Between Oriental and Romanic. The history of some words

Abstract

We tried to demonstrate in this paper that the Oriental influences, of Arabic type, had not directly touched each and every Romanic language. Romanian, for example, does not contain proper Arabic elements. The Arabic influence over Romanian has been an indirect one, through French. The words of Arabic origin, which had joined a Romanic language, especially French, reached the Romanian language thanks to the re-romanization process. One may call these loanwords “international words”, because they can be found all over the Oriental and Occidental linguistic areas, even though some of them don’t belong to the scientific style. Depending on the languages that met directly or indirectly, the loanwords we discussed here could be considered of second, third, even fourth rank. However, we were less interested in this aspect, but intended to emphasize the unitary character of an important part of the present Romanian vocabulary.

Keywords

• vocabulary
• linguistic
• Oriental
• influences
• languages
• style