The Slavic influence on Romanian is noticeable on all linguistic levels: lexis, phonetics, morphology and syntax.
Romanian (or Daco-Romanian), Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian and Istro-Romanian form the Eastern Romance branch of the Romance languages. [1] The four languages are descended from a common ancestor developed from the Vulgar Latin spoken in southeastern Europe during Classical Antiquity. The territory where the language formed was a large one, consisting of both the north and the south of the Danube (encompassing the regions of Dacia, Moesia, and possibly Illyria), more precisely to the north of the Jiriček Line [2] [3] Proto-Slavic —the root from which the modern Slavic languages developed—emerged during the first half of the 2nd millennium BC. [4] The Early Slavs lived in the plains north of the Carpathian Mountains or along the middle course of the Dnieper River. [4] Their expansion accelerated after the fall of the Hunnic Empire in the middle of the 5th century AD. [5] Significant Slavic-speaking groups moved across the Lower Danube and settled in the Balkan Peninsula. [5] By the end of the 7th century, Slavic became the dominant language throughout most of the Balkans. [5] Studies of the South Slavic languages revealed that Bulgarian and Serbian developed for centuries in two distant territories, separated by significant non-Slavic groups. [6]
It is unclear when contact began among the Early Slavs and speakers of Common Romanian. [7] According to one scholarly theory, the Romance-speaking communities had already come into contact with the Slavs in the 5th or 6th centuries. [7] [8] To explain the lack of early Slav loanwords in Romanian, linguist Kim Schulte claims that the "contact situation can be assumed to have been one of cohabitation and regular interaction between Romanians and Slavs, without a great degree of cultural dominance of either of the two". [8] In contrast, linguist Gottfried Schramm proposes that the Romanians' ancestors lived in the mountains, surrounded by Albanian-speaking communities and thus separated from the Slavs of the lowlands until the 10th century. [9] Otherwise, he continues, the fact that Slavic loanwords appeared in Albanian earlier than in Romanian could hardly be explained. [10]
Contacts with Slavic-speaking groups intensified before the disintegration of Common Romanian and about 80 Slavic loanwords are still present in all four Eastern Romance variants. [8] [11] [12] The high amount of Slavic loanwords and the shared morphological and syntactical elements of Romanian and Bulgarian show that modern Romanian developed from the tongue of a mixed, bilingual population and through frequent intermarriages. [8] [13] According to another scholarly approach, these elements do not reveal a widespread bilingualism or "racial intermixture", being the consequence of "cultural intercourse" deriving from the bilingualism of the literary class. [14]
Romanians adopted Old Church Slavonic as the language of liturgy, which gave it the "status of a cultural superstate language, particularly in semantic fields related to religious beliefs and practices". [15] Greek Catholic (or Uniate) priests were the first Romanian intellectuals to make efforts to demonstrate the Latin origin of Romanian in Transylvania during the 18th century. [16] They developed a Latin-based alphabet to replace the Cyrillic writing system and promoted the use of Latin terms in place of words of Slavic origin. [16] Wallachian writers started to advance the adoption of loanwords from Romance languages (especially from French and Italian) in the 19th century. [17]
Although the Re-latinization of Romanian created synonyms to, or replaced a number of Slavic and other loanwords in the 19th century, about 20% of the Romanian vocabulary is still of Slavic origin. [3] [18] The earliest Slavic loanwords which became part of the basic vocabulary are the most likely to have survived. [19] For instance, prag ("threshold"), nevastă ("wife") and rai ("heaven") survived, but postelnic ("chamberlain") disappeared. [19]
