - uman ("human"), etc., seem to have a certain "modern" ring about them.

Besides, if (a) Romanian is based on Vulgar Latin and (b) Vulgar Latin replaced the three-gender system of Classical Latin with two genders, how and why did Romanian end up with three genders?


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## Olaszinhok

This essay might be of interest to you.
The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter


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## Red Arrow

Vulgar Latin wasn't homogenous. It retained neuter gender in the East.


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## Apollodorus

Red Arrow said:


> Vulgar Latin wasn't homogenous. It retained neuter gender in the East.


By "East" you mean Romanian?

The Wikipedia article “History of the Romanian language” says:

“Historians have not reached a consensus on the date of the first historical event which can, without doubt, connect to Romanians … The oldest surviving writing in Romanian that can be reliably dated is a letter sent by Lupu Neacșu from the then Dlăgopole, now Câmpulung, Wallachia, to Johannes Benkner of Brașov, Transylvania. From the events and people mentioned in the letter it can be inferred that it was written around the 29th or 30 June *1521*”.

That’s a gap of more than a millennium between Roman colonisation (and presumed Latinisation) and the first written evidence for Romanian ….


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## Red Arrow

Apollodorus said:


> By "East" you mean Romanian?
> 
> The Wikipedia article “History of the Romanian language” says:
> 
> “Historians have not reached a consensus on the date of the first historical event which can, without doubt, connect to Romanians … The oldest surviving writing in Romanian that can be reliably dated is a letter sent by Lupu Neacșu from the then Dlăgopole, now Câmpulung, Wallachia, to Johannes Benkner of Brașov, Transylvania. From the events and people mentioned in the letter it can be inferred that it was written around the 29th or 30 June *1521*”.
> 
> That’s a gap of more than a millennium between Roman colonisation (and presumed Latinisation) and the first written evidence for Romanian ….


The modern Romanian language is proof, no? How else do you explain that there is this separate group of nouns in Romanian? It seems incredibly unlikely that Vulgar Latin in present day Romania and Moldova would have lost neuter gender and then _somehow_ regained it.


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## Apollodorus

Olaszinhok said:


> This essay might be of interest to you.
> The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter


According to that essay, Romanian words labelled “neuter” aren’t strictly neuter but “ambiguous” as they take no separate neuter form. Also, they take masculine adjectives when they are singular, but feminine adjectives when they are plural. So, they don't seem to be "neuter", after all.


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## Olaszinhok

Apollodorus said:


> According to that essay, Romanian words labelled “neuter” aren’t strictly neuter but “ambiguous” as they take no separate neuter form. Also, they take masculine adjectives when they are singular, but feminine adjectives when they are plural. So, they don't seem to be "neuter", after all.


It's exactly what I tried to explain in my previous posts.   See my #5


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## Apollodorus

Red Arrow said:


> The modern Romanian language is proof, no? How else do you explain that there is this separate group of nouns in Romanian? It seems incredibly unlikely that Vulgar Latin in present day Romania and Moldova would have lost neuter gender and then _somehow_ regained it.


I don't know about "losing" and "regaining". But they don't seem to be quite that separate if all they do is follow the standard masculine form when in singular and feminine when in plural.

They have no separate neuter endings and certainly not the Latin one ....


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## Red Arrow

Apollodorus said:


> I don't know about "losing" and "regaining". But they don't seem to be quite that separate *if all they do is follow the standard masculine form when in singular and feminine when in plural ....*


But they don't. This essay only looks at adjectives and pronouns and thus makes it look like plural feminine words and plural neuter words are indistinguishable, but feminine words and neuter words get different endings.

There are four groups of feminine words:
words that end in *-a* (plural -le)
words that end in *-ă* (plural -e, -i or -uri)
words that end in *-e* (plural -i)
words that end in *-i* (plural -i)

There are four groups of neuter words:
words that end in *a consonant* (plurai -uri or -e)
words that end in *-e* (plural -e)
words that end in *-i* (plural -ie or -iuri)
words that end in *-u* (plural -uri, -e, -ă or -i)

Masculine words end in a consonant, a, e, i or u, and they all get plural -i.


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## Apollodorus

From the examples given in the essay, it seems that:

1. Masculine nouns are preceded by a masculine article and take masculine adjectives, e.g.,

_un bărbat_ _frumos_ (‘a beautiful man’)

_doi bărbați frumoși_ (‘two beautiful men’).

2. Feminine nouns are preceded by a feminine article and take feminine adjectives, e.g.,

_o casă frumoasă_ (‘a beautiful house’)

_două case frumoase_ (‘two beautiful houses’).

3. “Neuter” nouns are preceded by a masculine article and take masculine adjectives in singular, but take feminine articles, endings and adjectives in the plural, e.g.,

_un măr frumos _(‘a beautiful apple’)

_două_ _mere frumoase_ (‘two beautiful apples’).

In contrast, Latin neuter has separate endings for singular and plural:

_mālum_, “apple” – _māla_, “apples”.

What Romanian seems to have done, is it replaced the original Latin neuter with an “ambiguous” class that combines existing masculine and feminine endings and adjectives.

In any case, it doesn’t look like the Romanian “neuter” is the same as the Latin neuter, in which case it can’t be a feature “inherited from Latin”.


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## Red Arrow

Apollodorus said:


> In contrast, Latin neuter has separate endings for singular and plural:
> 
> _mālum_, “apple” – _māla_, “apples”.


Latin can have the same ending for masculine, feminine and neuter words, but different plural forms:

avus (masculine, nominative singular) - avi (feminine, nominative plural)
virtus (feminine, nominative singular) - virtutes (feminine, nominative plural)
onus (neuter, nominative singular) - onera (neuter, nominative plural)

Romanian does the same thing:

Masculine and feminine words that end with -e get plural *-i*, whereas neuter words that end with -e get plural *-e*.
Masculine and feminine words that end with -i get plural *-i*, whereas neuter words that end with -i get plural *-ie* or *-iuri*, depending on the pronunciation of i.
Any other word ending will be typical for either feminine words or neuter words, not both.


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## Dymn

Another possibly* conservative trait of Romanian: short u became /u/ rather than /o/. In Gallo-Romance languages (French, Occitan, Lombard) it's also the case, but it's a later development that affected the merger of short u as well as long o. I think another language displaying a merger of short u and long u is Sardinian (which also merged short i and long i). 

* Most transcriptions I've seen use /ʊ/ for Latin short u, so maybe it's not more conservative for it to evolve towards /u/ than it is to evolve towards /o/.

