Ramona G?ncz?l-Davies, Dennis Deletant; Colloquial Romanian: The Complete Course for Beginners

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The Colloquial Series

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COLLOQUlAL CD-ROMs

Multimedia Language Courses

Available in: Chinese, French, Portuguese and Spanish

Colloquial

Romanian

The Complete Course

for Beginners

Third Edition

Ramona Gonczol-Davies, Dennis Deletant

I� ��o�;��n��up

LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published in 1983

by Routledge & Kegan Paul

Reprinted in 1990, 1991 and 1992

by Routledge

Second edition published in 1995

Third edition published in 2002 reprinted 2004

by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Oxon OX14 4RN

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada

by Routledge

270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

Typeset in Times by

Florence Production Ltd, Stoodleigh, Devon

Printed and bound in Great Britain by

Biddles Ltd, Guildford and King's Lynn

AH rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or

reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,

mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,

including photocopying and recording, or in any information

storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from

the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British

Library

Library of

Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

A catalog record for this book has been requested

ISBN 0-415-23783-1 (book)

ISBN 0-415-23784-X (cassettes)

ISBN 0-415-288037 (CD)

ISBN 0-415-237858 (pack)

Contents

Acknowledgements

vii

Introduction

Bună ziua

Good day

Bunvenit În România

Welcome to Romania

În vacanţă

On holiday

Cât e ceasul?

What's the time?

La restaurant

At the restaurant

Timpul probabil

The weather forecast

La poştă

At the Post Ofce

La cumpărături

Going shopping

Vreau o maşină nouă

101

Buying a new car

Recapitulare

116

Revision

Ceaă În familie

126

Trouble at home

Prietenii

141

Friendships

La doctor

153

A visit to the doctor

Visul

169

The dream

La piaţă

188

At the market

16 Bâă

201

Gossip

Spouri

215

Sports

O casă nouă

229

A new house

O poveste

243

Bedtime story

Recapitulare

252

Revision

Key to exercises

258

Romanian verb table

278

Romanian-English glossary

296

English-Romanian glossary

314

Acknowledgements

A word of thanks to Ben Crampton on whom we tried out this

course. His feedback alongside that from Andrea Deletant,

Ruxandra Trandafoiu, Radu Borza and Richard Davies, was im

mensely valuable, inc1uding identication of a number of mis

spellings in the typescript. If there are any others, they are the fault

of the authors. Comments from users of the book are welcome.

Introduction

Romanian is a Romance language spoken in Romania, the Re

public of Moldova, and in parts of Serbia and Hungary bordering

on Romania. Almost ninety per cent of Romania's population of

23 million has Romanian as their mother tongue and a further

2.8 million native Romanian-speakers represent 65 per cent of the

population of the Republic of Moldova.

Romanian or Daco-Romanian (so-named because its develop

ment is associated with the Roman province of Dacia) is a Latin

language and is one of four varieties of the sub-group of Romance

known as Balkan Romance. The other three are: Aromanian

or Macedo-Romanian, spoken in a number of communities in

northern Greece and Albania; Megleno-Romanian, spoken in a

smaU are a north of Thessaloniki; and Istro-Romanian, spoken in

a very smaU number of villages in the Istrian peninsula on the

Adriatic. AU four varieties are considered to have developed from

the Latin spoken in the area of the Balkans covered by the Roman

provinces of Dacia, Moesia and Illyricum, their separation being

caused by the intrusion of the Slavs in the sixth and seventh

centuries.

Origins

The Roman emperor Trajan conquered Dacia in campaigns lasting

from AD 105 to 107 and colonized it with settlers from aU parts of

the Empire, who intermarried with the local population, thus

producing the Daco-Roman people who were the forebears of the

Romanians. After Dacia was abandoned by the Romans in AD 271,

it became a battleground and gateway to the south for successive

invaders, amongst them the Slavs. The Slavs who settled north of

the Danube, in the are a of present-day Romania, were assimilated

the Romance-speaking population. After the seventh century,

any reference to, or trace of, the Romance-speaking population

both south and north of the Danube is extremely rare. Two

seventh-century chroniclers, writing in Greek (and both using the

same original text) mention a soldier in the Byzantine army who

spoke these words in his native language: Toma, toma, Jratre. The

phrase, connected with an event during a campaign in Thrace in

87, is believed to be the earliest evidence of Balkan Romance.

Thereafter the history of Romanian falls silent for almost a thou

sand years.

The earliest text in Romanian to have been dated is a letter of

1521. Contacts with the Slavs south of the Danube in the four

teenth century resulted in the rst durable cultural links and, via

these links, in a Slavonic garb, the Romanians received from the

Byzantine Empire its religion, art, litera ture and, in the revised

Cyrillic form, its alphabet. UntiI the seventeenth century the

language of the Romanians' literary culture was Church Slavonic.

Romanian, when used, was written in the Cyrillic alphabet. At the

end of the eighteenth century a Latinist movement amongst the

educated Romanian clergy of the Greek Catholic (Uniate) Church

in Transylvania encouraged the use of the Roman alphabet in place

of the Cyrillic, and at the same time attempted to 'reLatinize'

Romanian vocabulary by introducing an etymological spelling

system that rendered Romanian soare 'sun' by sole. The system

had little impact on the Romanian writers of Muntenia and

Moldavia who - aware of their linguistic ties with the Western

Romance languages (in particular with French and Italian) - during

the second and third decades of the nineteenth century sought to

'modernize' the language by importing new words from French and

Italian and adapting them to the contemporary structures of

Romanian. The practical problem of matching the sounds of

Romanian with the Cyrillic alphabet led, via transitional alphabets

in the rst half of the century, to the abandonment of the Cyrillic

in favour of the Roman alphabet in the 1860s.

Romanian today is written and printed in the Roman alphabet

with three diacritics (untiI 1989 the Romanian used in what was

then Soviet Moldova - now the Republic of Moldova - was written

and printed in a form of the Russian Cyrillic alphabet). In view

of the relatively recent adoption of the present Romanian alphabet

there has been little time for the written and spoken languages to

diverge. Romanian can be divided into a number of (sub)dialects.

The principal forms are Wallachian and Moldavian, spoken in the

former principalities of Muntenia or Wallachia (in the south-east)