Romanians adopted Slavic loanwords in three chronological stages: firstly from Proto-Slavic, then from a South Slavic language (associated with Old Church Slavonic), and finally from individual Slavic languages of Southeastern, Central and Eastern Europe. [11] Certain Slavic terms were borrowed twice: both the popular verb a sfârși and the educated form a săvârși derives from the Slavic term for "finish, complete" (sŭvŭršiti). [20] About 80 loanwords contain the Proto-Slavic *TorT-syllable before it underwent radical changes during the formation of Slavic languages. [21] This old syllable began with a consonant, which was followed by the vowel e or o and the consonant r or l, with a consonant closing the syllable. [22] The Romanian word for hillock (măgură) was likely also borrowed from a reconstructed Proto-Slavic *măgula form. [21] Romanian adopted most Slavic loanwords after the change of the original *TorT-syllables was completed in the South Slavic languages in the middle of the 9th century. [21] The third phase of the adoption of Slavic loanwords started after the dissolution of Common Romanian. [23] During this stage, the speakers of particular dialects started to borrow terms from the neighboring Slavic peoples. [23] Ukrainian, Polish and Russian influenced the 13th century Daco-Romanian dialects of Moldavia and Maramureș; Serbian loanwords appeared in the Daco-Romanian variants of Banat and Crișana; Bulgarian influenced the Wallachian dialects of Daco-Romanian; Istro-Romanian was exposed to a strong Croatian influence for centuries; while Aromanian and Megleno-Romanian were strongly influenced by Bulgarian and Macedonian. [23] [24]
Studies determined that about 16.5% of the nouns, 14% of the verbs (most of which have the fourth conjugation form), 11.8% of the adjectives, 20% of the adverbs and 1.6% of the function words were borrowed from Slavic languages. [24] The ratio of Slavic loanwords is especially high in the religious vocabulary (25%) and in the semantic field of social and political relations (22.5%). [25] Slavic loanwords make up more than 10% of the Romanian terms related to speech and language, to basic actions and technology, to time, to the physical world, to possession and to motion. [26] Some loanwords were used to name new objects or concepts. [27] For instance, Slavic loanwords in the Romanian vocabulary of agriculture show either the adoption of the Slavs' advanced agricultural technology by the Romanians, [27] or the transformation of their way of life from mobile pastoralism to a sedentary agriculture. [28] Other loanwords replaced inherited Latin terms. [27] For instance, it is unlikely that the Romanian ancestors had no term for love even if a iubi ("to love") is a Slavic loanword. [29] In some cases, certain dialects retained inherited Latin term which were replaced by Slavic loanwords in standard Romanian. [26] For example, the inherited Latin term for snow (nea) is only used regionally or in poems, while standard Romanian prefers zăpadă and omăt which were borrowed from Slavic languages. [26] Most Slavic loanwords are connected to situations which stir up emotions, including dragă ("dear") and slab ("weak"). [30] According to Robert A. Hall, originally Slavic-speaking individuals spread these emotive terms, because they continued to use them even when they were talking in Romanian. [31] Schulte notes that "in antonym pairs with one element borrowed from Slavic, there is an intriguing tendency for the Slavic word to be the one with more positive connotation". [26] For instance, Slavic a iubi ("to love") against inherited a urî ("to hate"), and Slavic prieten ("friend") against Turkic dușman ("enemy"). [26] The extent of this borrowing is such that some scholars once mistakenly viewed Romanian as a Slavic language. [32]
The influence of Romania's Slavic neighbors on the language continued. The Russian influence was intensified in Bessarabia after it was handed over [33] to the Russian Empire and becoming a Soviet Republic. Russian was used in relations with citizens from other parts of the Soviet Union. The effort to establish a Moldovan identity as part of a Romanian one included trying to form a Moldovan standard language, with more Russian loans and reviving archaic words of Slavic origin. [34]
Calques (or loan translations) from Slavic languages can also be detected in Romanian. [19] [35] For example, the double meaning of Slavic svĕtŭ (meaning both world and light) gave rise to the development of Romanian lume ("world") from Latin lumen ("light"). [36] [19] The semantic development of certain inherited Latin words was due to Slavic influence. [35] For instance, the Latin word for life (vita) developed into the Romanian term for cattle (vită) following the pattern of Old Church Slavonic životŭ ("being" and "animal"). [35]
