Towards an Etymological Map of R omanian (2021)

Abstract: In this paper we investigate the etymology of Romanian words. We start from the Romanian lexicon and automatically extract information from multiple etymological dictionaries. We evaluate the results and perform extensive quantitative and qualitative analyses with the goal of building an etymological map of the language.

## introduction located at crossroads between east and west, the romanian language presents a kaleidoscopic etymological picture. originated from latin, it suffered the influence of many cultures with which the other romance languages did not have (much or any) contact, hence its physiognomy became, from a certain point on, different from that of its cognate languages (cf. @xcite @xcite ). the romanian lexicographers, having to deal with this miscellaneous etymological structure of the language, must perform a fairly complicated task which not rarely ends up by giving in to the difficulty of identifying a word's origin. our analysis, based on a computational systematization of the origins of words, aims to evaluate quantitatively and qualitatively romanian's etymological composition. we propose a socio-cultural interpretation of the semantic domains most permeable to borrowings from the various languages with which romanian had a stronger contact, considering that a systematic perspective on the lexicon's etymological structure, doubled by statistics on the permeability and needs of the various onomasiological fields, may provide clues for future research concerning still unknown etymologies. ## extracting and processing the data in this section we describe our procedure for automatically extracting and processing etymological information for the romanian lexicon. dictionary match dex '09 -din #fr.# @abat-jour.@ dn [[...] / < #fr.# @xmath0] scriban (fr. @xmath1 [...]) @xmath3.# @xmath2 ## quantitative analysis in we also compared the data we obtained with the information we knew concerning the fundamental lexical core from @xcite , namely 7.5% french borrowings and 30% latin inherited words. we easily notice not only an inverted ratio between the quantity of words of latin origin and those originated from french, but also a hugely expanded proportion of french borrowings. about 38% of the whole lexicon and almost 73% of the words that have at least one etymology attested in the dictionaries have french origin (versus only 7.5% of the representative lexicon), while the quantity of words of latin origin (most of them inherited) hardly reaches 9% of the whole lexicon and 19% of the words that have at least one etymology attested in the dictionaries (versus the proportion of 30% for the fundamental lexical core). the gap is explainable by the distinction between the basic, common lexical core (covering 80% of everyday speech) and the cultured lexicon and specialised terminology, developed in the last century by massively borrowing lexical items from french. sorting the borrowings of each language by parts of speech highlights the significant quantitative breach between the nominal parts (by far the ma-jority) and the verbal ones. but, while the inherited lexicon shows a ratio of 1 verb to 6 nominal parts (noun+adjective), the borrowing process has considerably enriched the quantity of nominal parts of speech, in detriment of the verbal ones: e.g., the french borrowings encapsulate a ratio of 1 verb to 12 nominal parts, the english ones display a ratio of 1 verb to 48 nominal parts, and the turkish loanwords enclose a correlation of 1 verb to 388 nominal parts. this situation allows a deeper insight into the language structure, showing that expressing an action, state or occurrence requires a higher degree of internalized lexicon or of acquaintance with the language: we can deduce, on the one hand, that the speakers are able to express their experiences by using a fairly small number of verbs, but need to constantly increase the amount of nouns to designate the new objects they observe or concepts they acquire; on the other hand, morphosyntactic restriction may also play a part: while a nominal part of speech is easily adaptable to the morphological system of romanian, the complex verbal conjugation may impede its immediate adoption. also, it seems that the more related the source language is to romanian, the easier is the morphosyntactic adaptation of verbs, which might explain the above ratio order, french, english, turkish. by classifying the lexicon in parts of speech, we also notice a shortcoming in the romanian lexicography, namely the inconsistency of lexicographers when establishing the period when a word of slavic origin entered the romanian language: from this categorization it results that only one verb was borrowed from old slavic, while more than 200 come from slavic. it is, however, evident that many fundamental verbs of slavic origin have penetrated during the period of early contact between the two communities, thus, originate from old slavic (e.g., a iubi (meaning to love), a citi (meaning to read), a gres , i (meaning to make a mistake)). in this case, we only highlight a terminological misunderstanding. in order to quantify the resemblance between romanian words and their etymons, for different source languages, we compute the edit distance @xcite for {word, etymon} pairs, using the post-processed etymon form (see section 2.2). the edit distance counts the minimum number of operations (insertion, deletion and substitution) required to transform one string into another. we use a normalized version of this metric, dividing the edit distance by the length of the longest string. the obtained values are between 0 and 1; the lower the values, the closer the romanian words are to their etymons. in figure 2 we report the average edit distance between the romanian words and their etymons, per language. overall, romanian words borrowed from english are closest to their etymons. for 990 out of 2,064 words with english etymology, the edit distance is 0, meaning that those romanian words have not undergone any transformations when entering the language (e.g., marketing, management, avocado). for latin, 633 out of 9,313 words are identical to their etymon (e.g., vultur, meaning vulture). ## conclusions for historical, geographical and linguistic reasons, romanian presents a complex lexicographic picture, especially in terms of etymology. while reliable etymological dictionaries for romanian are still missing, we proposed a computer-assisted etymological analysis doubled by a linguistic manual verification and interpretation, using the available dictionaries via dexonline. the comparison between the obtained data and previous knowledge about the romanian fundamental lexicon revealed an inverted proportion between french and latin and a surprisingly high percentage of french borrowings. we visualized the romanian etymologies per source language on a geographic map and we also minded their part of speech proportions and interpreted them. error analysis showed that the automatic extraction was performed with high accuracy, while the remaining errors are due to erroneous etymologies from the dictionaries. finally, we experimented with the etymological composition of the romanian lexicon based on semantic fields. starting from a list of conceptual domains, adapted from romanian linguistic atlases, we automatically obtained 10 onomasiological fields containing romanian words in our dataset and their etymologies. for each of these categories, we ordered the source languages and interpreted the results from a sociocultural and historical point of view.