Vocabulary-wise: 

_ști _"to know" (< _scire_), rather than _sapere_
_ninge _"to snow" (< _ningere_)_, _rather than _*nivicare _or _*nivare_
_nimeni _"nobody" (< _neminem_), rather than other options
_incepe _"to begin" (< _incipere_), rather than _*cominitiare_
As for the neuter gender, the arrangement of Romanian is probably due to the fact that the Latin neuter resembles the masculine in the singular and the feminine in the plural. However I'm checking neuter nouns in Romanian which I think are inherited from Latin and it's astounding how many of them were masculine: _cap, puț, nas, loc, foc, lac, râu, vânt, câmp, sânge, joc, deget, fum_, etc. Can these be mere "exceptions"? I had always assumed the Romanian neuter was a continuation of Latin but apparently some linguists dispute that.



> For example, the Latin noun _dōnum _‘gift’ feels strong in its neuter gender as long as the final _-m_ is present and clear enough to mark the word as categorially different from a masculine noun like _ventus _‘wind’. However, if the _-s_, _-m_ and other case endings of these words became muddled and faded away, we would be left with ‘_donu_‘ and ‘_ventu_‘, which we would then reasonably group together under the same gender. This is indeed what happened to Latin _dōnum_ and _ventus_; they became masculine _don _and _vent_ in French, masculine _don _and_ viento_ in Spanish and masculine _dono_ and _vento_ in Italian.


I like Danny Bate (I'd recommend following him on Twitter) but this is inaccurate. Nouns in Romance come from the accusative case, where most masculine and neuter nouns had the same ending (_-um_), so of course it was natural to merge them. In fact final -s has been kept in all Western Romance languages. You can see that some nouns which had an -s in the accusative kept it in French or Catalan (_tempus > temps, corpus > corps/cos_).


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## S.V.

Red Arrow said:


> The modern Romanian language is proof, no? How else do you explain...


(SE) "Micheál Ledwith, adviser to Pope John Paul II, having had access to the Vatican Library, stated that indeed Romanian is not resulted from Latin, but rather that both Latin and Romanian stem from the same mother language."  Then a different answer for the thread.


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## Apollodorus

Red Arrow said:


> Latin can have the same ending for masculine, feminine and neuter words, but different plural forms.


Bate’s essay seems to be using Hocket’s _A course in modern linguistics_ in its argument against defining the “ambiguous nouns” in Romanian as true neuters. But if Latin neuters end in _-a_ and Romanian “neuters” have different endings, then the latter are not identical with the former. So, Romanian may have a form of neuter, but not the original Latin one.


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## Apollodorus

S.V. said:


> (SE) "Micheál Ledwith, adviser to Pope John Paul II, having had access to the Vatican Library, stated that indeed Romanian is not resulted from Latin, but rather that both Latin and Romanian stem from the same mother language."


What I find intriguing is that there is no epigraphic or other evidence for Romanian before the 1500s. This seems to leave room for a good deal of conjecture. And, come to think of it, the situation with Old Latin isn't much better. So, a common origin cannot be ruled out. It still isn't clear why Romanian supposedly preserved the Latin neuter whereas other Romance languages didn't. Could neuter have been an important feature of Romania's pre-Roman language?


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## bearded

Red Arrow said:


> avi (feminine, nominative plural)



Isn't it _aviae _(from singular _avia_)?


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## Apollodorus

If the masculine singular is _avus_, then the masculine plural is _avī_. Unless it changed gender en route .... 🙂


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## bearded

Apollodorus said:


> then the masculine plural is _avī_.


Sure, but Red Arrow wrote that 'avi' is  _feminine_ nominative plural.


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## Apollodorus

Possibly by mistake?

Incidentally, neuter nouns were no big deal as most Indo-European languages had similar three-gender systems, e.g., Greek, Celtic, Germanic, Slavic.

They also tended to take an _-a_ ending in the plural, e.g. Slavonic _ablŭko_ (аблъко, “apple”) – _ablŭka_ (аблъка, “apples”).

However, Slavonic also had a dual -_ě_ ([æ]) ending, e.g., _ablŭcě_ (аблъцѣ). Could Slavonic (or some other language) have played a role in the development of Romanian “neuter”?


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## Red Arrow

bearded said:


> Isn't it _aviae _(from singular _avia_)?


Woops, I copy-pasted, I meant masculine of course : /
Avus is the first masculine word Flemish students learn in Latin class.


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## Apollodorus

Olaszinhok said:


> However, it must be said that "neuter" nouns are much more common in Romanian than in Italian.


I think if we looked into the reasons for this, it might be a pointer in the right direction.

Even some Romanian linguists believe that Romanian has no true neuter. Ion Giurgea of the Romanian Academy and Blanca Croitor of Linguistics Institute Iorgu Iordan – Al. Rossetti argue that “Romanian does not have three values for the category Gender”:

I. Giurgea and B. Croitor, “On the so-called Romanian 'neuter'” (researchgate.net)

According to Harvey Mayer, Romanian has lost the neuter. Interestingly, he believes that Dacian, the pre-Roman language spoken in Ancient Romania (a.k.a. Dacia), was a Baltic or “Baltoidic” language. This is consistent with the findings of other linguists from Lithuania, Bulgaria and Romania.

According to the Bulgarian linguist Ivan Duridanov, of about 200 reconstructed Thracian words (Dacian is a subgroup of Thracian) most cognates (138) appear in the Baltic languages, mostly in Lithuanian:

Classification of Thracian - Wikipedia

Фракийский лексикон (Thracian Lexicon)

If this is correct, then (a) the Dacian gender system must have been similar to that of Old Lithuanian and its Proto-Baltic predecessor and (b) the dissimilarities between Romanian “neuter” and the Latin neuter must be due to influence from different languages including Baltic or Balto-Slavic.

According to the Wikipedia article “Dacian language”,

“It is likely that during the period of Celtic pre-eminence, the Dacian language was eclipsed by Celtic dialects in Transylvania. In Moesia, South of the Danube, there was also extensive Celticisation … it appears that some unoccupied [by the Romans] parts of the dava zone were overrun, either before or during the Dacian Wars, by Sarmatian tribes … The subsequent linguistic status of this region is disputed ….”.

The Greek philosopher Xenophanes (570-480 BC) wrote:

“The Thracians [of which the Dacians were a subgroup] say their [gods] have blue eyes and red hair [like themselves]” (_Fragments_ 16).