The structure of Romanian numerals from eleven to nineteen also reflects Slavic influence, according to most linguists' view. [36] [31] [37] In these numerals, the unit digit is followed by the prepositional element spre ("on", evolved from Latin super, meaning "above") before the decad digit: unsprezece ("one-on-ten"), doisprezece ("two-on-ten"), nouăsprezece ("nine-on-ten"). [38] The same pattern is common in all Slavic languages, but it is also present in Albanian and a similar structure exists in Hungarian. [39] The structure of the Romanian decades above ten follows a digit-decad system: douăzeci ("two-tens" for 20), treizeci ("three-tens" for 30) and patruzeci ("four-tens" for 40). [39] Old Church Slavonic displayed the same transparent structure and it can also be detected in modern Slavic languages. [40]
More than 17% of the prefixes (about 15 morphemes) were borrowed from Slavonic languages, but four-fifths of these morphemes are unproductive. [41] Slavic prefixes that are similar to prefixes inherited from Latin are the most productive. [41] This category includes ne- and prea-: for instance, nemică ("nothing") preserved a Latin prefix, but necinstit ("dishonest") contains a prefix borrowed from Slavic. [42] A third prefix, răz-, also belongs to this group, according to a number of scholars. [42] They propose that the ră- prefix in the verbs răscoc ("overbake") and răzbat ("go through") retained the Latin re- prefix. [42] Suffixes from Slavic languages also appeared in Romanian. [43] [44] Among the suffixes of Slavic origin -ac, -nic and -uș are still especially popular. [44]
Loanwords from other languages were rarely subject to fundamental phonological changes, most likely due to their steady influx contributing to the "relatively large phonological inventory" (Kim Schulte) of Romanian. [45] Slavic languages had more than 30 two- or three-member consonant clusters . [46] These clusters were alien to Common Romanian, but many of them appeared in Romanian through borrowing of Slavic terms. [46] Early Slavic loanwords contain two-member consonant sequences. [46] Most Slavic consonant clusters with a first fricative were fully adopted: vlădică ("bishop" from vladika), slugă ("servant" from sluga), zmeu ("dragon" from zmey ). [47] The cluster "ș t" can be detected in both Slavic loanwords and terms inherited from Latin. [48] The phonetical changes which resulted in this consonant sequence may have started before the first contacts with the Slavic peoples, but early contacts with South Slavic peoples clearly influenced its present form. [49] The word-initial "z d r"-cluster appears both in Slavic loanwords, like zdravăn ("strong") and a zdrobi ("to crush"), and in words of unknown origin, like a zdruncina ("to shake") and a zdrăngăni ("to tinkle"). [50]
Most linguists attribute the pre-ioticization of some Romanian words—the appearance of the semi-vowel "j" before a world-initial "e"—to contacts with speakers of Proto-Slavic. [51] Pre-ioticization can only be detected in eight forms of the verb a fi ("to be") and in four personal pronouns, but three archaic demonstratives also displayed this phonetic change. [48] Linguist Grigore Nandriș argues that pre-ioticization can hardly be attributed to Slavic influence, because the Latin e vowel had transformed into a diphthong long before the first Slavic loanwords appeared in Common Romanian. [52] Palatalization of consonants before the vowel "i" is also attributed to Slavic influence by a number of scholars, but others maintain that it developed internally. [53] [54] The palatalization of the last consonant of masculine nouns and of verbs before "i" ending is a prominent example of this development: for instance, the last consonant of the Romanian word for coin (ban) changes from "n" to "ɲ" in plural (bani). [53] [36]
The majority of specialists agree that the consonant "h" was alien to Common Romanian, but Slavicisms — such as duh ("spirit") from *duxŭ, and hrean ("horseradish") from *xrĕnŭ—enabled its appearance in Romanian. [36] [55] [56] In contrast to this view, Nandriș writes that certain Arumanian and dialectical Daco-Romanian terms show that the consonant "f" developed into "h" before the disintegration of Common Romanian (for instance, the Aromanian and dialectical Daco-Romanian word for iron, h'er descends from ferrum). [52] Linguist Graham Mallinson emphasizes that the consonant occurs in Romanian in positions alien to Latin. [56] Linguist Peter R. Petrucci proposes that Romanian loanwords containing "f" in place of the Proto-Slavic "x" were modelled on Macedonian patterns, because Proto-Slavic "x" developed into "v" in Macedonian in word-final position and after "u". [57] According to Mallinson, "x" changed to "v" at a relatively late period of the development of Daco-Romanian, because Istro-Romanian retained the original "x" consonant. [56] Petrucci proposes that the change of word-initial "v" to "h" in the Moldovan dialect of Daco-Romanian is to be attributed to Ukrainian influence either through language shift from Ukrainian or through the bilingualism of masses of Moldovans. [57]
