The study of the substrate involves comparative methods applied to:8
In general, words assumed to belong to substratum can be placed into two categories:1516
those related to nature and natural world
and those used in pastoral life for:
Other words from substratum are: bucur(ie), ciupi, copil, cursă, fluier, droaie, gata, ghiuj, jumătate, mare (adj.), moş, scăpăra.
Words possibly of substratum but not generally agreed among linguists are: arichiță, băiat, băl, brâncă, borţ, bulz, burduf, burtă, codru, Crăciun, creţ, cruţa, curma, daltă, dărâma, fluture, lai, mătură, mire, negură, păstaie, scorbură, spuză, stăpân, sterp, stână, traistă.17
The comparative method can be extended to other languages of the Indo-European family, including ones from which Romanian could not have borrowed directly or indirectly, in order to reconstruct Thraco-Dacian substratum words. This yields results with varying degrees of probability. Between 80 and 100 words belong to this category.1819
Substratum words like mal (1. shore, bank; 2. ravine, reg. a raised portion of land smaller than a hill and with abrupt sides) have almost identical correspondents in Albanian mal (mountain), but they can also be related to toponyms like Dacia Maluensis later renamed by Romans to Dacia Ripensis (rīpa - meaning bank, shore - has been inherited in Romanian as râpă - the abrupt side of a hill).20
All river names over 500 km and half of those between 200 and 500 km derive from pre-Latin substratum, according to linguist and philologist Oliviu Felecan.21 Similarly, linguist Grigore Brâncuș states that almost the entire major hydronymy has been transmitted from Dacian to Romanian.22 Other linguists have pointed out that the present Romanian forms of these hydronyms indicate that they were borrowed from Slavs or Hungarians.2324252627
A couple of phonetic changes have been agreed on as substratum influence:28
Several other have been attributed to the influence of substratum by some researchers, but there is no general consensus among scholars. For example, the development of "ă" vowel: linguists Al. Phillipide and Grigore Brâncuș consider the spontaneous evolution of unstressed "a" from words like Lat. camisia>Rom. cămașă, and stresses "a" before a /n/ or a consonant cluster beginning with /m/, a vowel found also in Bulgarian and Albanian, as the substratum influence in Romanian,29 while linguist Marius Sala points this changes can also be seen as the tendency of the oral language to differentiate between forms of a paradigm, comparable to the development of similar central vowels in Portuguese or Neapolitan.30
Likewise, the morphological and syntactical features attributed to substratum, identified by comparison to Albanian and other languages of the Balkan sprachbund, are subject to scholarly debate since the grammatical structure of the ancient languages of the Balkans, except Greek, is unattested.31
Numerous language studies and research papers discuss the problems of the Substrate in Romanian, considered by some to be the most controversial and difficult part of Romanian language since its nature and development could explain the evolution of Latin to Romanian.32
Some linguists (including Sorin Olteanu, Sorin Paliga and Ivan Duridanov) propose that a number of words presented as borrowings from a Slavic language or from Hungarian in standard literature may have actually developed from reconstructed (not attested) words of local Indo-European languages and they were borrowed from Romanian by the neighboring languages. Though the substratum status of many Romanian words is not much disputed, their status as Dacian words is controversial, some more than others since there are no significant surviving written examples of the Dacian language. Many of the possible pre-Roman lexical items of Romanian have Albanian parallels, and if they are in fact substratum words cognates with the Albanian ones, and not loanwords from Albanian, it indicates that the substrate language of Romanian may have been on the same Indo-European branch as Albanian.
The Bulgarian Thracologist Vladimir Georgiev developed the theory that the Romanian language has a "Daco-Moesian" language as its substrate, a hypothecised language that according to him had a number of features which distinguished it from the Thracian language spoken further south, across the Haemus range.
There are also some Romanian substratum words in languages other than Romanian, these examples having entered via Romanian dialects. For example, Bryndza is a type of cheese made in Eastern Austria, Poland, the Czech Republic (Moravian Wallachia), Slovakia and Ukraine, the name being derived from the Romanian word for cheese (brânză).