According to the Romanian historian Hadrian Daicoviciu, Dacians generally had “light skin, blue eyes and reddish-blonde hair”.

See also Celts in Transylvania – Wikipedia:

“Celts arrived in northwestern Transylvania in around 400–350 BC as part of their great migration eastwards … The Celts exercised politico-military rule over Transylvania between the 4th and 2nd century BC …”.

All facts considered, what appears to have been the case is that the territory of what is now Romania which was originally inhabited by an indigenous neolithic population, was settled by Indo-European Balts (or people related to them) during the Late Bronze or Early Iron Age, followed by Celts, Romans, Slavs and others. I don’t know if there is any detailed paleogenetic study of the region, but the presence of Celtic tribes there is attested by the archaeological evidence. It follows that Dacian could have been a Celticised Baltic language by the time of the Roman conquest.

The bottom line is that there must be an explanation for why Romanian lost the Latin neuter like other Romance languages, but preserved (or developed?) something _resembling_ a “neuter”. This phenomenon would be explained by a Baltic or Balto-Slavic origin or influence present in Romanian but absent in other Romance languages.


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## danielstan

An explanation from Rosetti (Al-Rosetti-Istoria-Limbii-Romane-1986.pdf), page 351:




I provide here a summary of this paragraph in my (poor) translation:

"The neuter is a vivid (grammatical) category in Romanian; neuter excludes the living beings.
...
After the disappearence of the neuter in Latin it reappears in Romanian probably during the Common Romanian era and it uses the masculin for singular and feminin for plural, along with the ancient -_ora_ ending.
...
The existence of the neuter may be thought as a reaction against the arbitrary gender for non living things.
....
So the creation of the neuter must be explained by the need to mark the distinction between 'living beings' and 'non living things'.
The neuter renders, in Romanian, the non living things."
------------------------------------------------------------
Regarding the main topic of this thread, one could read the chapter 
"Termeni păstrați numai în limba română" -
(containing the vocabulary of Latin origin preserved only in Romanian)
from the same book (Rosetti - ILR) at pages 173 - 180.


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## Apollodorus

danielstan said:


> After the disappearence of the neuter in Latin it reappears in Romanian probably during the Common Romanian era and it uses the masculin for singular and feminin for plural, along with the ancient -_ora_ ending.


So, Rosetti is arguing that the neuter was reintroduced to Romanian in the Common Romanian (Proto-Romanian) period, i.e., between the 6th/7th and 10th/11th centuries AD.

If (a) the immediate predecessor to Common Romanian was a mixture of Thracian and Latin and (b) Common Romanian shows major differences in grammar, morphology and phonology from Romance languages, then the developments or innovations in Common Romanian, including the so-called “neuter”, are likely the result of Thracian influence and not “inherited from Latin”.

An interesting question is, what gender were the “neuter” nouns prior to the reintroduction of “neuter”?


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## danielstan

I am amazed of your (a) and (b) assertions...
In fact:
(a) - the predecessor of Common Romanian was Vulgar Latin spoken at North of Jireček Line
It had a substratum of Dacian and Thracian words (see List of Romanian words of possible pre-Roman origin), but it was not a "mixture of Thracian and Latin" if by that you understand a hybrid language.
(b) - Common Romanian (and modern Romanian) show many similarities with other Romance languages (Classification of Romance languages) and it is closest to the Southern Italian dialects of today

What Rosetti meant is that the Vulgar Latin (as predecessor of Common Romanian) has lost the neuter in Balkan Peninsula (and everywhere else). The Latin neuter was used for collective nouns.
Later Common Romanian developed internally a different kind of neuter for distinguishing the animated and non animated notions.
As discussed in the book, the Romanian neuter is present in all four Romanian dialects (Daco-Romanian, Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian and Istro-Romanian) and this is why Rosetti designated Common Romanian as its source.


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## Hulalessar

danielstan said:


> So the creation of the neuter must be explained by the need to mark the distinction between 'living beings' and 'non living things'.
> The neuter renders, in Romanian, the non living things."


The problem with that is that inanimate things can also be masculine or feminine.

The neuter gender taking the masculine form in the singular and feminine in the plural is reflected in the first and second declensions in Latin. If Vulgar Latin lost the neuter in the Balkans and then found the need to for a third gender would it be in a way which effectively copies what was once the case?


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## Apollodorus

danielstan said:


> I am amazed of your (a) and (b) assertions...


I don’t see why that would be quite so amazing, to be honest. All I did was follow the link to the Wikipedia article you posted, where it says “The Thraco-Roman period of the Romanian language is usually delimited between the 2nd century and the 6th/7th century”. Obviously, the Thracians/Dacians didn’t speak Latin from day one. It was a slow process that must have started with a period of Thracian-Roman syncretism.

Plus, don’t forget that the first written evidence of Romanian is from the Late Middle Ages, so you’ve got a gap of over one thousand years into which everybody can hypothesise pretty much anything they like.

In any case, if the neuter in Romanian was “reintroduced”, it couldn’t have been “inherited”. The Romanian neuter can't simultaneously be "the same as" and "different from" the Latin. And we still don’t know what gender the nouns were before getting “neutered” in Common Romanian …. 🙂


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## Apollodorus

Hulalessar said:


> If Vulgar Latin lost the neuter in the Balkans and then found the need to for a third gender would it be in a way which effectively copies what was once the case?


Not only that, but a lot of basic inanimate objects apparently failed to comply with the new gender policy. The following retained their feminine gender as in Latin:

_casa – casae > casă – case_ (“house”)

_mēsa – mēsae_ > _masă – mese_ (“table”)

_aqua – aquae_ > _apă - ape _("water")

_petra – petrae > piatră - pietre_ ("stone"), etc., etc. ....


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## Trisia

First of all, I'm extremely impressed with and in awe of the sheer amount of interest, expertise and enthusiasm for all sorts of knowledge apparent in this thread. You all know more _about_ Romanian than I do. 

Secondly, the lack of clarity regarding the grammatical gender issue is an old point of contention among the highest circles and was best described, I believe, in the following excerpt by a Romanian playwright:



> Neuter! Neuter, therefore, if the horse is male and the mare is feminine, neuter is the mule, which is not a horse, nor a mare, not an ass nor a horse: it's a mule, hence a mongrel, thus both genders!


(source)


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## S.V.

M. Vinereanu (p. 4) also connects _crăiasă _'queen' to_ kreiousa_, 'found only once in the Iliad', "referring to one of Priam's wives."

If he had access to the Vatican Library, he may find other examples. But in any case, you will still be our cousins.


