A doua manea

Here is a second manea that is among my favorites. Like many manele that deal with the subject of family, with titles ranging from "You are my brother" and "My father" to "I miss my children", and even one titled "Neighbor", this particular manea is about a woman's Gypsy husband, suspected of cheating on her.
It starts off with the wife yelling at her companion, accusing him of being with another woman. After attempting to get the truth out of him, and wanting to know where he was azi noapte (last night), she ends up realizing that it's time to move on. The title, Țigane, tu ai amantă, translates to "Gypsy man, you have a lover".

The singer in this song, Narcisa, and Nicolae Guță, from my previous entry, are both well-known maneliști –  singers of manele – in Romania.



Going through the song title, of interest here is the vocative form of țigan heard in the song – țigane. Unlike the other Romance languages, Romanian uses different forms for the vocative case (like Latin for some nouns). For example, the word fiu in Romanian, and in Latin, FILIUS, would give us the vocative forms fiule and FILI, respectively.

Quite often, a phrase will show up on a song that truly showcases the closeness between Romanian and the rest of Romance. As examples from this song, we will take two lines that are very similar in structure to the other Romance languages, in particular, to Italian. The first one shows the Latin verb that each language uses with the meaning of "to have":

Latin	TU HABES      AMANTEM
Romanian	Tu ai                 amantă
Italian	Tu hai        (un') amante
French	Tu as        (une) amante
Spanish	Tu tienes   (una) amante
Portuguese	Tu tens      (uma) amante

Romanian, Italian and French using Latin HABERE for the verb "to have", and Spanish and Portuguese using Latin TENERE. The noun amantă arrived in Romanian via the French amant, ultimately derived in all languages from the Latin AMANTEM.

Another line from the song that makes it easy to see the similarities between Romanian and the rest of Romance is the following (heard at 1:08): jură-mi că amantă n-ai (Swear to me that a lover/mistress you don't have).

Vulgar Latin	IURA MI QUOD AMANTEM NON HABES
Romanian	Jură-mi că amantă n-ai
Italian	Giurami che amante non hai
French	Jure-moi que amante tu n'as pas
Spanish	Júrame que amante no tienes
Portuguese	Jura-me que amante não tens

From this sentence, we gather that all these languages retained the Latin IURARE – to swear – and, we can see the evolution of the Latin QUOD.

We hear, in this song, a Romanian expression that hints at an archaic "r" in infinitives: fir-aș al dracu' – I'll be damned. In the modern language, infinitives have lost the Latin -R- endings, so we find, for instance, a cânta from CANTARE, a înțelege from INTELLIGERE, or a fi from *FIRE. However, there are several fossilized expressions and a few archaizing constructions that maintain this -R-, in a grammatical construction involving the conditional, one that mirrors very closely the way the conditional is formed in the other Romance languages. This post in Romanian, along with its many user comments, covers the issue in depth. The following is cited there from the Gramatica Limbii Române:

“În afară de realizarea “scurtă” a componentului continuu, care este şi realizarea curentă, există cu totul limitat (ca frecvenţă, ca utilizare discursivă, ca registru stilistic) şi o componentă “lungă”, constituind forma arhaică şi etimologică a infinitivului, deosebită de forma actuală prin întinderea sufixului de infinitiv: -are, -ere, -re, -âre. Componenta verbala “lungă” a infinitivului se limitează: (a) la apariţia în forma inversată de condiţional, construcţie arhaică şi populară, neuzitată în româna actuală (Închinare-aş şi n-am cui); (b) la apariţia în propoziţii principale cu valoare injonctiv-optativă, conservată în înjurături şi blesteme (Dare-ar boala în ei! Fir(e)-ar să fie de proşti!).”

What happens here is that conditional marker, aș in this case (itself a form of avea, to have), is being placed after the verb, when in the modern language, the conditional particle traditionally comes before the verb. Thus, in this expression, we find fir-aș, instead of the modern aș fi (meaning "I would be"). In the first form, we then see this -R- that has disappeared in the modern language – a fi, to be, comes from an earlier *FIRE, from the Latin FIERI.