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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: August 8th, 2024

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  • From what I’ve managed to find, they seem to be on the same wavelength, yes! There is a lot of melancholy and nostalgia in “mi-e dor de tine,” it’s an ardent longing to interact with that person, or to simply have their presence around again. And it’s not just related to people, it’s used whenever referring to someone or something which generated profound satisfaction in us, like food, activities, music, etc. And I’ve noticed that few people use it outside of its intended emotional context (like “awesome” became a generalised superlative for “good” when it initially meant “awe-inspiring”).

    As for the number of speakers, I didn’t manage to find a lot of concrete or up-to-date information (although I am researching this halfway through my morning coffee, so I may have missed something), but Wikipedia (with this article from 2013 being cited as a source) states that about a quarter to a third of all Romanians spoke English a decade ago.

    Anecdotally, I’d say that number has remained relatively unchanged, as while more people have been exposed to English in one way or another, we’ve also seen a significant uptick in emigration during the same period. Plus we’ve started dubbing a lot of cartoons in Romanian, which I suspect has contributed to fewer children picking it up early on.

    As an addition to my initial comment, in which I focused specifically on people who have Romanian as their primary language, we also have significant portions of the population who speak Hungarian, Ukrainian and Roma as their primary languages, accounting for about 9% of the population (again, the numbers are taken from the sources listed above, so I take them with a grain of salt in terms of absolute accuracy).



  • Disclaimer: I am not a sociologist or a linguist, so everything listed below is purely based on my amateurish observations.

    As most people around my age in Romania (Millennials), I studied English as my “primary” secondary language all throughout primary, grade, and high school. I also studied French, but that one didn’t stick to me quite as much (I kinda’ blame the teaching methods involved for this one, because I’ve slowly been reforming that skill by using French subtitles, but anyway).

    What I’ve noticed with most of my generational peers is that we speak “Romglish” when interacting with each other (not universally applicable). It’s a very dynamic mix of both, for example: “Dammit, am uitat să mark it down în document, dar I’ll cover it până la următoarea ședință.”

    From what I’ve seen, the tendency is to use the most poignant words or structures from both on a case-by-case basis - for example, when cursing, I’ve noticed that most people use English when they want something short and sharp, and Romanian when they want to flood their interlocutor with “well-wishes.” We also tend to favour Romanian when we really want to dig into someone, as Romanian curse words feel heavier than English ones. Romanian also has more variants for interjectional structures (I think) - when a “God damn it…” would be used, we use “futu-i morții mă-sii,” “băga-mi-aș” (with or without “pula”/“picioarele”), “Dumnezeii mă-sii,” “mama naibii,” “pula mea” (or “pana mea” as a lite variant), etc.

    When talking tech, Romanian is mostly used to structure the ideas, while English is used to express the subject and related characteristics. It just “feels” more natural to use English for specialty subjects, as English techy words just sound more accurate and pragmatic.

    In terms of dirty talk during sexy times, Romanian sounds weird/funny and kinda’ breaks the mood, so I think most bilingual people favour English (if they talk dirty at all) - this is rather speculative, as we don’t often talk about sex with eachother around here, but that seemed to be the consensus among the few people with whom I broached the subject.

    When being intimate/vulnerable with eachother, we usually switch to Romanian, as it feels more personal and contains several structures which have more nuanced meanings than English - this may be a tired example, but “mi-e dor de tine” (which roughly translates to “I miss you”) is contextually more loaded with melodramatism, as it’s a mix of missing, yearning and craving, all wrapped together.

    We still struggle with the accent - most English teachers back in the day favoured the English (I hope you Brits give me top marks for this ;) ;) ) accent over the American one, but few actually managed to reproduce it faithfully, so our accents are very specifically Romanian - they sound sort of Slavic, but we don’t modulate our vowels as much, and our consonants are significantly harder. It’s a blocky accent, for lack of a better word. Mine is a weird mix of English and American, with a bit of Romanian, Scottish and Irish thrown in there (mostly around consonants, and when capping off words - I use a lot of hard "r"s).

    Speaking personally, my primary languages are Romanian and English, and they’re both native - started speaking English at about the same time as I did Romanian (~1 year old) thanks to having access to undubbed Cartoon Network, Discovery Channel, Animal Planet, etc. back in the 90s, and I was relatively conversant in both by the time I reached kindergarten age. We also had a lot of bilingual kindergartens back in the day, and so was the one which I attended.