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## Dymn

Apollodorus said:


> And we still don’t know what gender the nouns were before getting “neutered” in Common Romanian …. 🙂


They were masculine.


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## Apollodorus

Dymn said:


> They were masculine.


So, they started off as Classical Latin neuters, they became masculine in Vulgar Latin and then turned neuter again in Romanian (though of a different kind than the original) .... But if this is supposed to have happened because of a need to distinguish between animated and non-animated things, it doesn't quite add up given that many inanimate things seem to have retained their gender.


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## berndf

Apollodorus said:


> So, they started off as Classical Latin neuters, they became masculine in Vulgar Latin and then turned neuter again in Romanian


I don't think so. In my understanding, the Romanian neuter is innovation and unrelated to the Latin neuter.


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## Ben Jamin

berndf said:


> I don't think so. In my understanding, the Romanian neuter is innovation and unrelated to the Latin neuter.


I think that Apollodorus did not mean either all Latin neuters nor all Romanian neuters.


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## berndf

Still they are unrelated. Whether a noun was masculine or neuter in Latin before the merger in VL has no relevance for whether or not it turned from masculine to neuter in Romanian.


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## Dymn

As far as I understand, masculine and neuter were merged in Vulgar Latin. Then in Romanian the agreement in the plural of nouns from that new masculine-neuter gender would come to depend on animacy, giving rise to a new, unrelated "neuter gender". Feminine nouns weren't affected in any way.

I don't know what caused the split. I'm very skeptical of an influence from Thracian. We know too little about the language and it was probably dead by the time the phenomenon started to take root. In Slavic languages though, animacy is a relevant feature for declension in masculine and plural nouns. It is quite tempting to suggest Slavic-influenced speakers may have felt a need to tell apart animacy in masculine, but not feminine nouns.

But I don't know, and it may have been an entirely internal development anyway. What we know is the Romanian "neuter" wasn't inherited from Latin, which is what this thread is about.


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## Apollodorus

berndf said:


> I don't think so. In my understanding, the Romanian neuter is innovation and unrelated to the Latin neuter.


This has been my argument, too. I was merely repeating Rosetti's thesis. "Turned neuter again in Romanian" doesn't mean "returned to the Latin neuter".

Obviously, this can be debated _ad infinitum_, but Rosetti says:

“Genul neutru, în română, nu continuă formal neutrul latin, dar nici pe cel slav. El s-a constituit la o dată istorică, făcînd uz de materialele existente în limbă” (_Google translation_: “The neuter gender, in Romanian, does not formally continue the Latin neuter, but neither the Slavic one. It was established at a historical date, making use of the materials existing in the language”.) - Alexandru Rosetti, _Istoria Limbii Romane_, p. 278.

So, according to Rosetti, Romanian neuter was _not_ inherited from Latin. Which is exactly the point I had been making …


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## Apollodorus

berndf said:


> Whether a noun was masculine or neuter in Latin before the merger in VL has no relevance for whether or not it turned from masculine to neuter in Romanian.


It does have relevance in the context of the claim that the Romanian neuter was "inherited from Latin". If Vulgar Latin admittedly had no neuter, it must be shown that the Romanian neuter corresponds to Classical Latin. Otherwise, the claim is unsupported by the evidence.


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## berndf

Apollodorus said:


> It does have relevance in the context of the claim that the Romanian neuter was "inherited from Latin".


I think we all agree that this is not so, right?


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## Apollodorus

Dymn said:


> In Slavic languages though, animacy is a relevant feature for declension in masculine and plural nouns. It is quite tempting to suggest Slavic-influenced speakers may have felt a need to tell apart animacy in masculine, but not feminine nouns.


Slavic influence wasn't negligible. Apparently, many (a majority?) Romanian toponyms are Slavic. See also Slavic influence on Romanian - Wikipedia.

I think that first, it needs to be demonstrated that there actually was an urge to make inanimate objects neuter. Second, credible explanations must be found for where this urge came from, why many inanimate objects preserved their original gender, etc.


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## Apollodorus

berndf said:


> I think we all agree that this is not so, right?


Well, I don't know about "we all". I can only speak for myself.


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## Apollodorus

Dymn said:


> I'm very skeptical of an influence from Thracian. We know too little about the language and it was probably dead by the time the phenomenon started to take root.


According to Wikipedia, Free Dacian tribes may have continued to speak Dacian in the area north-east of the Carpathians as late as the 6th or 7th century AD.

If the substratum language (Dacian or Thraco-Dacian) was related to Balto-Slavic as some scholars have suggested and it was still spoken by some of the population at the time Proto-Romanian emerged, it could have influenced the Proto-Romanian gender system.

Andre Du Nay writes:

“The many correspondences in details with Albanian (among others, the appearance of some neuters as masculines in the singular and feminines in the plural) shows that the influence of the substratum is possible also here”.

Andre Du Nay, The Origins of the Rumanians, p. 57 - Internet Archive.

He also notes that most authors consider that the Romanian numerical system is derived from Old Slavic, though it also has similarities with Albanian, the Baltic languages and partially with Armenian. This would make substratum-influence perfectly possible.


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## OBrasilo

> (among others, the appearance of some neuters as masculines in the singular and feminines in the plural)


And yet, that same phenomenon is also observed in Italian, except that Italian seem to be somewhere in between - the plurals take the feminine article but still retain the _-a_ ending from Latin: _il muro_ -> _le mura_, _il dito_ -> _le dita_. Romanian appears to simply go one step further and completely makes the plural feminine. The words affected also overlap significantly, eg. _deget_ -> _degete_, cognate with _dito_.


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## Apollodorus

OBrasilo said:


> And yet, that same phenomenon is also observed in Italian


That is correct. But Du Nay says “among others”.

I think it is obvious that the Romanian neuter is not identical with the Latin. Some linguists don’t even consider it a real neuter (which I tend to agree with). Whether real or not, many linguists (e.g. Rosetti) argue that it isn’t derived from Latin (which, again, I tend to agree with). The question then is, where did it come from?

If Romanian toponyms are mostly Slavic (or Daco-Slavic), the numerical system is Slavic (but also occurs in Albanian and Baltic languages), 20% of Romanian words are Slavic, etc., this suggests a regional origin for some important features of Romanian, including the neuter. And that origin seems to be Dacian, Baltic, Slavic, or a combination of these.

In any case, an objective and balanced analysis requires that the Romanian neuter be assessed in comparison with other languages, not just Latin. IMO having seen the similarities and dissimilarities with Latin, it would make sense to have a look at Lithuanian (Baltic) and Slavic.


