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TWELVE WORDS YOU ALREADY KNOW

Why are you still counting in Latin?

Type OCTO, get OPT. Eleven numerals inherited from Latin, four sound laws and one disputed origin — plus the same quantity in three worlds of writing.

Start the machine

11 of 12
have a Latin etymon in DEX
4 laws
each with its name
1 intruder?
sută's origin stays disputed

The sound machine

Type a Latin word and watch it turn Romanian, step by step. Each law has its own colour; turn one off and the derivation stalls.

Sound laws describe historical changes in sounds, not mechanical letter substitutions. The machine simplifies them to make them visible.

Legend

  • LATIN FORM the classical form, for orientation — DUO, SEX, MILLE
  • ETYMON the exact form the dictionary says the Romanian comes from
  • RULE a documented sound change; the coloured law badges
  • RECONSTRUCTED the starred form given by the dictionary — dui, sess — not the machine
  • MODEL a stage added only for the didactic explanation
  • UNSURE the exact path is not established by the sources used

Try OCTO, QUATTUOR or SEX. Guests: SIGNUM, SOLEM, CAMPUS.

  1. OCTO
  2. CT → PT CT becomes PT
  3. *OPTO
  4. MODEL the ending falls
  5. OPT
  6. MODEL today's spelling
  7. opt
Laws

Turn off a law to see the derivation stall.

Laws discovered: 0 of 4

Steps wear badges: rule, etymon, model, unsure. Method

The machine knows

  • DUI
  • DUO
  • SEX
  • SOL
  • *DUI
  • DUAE
  • OCTO
  • SESS
  • SUTA
  • SUTĂ
  • TRES
  • UNUS
  • *SESS
  • DECEM
  • MILIA
  • MILLE
  • NOVEM
  • SOLEM
  • CAMPUS
  • CENTUM
  • CINQUE
  • SEPTEM
  • SIGNUM
  • QUINQUE
  • QUATTUOR
The carved dedication on Trajan's Column
The dedication on Trajan's Column, Rome: the empire's capital letters. Photo: MumblerJamie, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0

The twelve words

Eleven inheritances and one dispute

Each card shows the DEX etymon and the road to today's form. Control cards carry no named law: each step's badge says whether it is rule, etymon, model or unsure path. Pick a card to load it into the machine.

1

unu

CONTROL

DEX’09: Lat. unus, -a.

  1. UNUS
  2. MODEL the ending falls
  3. UNU
  4. MODEL today's spelling
  5. unu

See in DEX

2

doi

CONTROL

DEX’09: Lat. *dui, duae.

  1. DUO
  2. ETYMON the etymon as DEX gives it DEX gives *dui without saying how it formed; the machine shows only the etymon.
  3. *DUI
  4. UNSURE exact path unmodeled
  5. doi

The feminine

  1. DUAE
  2. MODEL today's spelling
  3. două

See in DEX

3

trei

CONTROL

DEX’09: Lat. tres.

  1. TRES
  2. MODEL the vowel settles
  3. TREI
  4. MODEL today's spelling
  5. trei

See in DEX

4

patru

QU → P / C

DEX’09: Lat. quattuor.

  1. QUATTUOR
  2. QU → P / C QU becomes P or C
  3. *PATTUOR
  4. MODEL the ending falls The double consonant simplifies and the ending wears away.
  5. *PATRU
  6. MODEL today's spelling
  7. patru

See in DEX

5

cinci

QU → P / C

DEX’09: Lat. cinque (= quinque).

DEX gives the late form cinque.

  1. QUINQUE
  2. ETYMON late form, as DEX gives it
  3. CINQUE
  4. MODEL the consonant softens
  5. *CINCI
  6. MODEL today's spelling
  7. cinci

See in DEX

6

șase

CONTROL

DEX’09: Lat. *sess (= sex).

DEX gives the late form *sess.

  1. SEX
  2. ETYMON late form, as DEX gives it
  3. *SESS
  4. UNSURE exact path unmodeled DER says the phonetics are hard to explain.
  5. șase

See in DEX

7

șapte

CONTROL

DEX’09: Lat. septem.

  1. SEPTEM
  2. MODEL s turns to ș in this word
  3. *ȘEPTEM
  4. MODEL the ending falls
  5. *ȘEPTE
  6. MODEL the vowel settles
  7. șapte

See in DEX

9

nouă

CONTROL

DEX’09: Lat. novem.

