When I learned I would be going to Romania, Karl found a Teach Yourself Romanian book in one of the English language bookstores in Tehran. I found it curious that such a book could be found there; I hadn't yet discovered all the connections between Iran and Romania which provided some explanations. The book gave me a head start on learning about the language when I completed my Iran to the U.S. travels.
I learned that Romanian is a Romance language, related to French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese, not Russian or other Slavic languages spoken in neighboring countries. Some said Romanian is closer to Latin than the other Romance languages. Since I never studied Latin, I don't have the experience to compare. A joke told about the similarity between Romanian and Italian concerned a Romanian peasant who traveled to Rome and told everyone when he returned that those Italians were so dumb that they spoke Romanian like children.
It was difficult to figure out just how to pronounce Romanian words and phrases, having only a book to read and no audio sources to hear the language. Some of the phrases didn't look too difficult. For example, bună ziua, good afternoon, had only four syllables and more vowels than consonants. I figured it should sound something like "boon-a zi-wa." Likewise bună seara, good evening, looked manageable as boon-a se-yar-a. But the Romanian equivalent of good morning had a lot more syllables and nearly as high a vowel to consonant ratio: bună dimineaţa, where I understood that little tail under the "t" was pronounced as two English sounds: ts. Thus good morning in Romanian was boon-a dee-meen-ee-yats-ah, a mouthful for a non-morning person like myself.
But when I got to the pronouns, I just wasn't sure I could believe the book. I thought it might be a version of Romanian spoken by those of several generations ago, much like the Russian textbook of my college days. Who ever heard of a personal pronoun having more syllables than the noun it represented? English pronouns are all short: I, you, he, she, it, we, they. Not a multisyllabic one among them. But the Teach Yourself Romanian book said the Romanian equivalent of the plural (and "formal" or polite form) of you was Dumneavoastra. That is six syllables! And the single, informal form of you wasn't much shorter, Dumneata, four syllables. I just couldn't believe that Romanians waste that much effort and time on the personal pronoun, you.
On the plane from Frankfurt to Bucharest, I finally met someone who had at least heard Romanian spoken by those living in Bucharest at that time. I decided to test out my theory by asking her to tell me how to say good morning, good evening, and good afternoon as a benchmark of my interpretation of the sounds. She confirmed that I had figured out those phrases fine. Then I asked her about the pronouns, starting with the ones I wasn't amazed at: I is eu (which sounds a lot like the Spanish equivalent, yo), we is noi, he is el, she is ea, all of them short. So I fully expected my semi-native informant to give me short versions of the singular and plural you. But she didn't. She confirmed what the book said, Dumneavoastra was the polite form of you. But the familiar, singular form was often shortened to te, although Romanian has many cases so the spelling varies, depending on whether it is the subject or object in a sentence.
So I learned to roll Dumneavoastra off my tongue when addressing strangers. There was no point becoming too familiar too quickly as I learned many times over in Romania.
But those are future stories.
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