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## Trisia

Quick question: why would the numeric system be considered Slavic? I can guess that might refer to numerals 11-19 (since 1-10 are obviously Latin) but from 20 on, naming 20 two-tens, 50 five-tens and so on can't be something exclusively Slavic, can it?


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## aum34

Red Arrow said:


> Romanian inherited the diphthong au from Latin.
> 
> *Latin - Romanian - Italian - French - Spanish - Portuguese*
> aurum - aur - oro - or - oro - ouro/oiro
> taurus - taur [taur] - toro - taureau [toʁo] - toro - touro/toiro
> laus - laudă - lode - los (obsolete) - loa / - /
> 
> There are also learned borrowings from Latin like pauper, but they don't count.



Loa (sustantive) and Loar (verb) is the Latin evolution in Spanish (au> o )

Laudare > Lodare > Loar


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## Apollodorus

Trisia said:


> Quick question: why would the numeric system be considered Slavic? I can guess that might refer to numerals 11-19 (since 1-10 are obviously Latin) but from 20 on, naming 20 two-tens, 50 five-tens and so on can't be something exclusively Slavic, can it?


Correct. It isn't "exclusively Slavic". If you follow Du Nay's argument, he says:

“The numerals between eleven and nineteen are in Romanian formed according to the system ‘_unus supra decem’_: N. Rum. _unsprezece_ _(un-spre-zece)_ ‘eleven’, _doisprezece_ ‘tweve’, etc. *This is different from the Latin system*: _undecim (un-decim)_, _duodecim (duo-decim)_, etc. The system used by Rumanian is also found in Albanian and Slavic: Alb. _njëmbëdhjetë_ and Old Slavic _jedinu na desete_ ‘eleven’ …” - _The Origins of the Rumanians_, p. 57 (my emphasis).

Similarly, Latvian has _vienpadsmit_ _(vien-pa-desmit)_, “eleven”, _divpadsmit_, “twelve”, _trīspadsmit_, “thirteen”, etc.

This also holds for decades or tens:

Italian _venti_, _trenta_, _quaranta_, _cinquanta_ ..., French _vingt_, _trente_, _quarante_ … , Spanish _veinte_, _treinta_, _cuarenta_ …, all from Latin _vīgintī_, _trīgintā_,_ quadrāgintā_ … “twenty”, “thirty”, “forty” … but Romanian _douăzeci_ _(două-zeci)_, _treizeci_, _patruzeci_ which are also of Latin origin but follow the pattern of Slavic _dŭva desęti_, _tri_ _desęti_, _četyre_ _desęti_, Albanian _tri-dhjetë_, _katër-dhjetë_, _pesë-dhjetë_, Latvian _div-desmit_, _trīs-desmit_, _četr-desmit_, (“two tens”, “three tens” …), etc.

What we consistently see is Romanian using Latin-origin words but according to a _non-Latin system_ that is found in Albanian, Baltic languages and Old Slavic.

It is the existence of this system in Romanian, Albanian, Baltic languages and Old Slavic (_but not in Latin_) that has led to the contention that it originated from the substratum (Cicerone Poghirc, _Istoria Limbii Române_, Vol. II, p. 325.). The same applies to the Romanian neuter. Proto-Romanian could have used elements of Vulgar Latin, perhaps influenced by Slavic, to express a neuter concept inherited from Dacian (or Balto-Slavic).


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## S.V.

> originated from the substratum



The rich morphology of Romanian also makes sense to me, as an old 'core' being preserved by those mountains. 







(Quora)


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## Apollodorus

S.V. said:


> The rich morphology of Romanian also makes sense to me, as an old 'core' being preserved by those mountains.


Exactly. 

It must also be borne in mind that the Romanised Dacians must have maintained some contact with the Free Dacian tribes which were outside Roman-controlled territory with the result that, even if Dacian was dead or dying by the time Proto-Romanian emerged, there must have been sufficient residual cultural memory to provide the need to introduce a neuter (or something resembling one) in the new language, a need apparently not felt in other Romance languages.

This is also consistent with the theory that Dacian belonged to the Baltic or Balto-Slavic group of languages.


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## Hulalessar

Before this thread started I always assumed that Romanian had a neuter gender because Latin had one. Applying Occam's razor, that seems to me to be the most likely reason. What is the justification for a more convoluted explanation?

There are of course those who hold that Romanian has only two genders. Above Olaszinho says: "Romanian neuter is a _combination_ of the other two genders. More specifically, neuter nouns behave in the singular as masculine nouns and in the plural as feminine nouns." Is the fact that what is classed as neuter does not have distinct features a sufficient reason for denying the gender exists?


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## berndf

Hulalessar said:


> Before this thread started I always assumed that Romanian had a neuter gender because Latin had one. Applying Occam's razor, that seems to me to be the most likely reason. What is the justification for a more convoluted explanation?


I'd say the opposite: Connecting the Romanian neuter with the Latin neuter would need a convoluted explanation. You would have to explain, that two concepts that have little more in common other than that grammarians chose the same technical term to refer to it should be related (as far as I understand, there is no apparent relation between what words are neuter in Latin and what words are neuter in Romanian) and you would have to explain why one of the most important laws of language evolution should not hold here, namely that a distinction once lost cannot be be recovered through natural language evolution.


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## OBrasilo

Specifically for the neuter, but also for the other features, it should be looked at the various Italian languages as well as the various laguages closely related to Romanian (Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian, and Istro-Romanian), as well as to the now-extinct romance languages that used to be spoken in the in-between areas, such as Istriot, Dalmatian, etc., to see if there's any correspondences.



			
				berndf said:
			
		

> (as far as I understand, there is no apparent relation between what words are neuter in Latin and what words are neuter in Romanian)


The same is, however, true for Italian - eg. _dito_ in Italian and _deget_ in Romanian are both "neuter" (I believe in Italian, that's called the irregular masculine instead*, never heard the term "neuter" used for that), but in Latin, _digitus_ was masculine.
But there's also discrepancies between Italian and Romanian - in Italian, _muro_ can be both masculine and "neuter", but in Romanian, _mur_ is invariably masculine, the same goes for Latin _mūrus_.
Neither word is neuter in Slavic - finger is always masculine, whether it's called _palec_ (in Russian) or _prst_ (in Slovenian), while the wall can be masculine (Slovenian _zid_) or feminine (Slovenian _stena_, Serbo-Croatian _stijena_). Though there _is_ a case of it being neuter, specially in Slovenian, the word _obzidje_ (city walls), which has the same meaning as the Italian _le mura_.
For finger, the only way I can see it becoming neuter through either Slavic or Germanic is through a hypochoristic (Slavic *_palečko_ or *_prstečko_ and German _Fingerchen_).
Another "neuter" in Italian I can think of is _l'osso_ (plural _le ossa_), meaning "bone" - that one was already neuter in Latin, classical latin _os_, later form _ossum_, both having the plural _ossa_ - in Romanian, that's _os_, plural _oase_, ie. a neuter. So this is one word that was neuter in Latin, and is "neuter" in Italian and neuter in Romanian.