One of the most interesting components of the Romanian phonological inventory is the vowel /ɨ/, which is the most recent addition to its inventory. [58] Most linguists support that /ɨ/ first arose as an allophone of /ə/ in Romanian native vocabulary [59] [60] [61] [62] and not due Slavic influence as Petrucci argues that /ɨ/ cannot have come from Slavic *y as there is a lack of direct correspondence between Slavic loanwords and /ɨ/. [63] Petrucci emphasizes that three of the earliest Slavic loanwords which now contain "î" could have originally contained /i/ in Romanian, because the vowel shift from /i/ to /ɨ/ is attested in similar position in some inherited words. [64]
Romanian is the sole major Romance language still using the vocative case when addressing a person: domnule ("sir!"), Radule ("Radu!"), soro ("sister!"), Ano ("Anne!"). [31] [65] Unlike Latin, which used a distinct vocative ending only in the singular of most nouns in only one of its five declensions, Romanian has three distinct vocative forms. [66] The -e ending of masculine nouns in vocative corresponds to the specific Latin vocative suffix (if one ignores the -ul- article infix, obligatory in Romanian vocative), but neither the -o ending of feminine nouns, nor the -lor ending of plural can be detected in Latin. [66] Since the vocative also exists in Slavic languages, linguists agree that contacts with Slavic-speaking groups enabled its preservation in Romanian, with some even suggesting that the vocative case (re-)appeared in Romanian as a consequence of a language shift from Slavic. [31] [67] [68] Even if Common Romanian retained at least the traces of the vocative case, the vocative suffix of feminine nouns can most probably be attributed to the parlance of an originally Slavic-speaking group. [69] [70]
The appearance of two forms of the infinitive, a short and a long form, is one of the distinctive features of Daco-Romanian and Istro-Romanian in comparison with other Romance languages. [71] The shortening of the infinitive can be observed in the development of Tuscan, but also Bulgarian and Macedonian: for example, Old Church Slavonic viděti ("to see") shortened into vidět in Middle Bulgarian which became vidě in Bulgarian. [72] Linguists Jacques Byck and Ion Diaconescu maintain that the infinitive shortened without external influence during the development of Romanian. [73] Alexandru Graur, Ivan Gălăbov and Alexandru Rosetti argue that South Slavic influence gave rise to this specific morphological change. [74] Petrucci offers an interim explanation, saying that the infinitive was shortened at an early stage of the development of Romanian, but a language shift from South Slavic is responsible for the development of the two forms of infinitive. [75]
Romanian has a neuter (or ambigeneric) gender, with neuter singular adjectives and articles corresponding to their masculine forms, and with neuter plural adjectives and articles matching their feminine variants. [76] Since other Romance languages have not preserved the Latin neuter gender in nominal stems, Rosetti, Graur, Nandriș, Mallinson and other linguists propose that the existence of the neuter in Romanian should most probably be attributed to Slavic influence. [77] [76] [78] In contrast with them, Petrucci maintains that the Romanian tripartite gender system cannot be assigned to contact with the tripartite gender system of South Slavic because of the lack of credible evidence. [79] Petrucci and other linguists studying the grammatical gender in Romanian in recent years generally agree [80] that it is the result of an internal historical development. [81] [82] [83] [84]
A couple of words inherited from Latin used in active voice in other Romance languages became reflexive in Romanian under a Slavic influence. For example, bojati sę became a se teme ("to fear") and roditi sę became a se naște ("to be born"). [85]
Macedonian is an Eastern South Slavic language. It is part of the Indo-European language family, and is one of the Slavic languages, which are part of a larger Balto-Slavic branch. Spoken as a first language by around 1.6 million people, it serves as the official language of North Macedonia. Most speakers can be found in the country and its diaspora, with a smaller number of speakers throughout the transnational region of Macedonia. Macedonian is also a recognized minority language in parts of Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Romania, and Serbia and it is spoken by emigrant communities predominantly in Australia, Canada and the United States.
