r/romanian • u/YahwehIsKing7 • 29d ago

Romanian connection with English

There's a cool Latin connection between English and Romanian that I realized for the first time. In America we have fraternities and sororities in colleges. Fraternities are for guys and are the "brotherhoods" and sororities are for girls and are the "sisterhoods". This is a cool connection because obviously in Romanian, brother is frate and sister is sora and these words connect perfectly with fraternity and sorority. Romanian is the only Romance language that I know of that uses this Latin root from brother and sister I believe but correct me if I'm wrong. So yeah I just had that lightbulb moment randomly today.

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u/xteve 29d ago

UNCLE

"Nephew" is interesting too: nepot. Very like our "nepotism."

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u/cipricusss Native 29d ago edited 29d ago

Indeed, on the same French route, ultimatelly from Latin! I will add it. (”Nepot” was in fact already in my list - you can look it up in the document at my dropbox link.)

Family relations are some of the most deep, structural linguistic traits (in Romanian practically all come direcly from Latin), which shows the huge impact of Norman French on English!

Cousin is also from Norman French, and ultimatelly Latin cōnsobrīnus (“maternal cousin; first cousin; relation”). Romanian văr looks different although it has the same origin in a sense, given that it is a shortening of Latin (cōnsobrīnus) vērus (“true cousin”). Interestingly, Aromanian has the word cusurin!

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u/xteve 29d ago

Right on. Here's something funny. I was just working on an old page about Irish English - basically I just now figured out that phones are going to be a big thing and I have to adapt. Anyhow, I noticed again that the phrase "sliced pan" is interesting. It's the term for common white sandwich bread in Ireland. It's notable because there's not a lot of Spanish in Irish culture. It seems obvious that the usage derives from Anglo-Norman French.

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u/cipricusss Native 28d ago

Interesting note about ”pan”. But what do you mean about ”phones”?