I was listening to manele (as I am wont to do hehe) this morning while cleaning the house and heard this “word” aoleu and it made me laugh as I’ve heard my neighbors use it a million times. It’s an interjection, which means it’s something people suddenly exclaim and is never “conjugated” or modified in any way (grammatically). There are about a million variants of … Continue reading Slang Word of the Day: Aoleu!
One of the interesting things about studying the Romanian language is the number of lexical doublets, meaning that quite often two similar words are used, one from a Latin root and one from a non-Latin (usually Slavic) root. English has many of these, including lord and master, venison and deer, fire and flame or sheep and ewe. If you are familiar with other Romance languages … Continue reading Lexical Doublets
One of the easier Hungarian words to pronounce has to be the word buli, more or less just like you’d think it sounds. At least around here, it usually means a “party”, almost identical to the way the Romanian word chef is used. The Hungarian word buli has an interesting history, borrowed first from German and that originally from the French poule, from the Latin … Continue reading Hungarian Word of the Day: Buli
The other day I was talking to my mother and a phrase rose unbidden in my mind – “spor la treaba“. I didn’t actually say it though because while I know what it means I didn’t have a way to translate it. Spor la treaba (sometimes spor la lucru) is just a generic phrase Romanians say to one another when beginning to work. I think … Continue reading Word of the Day: Spor
The other day The Woman and I were talking about what are known as smelling salts, a very powerful aromatic mixture given to people who have lost consciousness in order to use a biological response to “jolt” them awake. In ordinary Hungarian the word “só” means “salt” but the interesting thing is that their name for “smelling salts” is repülősó, a combination of the word … Continue reading Hungarian Word of the Day: Repülősó
All Things Romania 