In fact, the following are nouns that were neuter in Latin, are "neuter" in Italian and are neuter in Romanian:
- _os_ / _ossum_ (pl. _ossa_) - Italian _osso_ - _ossa_; Romanian _os_ - _oase_;
- _membrum_ (pl. _membra_) - Italian _membro_ - _membra_ (limbs, members are _membri_); Romanian _membru_ - _membre_;
- _ōvum_ (pl. _ōva_) - Italian _uovo_ - _uova_; Romanian _ou_ - _ouă_;
- _lignum_ (pl. _ligna_) - Italian _legno_ - _legna_ (now reanalyzed as the feminime singular _la legna_); Romanian _lemn_ - _lemne_.

There's also _cilium_ (pl. _cilia_) that in Italian is _ciglio_ - _ciglia_, but for Romanian, I have only been able to find the singular _ciliu_, so I have no idea what the plural is.

So the statement that there's no apparent relations between what words are neuter in Latin and neuter in Romanian (and "neuter" in Italian) is wrong - there's at least 4 such words shared among all 4 languages.

Now, why most Romanian neuter plurals are _-e_, I don't know, but them coming from an original _-ă_, which would have naturally evolved from Latin _-a_ (see the same evolution for the feminine singular) could very well have been the case.

* I don't remember the exact term. I do, however, know that Italian grammarians absolutely refuse to consider it a neuter.


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## berndf

OBrasilo said:


> So the statement that there's no apparent relations between what words are neuter in Latin and neuter in Romanian (and "neuter" in Italian) is wrong - there's at least 4 such words shared among all 4 languages.


That is a strange logic. If there is no relation than of course all combinations (neuter Romanian- neuter Latin, neuter Romanian-masculine Romanian, masculine Romanian-neuter Latin, masculine Romanian-masculine Latin) should occur. And as far as I can see that is the case. The only commonality is that nouns denoting animate objects are never neuter in both Latin and Romanian. But this is not proof of a relationship but only means that they share a common set of constraints. 

In Italian, some masculine words have two different plurals, an individual and a collective one. _Dito_ and _osso_ are examples. _Uovo_ is different. It just has an irregular plural and that might indeed have to do with its etymology. But as a whole, irregular plurals in Italian are a different can of worms.



OBrasilo said:


> For finger, the only way I can see it becoming neuter through either Slavic or Germanic is through a hypochoristic (Slavic *_palečko_ or *_prstečko_ and German _Fingerchen_).


If the Romanian neuter is indeed an innovation, then no relation would be needed.


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## Apollodorus

Hulalessar said:


> Before this thread started I always assumed that Romanian had a neuter gender because Latin had one. Applying Occam's razor, that seems to me to be the most likely reason. What is the justification for a more convoluted explanation?



Actually, there are many theories regarding the Romanian neuter:

1. Consolidation of the neuter under Slavic influence.
2. Its situation in the context of the Balkan linguistic community.
3. Continuity of the Latin neuter in Romanian.
4. Reconstruction of a different type of gender (ambigenous, heterogeneous, heteroclitic) than the neutral one.
5. Theory of convergent evolution, etc.

Cf. I. Giurgea and B. Croitor, “On the so-called Romanian 'neuter'” (researchgate.net)

In the final analysis what matters is not what this or that linguist has said, but what the evidence says. Essentially, it boils down to (1) evidence and (2) methodology. The onus is on those who claim that the Romanian neuter is derived from the Latin to demonstrate that this is the case. So far, they have failed to do so and this is why we need to consider other possibilities.

As I said, the reason why linguists mention Romanian numerals is that they demonstrate the use in Romanian of Latin-derived words along non-Latin patterns. These patterns may be from the substratum (Dacian, Baltic) or some adstratum (Slavic). But they are _not _Latin.

For example, if we compare Romanian _unsprezece_ _(unu-spre-zece)_ with Italian _undici (uno-dieci)_, “eleven”, we can clearly see that both are Latin-based but whilst the Italian numeral has a Latin precedent (_ūndecim_), the Romanian is formed with Latin-derived words (_ūnus-supra-decem_) but according to a _non-Latin system_ that is found in Albanian, Baltic languages and Old Slavic.

This raises the possibility (among others) that something similar has occurred in the case of the Romanian “neuter”. In other words, the Latin derivation of a word doesn’t necessarily mean that its neuter form must also be derived from Latin.

It is clear from the very start that the Romanian “neuter” is not identical with the Latin one. One prominent feature of the Latin neuter is the plural in _-a_. And this is exactly what Romanian doesn’t have. Romanian _cap - capete_ (“head - heads”) is evidently not the same as Classical Latin _caput - capita_ or, for that matter, Vulgar Latin _capus - capī_, etc.

The problem arises from dissimilarities between the Romanian and the Latin neuters, which need to be accounted for.


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## Hulalessar

Romanian is part of the Balkan sprachbund which explains some of the features of the language not found in other Romance languages or Latin. However, three genders are found in Latin. What is the evidence that the three genders of Romanian are not a continuation of the three Latin genders? If Romanian neuter words do not completely line up with Latin neuter words that would seem to be only weak evidence unless Romanian neuter words line up more closely with the neuter words of another language in the sprachbund. Even then, that would not be convincing evidence that the neuter gender was lost, only that some words changed gender under the influence of another language.


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## Dymn

From what I understand, it's not that there are a couple exceptions. There's simply no correlation. Leaving aside feminine nouns, all animates are masculine and almost all inanimates are neuter. Knowing the gender of a noun in Latin doesn't help at all when guessing the gender in Romanian.


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## Red Arrow

Dymn said:


> Leaving aside feminine nouns, all animates are masculine and almost all inanimates are neuter.


Are you talking about Latin or Romanian gender now? Do you mean that masculine words in Latin have become neuter in Romanian in case they refer to inanimate objects (like campus (m) > câmp (n))?