Three homonyms, with no proven link between them:

  • nouă = nine (novem)
  • nouă = new, feminine (novus)
  • nouă = to us, dative (nos)
  1. NOVEM
  2. UNSURE exact path unmodeled noao is an attested old form (MDA2).
  3. noao
  4. MODEL the vowel settles
  5. nouă

See in DEX

10

zece

CONTROL

DEX’09: Lat. decem.

The old form diace (MDA2) keeps the d sound.

  1. DECEM
  2. MODEL the consonant softens D becomes z; c sounds as ci before e, keeping its letter.
  3. *ZECE
  4. MODEL today's spelling
  5. zece

See in DEX

1000

mie

CONTROL

DEX’09: Lat. milia (pl. lui mille).

DEX gives the plural milia.

  1. MILLE
  2. ETYMON the plural as DEX gives it
  3. MILIA
  4. MODEL the consonant softens
  5. *MIE
  6. MODEL today's spelling
  7. mie

See in DEX

100

sută

DEX’09: Et. nec.

Șăineanu (1929), a historical form of words: Slav. SŬTO (unicul numeral românesc de origină străină)

DER (1958–1966): Sl. sŭto — „trecerea lui ŭ › u este greu de explicat”.

DER and older dictionaries propose Slavic sŭto, but the sound change is disputed. And “the only numeral of foreign origin” is a 1929 form of words: zero, milion and miliard are late loans too.

See in DEX

The same quantity, three worlds of writing

From wax to comma-below

The words survived; the signs changed radically. The same quantity — seventy denarii — in three worlds of writing: wax, Cyrillic, Latin letters. Not the genealogy of one word: septuaginta is not the etymon of șaptezeci, which means literally “șapte zeci”, seven tens.

Tablet XI · the Alburnus Maior corpus · drawn up at Immenosum Maius · 20 May 164

On wax, in words

[denarios se]pt(u)aginta

Seventy denarii in wages, written in words, not figures.

Square brackets mark letters restored by editors. The corpus keeps twenty-five documents from the years 131–167.

Read the contract at actul-din-131

Didactic reconstruction

In Cyrillic, under a titlo

О҃

The letter O with a titlo stands for seventy.

In the Cyrillic numeral system, different letters stood for units, tens and hundreds. О was worth 70; the titlo above marked its use as a number.

A page of the Ostromir Gospel, written in Cyrillic
Slavonic book hand: the Ostromir Gospel (1056–1057) — the manner of writing, not the sum's document. Photo: deacon Gregory, Wikimedia Commons, public domain

70 · seventy

Today, in Latin letters

70

Seventy, in Arabic figures and Latin letters.

The letter Ș: the Academy brought back â and sunt on 17 February 1993; comma-below ș entered Unicode 3.0 in September 1999, at Romania's request.

How the machine works, and where it stops

Three notes on the model, one disputed case, and what stays unsaid.

The model

  • The machine works on written forms, not recorded sounds.
  • Latin spelling marks neither stress nor vowel length, though the laws depend on them.
  • Starred forms from DEX — dui, sess — are dictionary reconstructions; the other starred forms are model states, not attested words.

The disputed case

Sută has no established Latin etymon in DEX: the dictionary gives an unknown etymology. DER and older dictionaries propose Slavic sŭto, but DER itself says the sound change is hard to explain and mentions other hypotheses. In the selection one–ten, sută and mie, DEX gives a Latin etymon for eleven forms; for sută it gives an unknown etymology. The loan itself is natural — zero, milion and miliard are late loans too.

What we leave unsaid

  • How masculine doi came from *dui, the sources do not say; we show only the etymon.
  • Why nouă (nine) ends in -ă, the sources do not say; we show the three homonyms without claiming any link between them.
  • Why *sess becomes șase, not even the sources say clearly: DER calls the phonetics hard to explain.
  • The laws are cited at handbook level (Sala 1998; Rosetti 1986), with no page reference: check them in the cited editions.

In short: 1993 is â's year, 1999 the comma's.

Sources

Dictionaries first, then handbooks and tablets, then sibling pages. Every high-risk claim points at its source.

Dictionaries

Handbooks and laws

  • Marius Sala, De la latină la română (1998)
  • Alexandru Rosetti, Istoria limbii române (1986)
  • Ovide Densusianu, Histoire de la langue roumaine (1938)
  • Romanian numbers, overview (EN-wiki)

Tablets and writing

Sibling pages

Type: Fraunces, Newsreader and Atkinson Hyperlegible, under the SIL Open Font Licence.