Lexical Items
Older Romanian etymological dictionaries tended to assume a borrowing in many cases, usually from a Slavic language or from Hungarian, but etymological analysis may show that, in many cases, the direction of borrowing was from Romanian to the neighboring languages. The current Dicţionar explicativ (the DEX) published by the Romanian Academy continues to list many words as borrowings, though the work of other linguists (Sorin Olteanu, Sorin Paliga, Ivan Duridanov, et al.) may indicate that a number of these are in fact indigenous, from local Indo-European languages.
Though the substratum status of many Romanian words is not much disputed, their status as Dacian words is controversial, some more than others. There are no significant surviving written examples of the Dacian language, so it is difficult to verify in most cases whether a given Romanian word is actually from Dacian or not. Many linguists however favor a Dacian source for the Romanian substratum. Many of the Romanian substratum words have Albanian cognates, and if these words are in fact Dacian, it indicates that the Dacian language may have been on the same branch as Albanian.
The Bulgarian Thracologist Vladimir Georgiev helped develop the theory that the Romanian language has a Daco-Moesian language as its substrate, a tongue which had a number of features which distinguished it from the Thracian language spoken further south, across the Haemus range.
Other Romanian words which are argued to be indigenous have close Slavic correspondences:baltă, daltă, sută etc., though some of these also have Albanian cognates:baltë, daltë. If such words are actually indigenous, then the Slavic correspondences are in line with the Daco-Thracian corpus, Slavic cognates existing for a number of Daco-Thracian words (Dacian diesema considered to be cognate to divizna, from Slavic languages, etc.). Also possible are a limited number of borrowings from a North Thracian (Dacian) dialect into Proto-Slavic (Pre-Expansion Slavic) as early as the 3rd-4th century AD.
Read more about this topic: Eastern Romance Substratum
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