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## merquiades

Yes, the idea stated here is that Latin masculine nouns split into two groups, Romanian masculine for animate nouns and Romanian neuter for inanimate nouns. Thus there must be tons of neuter nouns in Romanian.
 Latin feminine is Romanian feminine. 
What is not clear to me is what happened with Latin neuter nouns.


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## Dymn

Red Arrow said:


> Do you mean that masculine words in Latin have become neuter in Romanian in case they refer to inanimate objects (like campus (m) > câmp (n))?


I think generally yes, but I may have been inaccurate in saying "almost all inanimates are neuter". Many Latin inanimate masculines keep the masculine in Romanian: _an, umăr, păr, timp, dinte, _month names... I'll defer to someone more knowledgeable.


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## berndf

Hulalessar said:


> If Romanian neuter words do not completely line up with Latin neuter words ..


As far as I can see there is no alignment whatsoever. The original gender in Latin (neuter or masculine) seems so be no predictor whatsoever for a noun describing a non-animate object to fall under the category of "neuter" (which seems to be nothing more than a reuse of an existing term for something unrelated and is therefore ofter placed in quotes) in Romanian. In addition, the Romanian "neuter" is productive and also applies to newly coined or imported words.


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## Hulalessar

Were the genders of all nouns fixed by the time Romanian first came to be written?

Does the pattern of gender distribution match that of any other language in the Balkan sprachbund?


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## merquiades

Hulalessar said:


> Does the pattern of gender distribution match that of any other language in the Balkan sprachbund?


What would that mean?  That Latin/vulgar Latin/Romanian was a language of privilege in that area and Slavic/Hungarian/Greek speakers slowly assimilated it yet transposed their previous languages' gender rules on the language?

Older French speakers in eastern France sometimes apply Germanic grammar (such as Germanic gender) to French because of the presence of regional languages.  _Le salade_ rather than _La salade,_ for example...  However as these languages have died out and access to standard language is greater, new generations do not do this.  I would have expected this to occur in Romanian too.


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## OBrasilo

berndf said:
			
		

> As far as I can see there is no alignment whatsoever.


There is alignment - I posted 4 nouns which were neuter in Latin, are neuter in Romanian, and are also what could be consider as neuter (but is not by the grammarians even though it behaves a lot like Romanian neuter) in Italian. Of course, the alignment isn't 100%, but there never is - look at how many words have changed gender in Italian, French, Spanish, etc.

There's even further reason to believe Romanian neuter is related to the Italian construction and possibly to Latin neuter - in Italy, the construction is mostly found south of the La Spezia-Rimini line, ie. in the area where the dialects spoken are more closely related to Eastern Romance. North of said line, it's not found. Eg. in Venetian, the word for egg, _vovo_, has the plural _vovi_, which is the regular masculine plural. Which, IMHO, alongside partial alignment with Latin, and the choice of words, also excludes Slavic influence - since the area in Italy where the same construct as in Romanian, is observed, is the area farthest from the borders with any Slavic-speaking area. However, there is one language that did have strong historic influence over both the Italian peninsula south of the La Spezia-Rimini line and in Romania, and that is Greek. The influence of Greek would have easily prevented the complete disappearance of the neuter, while also affecting the choice of which nouns are neuter, the latter especially in Romania where Greek influence was longer and stronger than in Italy.


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## berndf

OBrasilo said:


> I posted 4 nouns which were neuter in Latin, are neuter in Romanian


I really don't understand why you are bringing this argument again. If there is no connection, you would of course expect to find such cases. That is the essence of what _unrelated_ means: you'd expect to find examples of *all* combinations, including neuter in Latin and neuter in Romanian.

As Latin had hundreds, probably thousands of neuter nouns, it wouldn't be surprising to find 4 of them ending up as neuter in Romanian as well.


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## Red Arrow

merquiades said:


> Slavic/Hungarian/Greek


Dacians were not Hungarian. They clearly spoke an Indo-European language. It has been proposed that their language is close to Albanian or the Baltic languages (Latvian, Lithuanian).


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## Apollodorus

Hulalessar said:


> Even then, that would not be convincing evidence that the neuter gender was lost, only that some words changed gender under the influence of another language.


The evidence is simply insufficient to reach a conclusion “beyond reasonable doubt”. This is precisely why this discussion is taking place. 🙂

It follows that the matter must be decided on the “balance of probabilities”. And what the probabilities are tends to be determined _subjectively _and under the influence of cultural, political, or emotional factors. Those who are fond of the Romans may insist on a Latin theory, Dacian fans may prefer the substratum theory, etc., etc. ....


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## berndf

Apollodorus said:


> The evidence is simply insufficient to reach a conclusion “beyond reasonable doubt”. This is precisely why this discussion is taking place. 🙂


Exactly.


Apollodorus said:


> It follows that the matter must be decided on the “balance of probabilities”. And what the probabilities are tends to be determined _subjectively _and under the influence of cultural, political, or emotional factors. Those who are fond of the Romans may insist on a Latin theory, Dacian fans may prefer the substratum theory, etc., etc. ....


No, scientific research has nothing to do our ideological preferences. Of course scientists of much too often victims of their ideological prejudices, but this just always be understood as a methodological flaw that should be overcome and should never just be accepted.


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## Apollodorus

berndf said:


> Of course scientists of much too often victims of their ideological prejudices, but this just always be understood as a methodological flaw that should be overcome and should never just be accepted.


That’s exactly why I said “Essentially, it boils down to (1) evidence and (2) methodology” (#70). Of course, pure science is, or is _supposed _to be, “absolutely objective and impartial”. However, (a) not everybody is a scientist in the strict sense of the term and (b) in practice, political, cultural and emotional factors do play a role.


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## robbie_SWE

> We have seen that the progression of gender from Latin through Vulgar Latin to Romanian is largely predictable: most nouns preserve their Latin gender. *This preservation of gender proceeds via regular sound change, which preserves masculine and feminine morphology, and muddles neuter plural morphology such that it gets reanalyzed as feminine. *(page 88)



I highlighted certain parts to underscore some key points made by Nicolae and Scontras in their study _The progression of gender from Latin to Romanian_ (2015, Harvard Working Papers in Linguistics, 2015). To be honest, I really don't get the point that Apollodorus is trying to make.



> The cases in which we saw changes in gender from Latin to Romanian can be explained by the syncretism and homophony which decreased contrasts between genders and cases, and paved the way for gender reassignment. (page 88)



OBrasilo raised some interesting points that I believe were ignored – the authors of this study looked into an alignment between shared words in Latin and Romanian.



