Language Learning

We started this week learning with a Romanian language tutor, Olga. She is a really nice lady and, from our first lesson, a great tutor. Romanian is a Latin-based language that has some similarities to other Romance languages such as Spanish and French. As I indicated earlier, everyone here in Moldova speaks or understands Romanian, while many speak Russian as well. We decided to study Romanian because we are also studying Spanish (or at least it is part of the kids school curriculum the next few years), and the alphabet is easier to grasp then the Russian Cyrillic letters.

The language history of Moldova is another fascinating piece of cultural history here. Since the Moldovans have been under the control of the Romanians and the Russians (later the Soviets) they have borrowed from both the Russian and Romanian languages to create what can be referred to as Moldovan (yet is essentially Romanian today). The result is that in many places, especially in rural areas, you will find Romanian writing/signs etc. written in Romanian yet using Cyrillic letters. This is obviously very confusing for a non-native speaker.

One account of the Romanization of the language is that during the Soviet era Stalin actually encouraged the use of Romanian as the official language in order to gain influence in Romania (Russian controlled Moldova for much of the 19^th century). Thus, Moldova has had times were the policy has shifted from children being taught in Russian and then times where children are taught only in Romanian. I may post later on Moldovan history, but this territory has had a long history of cultural influence from the Romanians even when the area was controlled by the Ottomans (1538-1812).