    As a result, I also think in “Romglish,” although English is somewhat more melodic to my ear, so I tend to favour it when expressing feelings, or when expressing complex ideas related to philosophy, tech, etc. When I talk to myself, however, I mostly use English, as I favour it over Romanian in general.

    In my most vulnerable state, I use Romanian more frequently than English because it sounds a bit more personal, more intimate when used to express deep love or sadness, as mentioned above.

    In general, however, I just use whatever’s shortest to pronounce (syllable count): “am o idee” instead of “I have an idea,” “just a sec” instead of “stai o secundă,” “got it” instead of “am înțeles,” etc.

    Very late edit, because it may be relevant: most Boomers HATE us for this, with reasoning based on language purity (yeah…).


  • For me, it’s the sheer scale of celestial bodies.

    Our Sun is humongous. UY Scuti’s radius is 1700 times larger - 185300 times larger than the Earth’s. And then there’s TON 618, which has a mass 66 billion times larger than our Sun’s.

    And even those are barely grains of sand when compared to solar and galactic structures… It is humbling, to say the least.

    Edit 2: I deleted the previous edit, because my first observation is correct (scale is maintained when going from comparing radii to comparing diameters…), which is why I have an Arts degree.








  • I only ever had one, and he died of old age! But he sure tried his best to clock out early!

    I remember about three months in, I came home from school only to find him suspended from the top of his cage by his right hind leg. Rushed him to the vet, got minor PTSD when the doc tied his stump and told us “the rest of it will fall off soon,” and we threw that cage away the instant we got back home.

    After that, Crunchy (rough translation) had the whole apartment to himself, and he sure liked to run right in front of you as you were walking! Would have rather broken my neck than step on the little fella (which I nearly did a couple of times - the neck part, not the stepping on him part).

    But he was very loving and cute, he’d climb up either mum or myself while we were watching movies or playing vidya, he’d nestle above the collar bone, and sleep there for hours. Even my cat loved him to bits, they used to sleep together under my bed. He’d help himself to popcorn, chips, fried eggs, cereal (because of course he was allowed on the table, equal rights), and he once bathed in my soup.


  • This.

    Imagine you’re in a relationship with someone who’s been through so much suffering in the past, that they now hurt/abuse you (doesn’t matter what type of trauma or abuse it is for this example), either as a defence mechanism, or as a control mechanism, or as a preemptive strike type deal.

    You have no way of changing/helping them because they do not want to let you in.

    Even in this scenario, where we may be able to empathise, the “why” doesn’t matter. What matters is that, at the end of the day, they’re abusing you.

    If you ask me, Musk doing the Nazi salute is even more clear cut than this. We all know exactly who Nazis were, are, and will be, what’s behind that one gesture. Even if it were performed by a kid with no context of the world, it’s still a Nazi salute. The intent doesn’t matter, because the meaning has been defined waay before the performer’s intent even comes into play.

    And even if he claims that “because he’s a Fascist” (which he is) wasn’t the intent behind it, that should only make him, the Tech Bro of Tech Bros, the man with enough resources to friggin’ buy half the schools, libraries and teachers in the world, look that much more stupid, ignorant, insensitive, immature, and stupid (yes, I said that twice).

    Edit: another, personal example would be my reticence to make the peace symbol because it was so heavily co-opted by Nixon. I’m not saying he managed to fully corrupt it, but he did manage to leave an indelible fecal stain on it as I see it.





  • Oh, yepyep, honest and open communication is vital in everything! And I agree that “to each their own,” we all have our own love languages and respond in our own unique ways to everything!

    I think your point is even reinforced by contemporary circumstances, as a whole damned lot of us would almost kill for a bit of kindness and soft attention…


  • Plus you can always laugh about it afterwards (as long as it’s not a creepy/intrusive/tasteless attempt at flirting), and that can serve just as well!

    I fully accepted my complete lack of game, so I purposefully turn flirting into a playful parody with extra-campy Smooth™ lathered all over that puppy, and the reactions so far have been really positive!

    I still can’t tell when someone else is flirting with me, though, so I just joke about that, too! I make it clear that my love language isn’t Sexy Talk in general, so I just ask “are you flirting with me right now?” at inappropriate times, which nets me at least a frustrated chuckle.

    As a great man once said: “you laughed, I’m off the hook!”