> [...]And as we saw, min the second declension, historically masculine nouns appear as neuter in Romanian unless they possess masculine semantics. Again, all of these changes occur as a result of sound change with confused masculine plural morphology with feminine morphology, deliver the split agreement pattern of Romanian neuter. (page 88)





> The largely normal progression of gender could support an uninterrupted lineage of neuter gender in Romanian (cf. Petrucci (1993)); rather than losing neuter in Proto Romance and regaining it from contact with the three-gender Slavic superstrate (as some had suggested), neuter was preserved throughout the development of Romanian. However, the manifestation of neuter did change, from a distinct class of morphological markers to a split agreement paradigm with masculine and feminine. (page 88)



And last but not least:



> Another interpretation of the results presented here might instead suggest that neuter was lost, with a certain number of ambigeneric nouns remaining. Those nouns had distinctly masculine morphology in the singular, and distinctly feminine morphology in the plural, which results in the present day Romanian pattern of neuter agreement. *This agreement pattern could have surfaced as a result of the particular character of Latin neuter plural endings: they all end in -a, a typical feminine ending in Romance. Thus, with masculine-looking singular morphology and feminine-seeming plural morphology, the agreement pattern of neuters in Romanian is no longer a mystery.* In fact, Romanian is not the only Romance language with such “ambigeneric” nouns. In Italian, a small class of nouns behaves the same. (page 88-89)



As I see it, several equally plausible theories emerge. Nicolae and Scontras' conclusion – which can be read in its entirety, including an appendix comprising the words they analysed – is that nothing points to the neuter not being inherited from Latin.

Another interesting study looked at gender assignment in the Italo-Romance dialect of Bocchigliero (a locality in the Calabria region of southern Italy) which shows striking similarities to Romanian. For those interested in finding out more, you can read it here.


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## Apollodorus

robbie_SWE said:


> To be honest, I really don't get the point that Apollodorus is trying to make.


To be honest, I don't get the point you are trying to make, either.  Saying "several equally plausible theories emerge" doesn't solve anything. We're back to square one. That's why I said "this can be debated _ad infinitum_" (#53) .... 🙂


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## OBrasilo

There's a reason why I suggested looking Dalmatian and Istriot and seeing what the status of the grammatical genders is in those languages.

And the paper about Bocchiglierese is very interesting, it further strenghtens supposition of the phoenomenon being an isogloss south of the La Spezia-Rimini line, and it appears that in Bocchiglierese, it's somewhere in between Italian and Romanian.

Edit: Even more interesting - Bocchiglierese also appears to have a fourth gender, which is feminine in the singular and masculine in the plural.


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## robbie_SWE

Apollodorus said:


> To be honest, I don't get the point you are trying to make, either.  Saying "several equally plausible theories emerge" doesn't solve anything. We're back to square one. That's why I said "this can be debated _ad infinitum_" (#53) .... 🙂


When we're dealing with languages that have a huge documentation gap spanning nearly 1000 years, then "several plausible theories" is the best we can hope for. Linguistics is not something to be solved, but something to be discussed openly, where bits and pieces aren't discarded just because they don't fit one paradigm or another.

On another note, including Dacian into this discussion is not going to do us any favours. There is currently no academic consensus as to where it fits linguistically (Daco-Thracian, Illyrian, Baltic, Italic or even Celtic – yeah, scholars have tried to connect it to several language families across Europe) and if possible, it has even fewer vestiges than Proto-Romanian. We can't seriously hypothesise over a possible Dacian (or even Baltic) influence on a neuter gender solely based on one inscription(!) and Dacian names for a number of medicinal plants and herbs.


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## robbie_SWE

OBrasilo said:


> There's a reason why I suggested looking Dalmatian and Istriot and seeing what the status of the grammatical genders is in those languages.
> 
> And the paper about Bocchiglierese is very interesting, it further strenghtens supposition of the phoenomenon being an isogloss south of the La Spezia-Rimini line, and it appears that in Bocchiglierese, it's somewhere in between Italian and Romanian.
> 
> Edit: Even more interesting - Bocchiglierese also appears to have a fourth gender, which is feminine in the singular and masculine in the plural.


Well Dalmatian seems to have only two genders, the masculine and feminine.

When you say Istriot, do you mean Istro-Romanian, cause they're two different languages?
Istro-Romanian has three - masculine, feminine and neuter, and they behave the same as in Romanian.

I-RO: *bråţ *(_arm_), *bråţe *(pl.) – *bråţu *(_the arm_), *bråţele *(pl.)
RO: *braț *(_arm_), *brațe *(pl.) – *brațul *(_the arm_), *brațele *(pl.)

I-RO: *os *(_bone_), *ose *(pl.) – *osu *(_the bone_), *osele *(pl.)
RO: *os *(_bone_), *oase *(pl.) – *osul *(_the bone_), *oasele *(pl.)


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## OBrasilo

There is actually a language called Istriot: Lingua istriota - Wikipedia , it is part of the Italo-Dalmatian languages. It is the autochtonous romance language of Istria.


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## robbie_SWE

OBrasilo said:


> There is actually a language called Istriot: Lingua istriota - Wikipedia , it is part of the Italo-Dalmatian languages. It is the autochtonous romance language of Istria.


That's what I suspected. I'm unfortunately not all that familiar with Istriot so I'm afraid I can't provide any insights.


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## Apollodorus

robbie_SWE said:


> Linguistics is not something to be solved, but something to be discussed openly, where bits and pieces aren't discarded just because they don't fit one paradigm or another.


IMO the problem to be solved is not "linguistics" but the question of the Romanian neuter. Of course, you can discuss it as much as you like, I've repeatedly said this myself. I'm not preventing anyone from discussing anything they want. What I'm saying is that once you have decided that there is a set of "equally plausible theories", you can't argue that any of them is more plausible that the others. 

BTW I never hypothesized anything "based on one inscription". I don't even believe such an inscription exists. The question of the Romanian "neuter" remains all the same. If anyone had demonstrated that it is "inherited from Latin", there would be no discussion.


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## Apollodorus

robbie_SWE said:


> Linguistics is not something to be solved, but something to be discussed openly, where bits and pieces aren't discarded just because they don't fit one paradigm or another.


If that is the case, why discard the possibility of a substratum origin or influence?


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## S.V.

> Dacian names



I had not seen _Dracontos_ for _Rosemary_. 






I have some other thoughts, after Robbie's great contributions, but I will open a thread for it. We already filled Febri's thread.


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