Brâncuș, Grigore (2005). Introducere în istoria limbii române] [Introduction to the History of Romanian Language]. Editura Fundaţiei România de Mâine. p. 44. ISBN 973-725-219-5. 973-725-219-5 ↩
Vrabie, Emil (2000). An English-Aromanian (Macedo-Romanian) Dictionary. Romance Monographs. p. 21. ISBN 1-889441-06-6. 1-889441-06-6 ↩
Pană Dindelegan, Gabriela, The Grammar of Romanian, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013, ISBN 978-0-19-964492-6, page 2. /wiki/Gabriela_Pan%C4%83_Dindelegan ↩
Malcolm, Noel. Kosovo, a short history. http://macedonia.kroraina.com/en/nm/kosovo.html ↩
Izzo, Herbert J. On the history of Romanian (Marino, Mary C.; Pérez, Luis A. ed.). Linguistic Association of Canada and the United States. ↩
Schramm, Gottfried. Ein Damm bricht. Die römische Donaugrenze und die Invasionen des 5-7. Jahrhunderts in Lichte der Namen und Wörter [=A Dam Breaks: The Roman Danube frontier and the Invasions of the 5th-7th Centuries in the Light of Names and Words] (in German). R. Oldenbourg Verlag. ↩
Andreose, Alvise; Renzi, Lorenzo (2013). "Geography and distribution of the Romance languages in Europe". In Maiden, Martin; Smith, John Charles; Ledgeway, Adam (eds.). The Cambridge History of the Romance Languages, Volume II: Contexts. Cambridge University Press. pp. 283–334 (287). ISBN 978-0-521-80073-0. 978-0-521-80073-0 ↩
Friedman, Victor A. (2023). "The importance of Aromanian for the study of Balkan language contact in the context of Balkan-Caucasian parallels". In Aminian Jazi, Ioana; Kahl, Thede (eds.). Ethno-Cultural Diversity in the Balkans and the Caucasus. Austrian Academy of Sciences Press. pp. 345–360. doi:10.2307/jj.3508401.16. JSTOR jj.3508401.16. /wiki/Doi_(identifier) ↩
Fine, JA. The Early medieval Balkans. University of Michigan Press, 1991. pp. 10–11. Google Books https://books.google.com/books?id=YbS9QmwDC58C ↩
Rusakov, Alexander (2017). "Albanian". In Kapović, Mate; Giacalone Ramat, Anna; Ramat, Paolo (eds.). The Indo-European Languages. Routledge. ISBN 9781317391531. 9781317391531 ↩
Schumacher, Stefan (2020). "The perfect system of Old Albanian (Geg variety)". In Robert Crellin; Thomas Jügel (eds.). Perfects in Indo-European Languages and Beyond. Current Issues in Linguistic Theory. Vol. 352. John Benjamins Publishing Company. ISBN 978-90-272-6090-1. 978-90-272-6090-1 ↩
Pană Dindelegan, Gabriela, The Grammar of Romanian, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013, ISBN 978-0-19-964492-6 https://books.google.com/books?id=DlrPPUCQmk4C ↩
Rosetti, Alexandru (1965). "La situation du romain parmi les langues balkaniques". Linguistica (in French). Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. pp. 216-225 [222]. doi:10.1515/9783111349039-037. /wiki/Alexandru_Rosetti ↩
Sala, Marius (2012). De la Latină la Română [From Latin to Romanian]. Editura Pro Universitaria. p. 84. ISBN 978-606-647-435-1. 978-606-647-435-1 ↩
Sala, Marius (2012). De la Latină la Română [From Latin to Romanian]. Editura Pro Universitaria. p. 83. ISBN 978-606-647-435-1. 978-606-647-435-1 ↩
Sala, Marius (2013). "Contact and Borrowing". In Martin Maiden; John Charles Smith; Adam Ledgeway (eds.). The Cambridge History of the Romance Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 187–236 [201]. doi:10.1017/cho9781139019996.007. /wiki/Doi_(identifier) ↩
Brâncuș, Grigore (2005). Introducere în istoria limbii române] [Introduction to the History of Romanian Language]. Editura Fundaţiei România de Mâine. p. 45. ISBN 973-725-219-5. 973-725-219-5 ↩
Felecan, Oliviu; Felecan, Nicolae (2015). "Etymological strata reflected in Romanian hydronymy". Quaderns de Filología. Estudis Lingüístics. 20 (Toponímia Románica): 251–269. doi:10.7203/qfilologia.20.7521. hdl:10550/49693. ISSN 1135-416X. https://doi.org/10.7203%2Fqfilologia.20.7521 ↩
Petrovici, Emil. Istoria și geografia României. There is not a single river name of Romanian origin, the old river names have been transmitted into Romanian through Slavic transmission. ↩
Nandris, Grigore (December 1951). "The Development and Structure of Rumanian". The Slavonic and East European Review. 30 (74): 7–39. /wiki/Grigore_Nandri%C8%99 ↩
Makkai, László (2001). "Toponymy and Chronology". History of Transylvania Volume I. From the Beginnings to 1606 - III. Transylvania in the Medieval Hungarian Kingdom (896–1526) - 1. Transylvania'a Indigenous Population at the Time of the Hungarian Conquest. New York: Columbia University Press, (The Hungarian original by Institute of History Of The Hungarian Academy of Sciences). ISBN 0-88033-479-7. 0-88033-479-7 ↩
Miskolczy, Ambrus (2018). "A román nép születése – avagy egy rejtély filológiája" (PDF). Aetas - Történettudományi Folyóirat (in Hungarian). 33 (4). Nemzeti Kulturális Alap, Szegedi Tudományegyetem Bölcsészettudományi Kara, Szegedért Alapítvány, Szeged Megyei Jogú Város Önkormányzata, Nemzeti Együttműködési Alap: 146. http://acta.bibl.u-szeged.hu/57282/1/aetas_2018_004_134-166.pdf ↩
Brâncuș, Grigore (2005). Introducere în istoria limbii române] [Introduction to the History of Romanian Language]. Editura Fundaţiei România de Mâine. p. 46. ISBN 973-725-219-5. 973-725-219-5 ↩
Sala, Marius (2012). De la Latină la Română] [From Latin to Romanian]. Editura Pro Universitaria. p. 148. ISBN 978-606-647-435-1. 978-606-647-435-1 ↩
Brâncuș, Grigore (2005). Introducere în istoria limbii române] [Introduction to the History of Romanian Language]. Editura Fundaţiei România de Mâine. p. 47. ISBN 973-725-219-5. 973-725-219-5 ↩
Brâncuș, Grigore (2005). Introducere în istoria limbii române] [Introduction to the History of Romanian Language]. Editura Fundaţiei România de Mâine. p. 43. ISBN 973-725-219-5. 973-725-219-5 ↩