Romanian is the official and main language of Romania and Moldova. Romanian is part of the Eastern Romance sub-branch of Romance languages, a linguistic group that evolved from several dialects of Vulgar Latin which separated from the Western Romance languages in the course of the period from the 5th to the 8th centuries. To distinguish it within the Eastern Romance languages, in comparative linguistics it is called Daco-Romanian as opposed to its closest relatives, Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian, and Istro-Romanian. It is also spoken as a minority language by stable communities in the countries surrounding Romania, and by the large Romanian diaspora. In total, it is spoken by 25 million people as a first language.
The Slavic languages, also known as the Slavonic languages, are Indo-European languages spoken primarily by the Slavic peoples and their descendants. They are thought to descend from a proto-language called Proto-Slavic, spoken during the Early Middle Ages, which in turn is thought to have descended from the earlier Proto-Balto-Slavic language, linking the Slavic languages to the Baltic languages in a Balto-Slavic group within the Indo-European family.
Old Church Slavonic or Old Slavonic is the first Slavic literary language.
The Istro-Romanian language is an Eastern Romance language, spoken in a few villages and hamlets in the peninsula of Istria in Croatia, as well as in the diaspora of this people. It is sometimes abbreviated to IR.
Several theories, in great extent mutually exclusive, address the issue of the origin of the Romanians. The Romanian language descends from the Vulgar Latin dialects spoken in the Roman provinces north of the "Jireček Line" in Late Antiquity. The theory of Daco-Roman continuity argues that the Romanians are mainly descended from the Daco-Romans, a people developing through the cohabitation of the native Dacians and the Roman colonists in the province of Dacia Traiana north of the river Danube. The competing immigrationist theory states that the Romanians' ethnogenesis commenced in the provinces south of the river with Romanized local populations spreading through mountain refuges, both south to Greece and north through the Carpathian Mountains. Other theories state that the Romanized local populations were present over a wide area on both sides of the Danube and the river itself did not constitute an obstacle to permanent exchanges in both directions; according to the "admigration" theory, migrations from the Balkan Peninsula to the lands north of the Danube contributed to the survival of the Romance-speaking population in these territories.
The proposed substratal elements in Romanian are mostly lexical items. The process of determining if a word is from the substratum involves comparison to Latin, languages with which Romanian came into contact, or determining if it is an internal construct. If there are no matching results, a comparison to Albanian vocabulary, Thracian remnants or Proto-Indo-European reconstructed words is made.
Common Romanian, also known as Ancient Romanian, or Proto-Romanian, is a comparatively reconstructed Romance language evolved from Vulgar Latin and spoken by the ancestors of today's Romanians, Aromanians, Megleno-Romanians, Istro-Romanians and related Balkan Latin peoples (Vlachs) between the 6th or 7th century AD and the 10th or 11th centuries AD. The evidence for this can be found in the fact that Romanian, Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian, and Istro-Romanian share with each other their main language innovations comparative to Vulgar Latin on one hand, and distinctive from the other Romance languages on the other, according to Romanian linguist Marius Sala.
The Eastern Romance languages are a group of Romance languages. The group, also called the Balkan Romance or Daco-Romance languages, comprises the Romanian language (Daco-Romanian), the Aromanian language and two other related minor languages, Megleno-Romanian and Istro-Romanian.
Megleno-Romanian is an Eastern Romance language, similar to Aromanian. It is spoken by the Megleno-Romanians in a few villages in the Moglena region that spans the border between the Greek region of Macedonia and North Macedonia. It is also spoken by emigrants from these villages and their descendants in Romania, in Turkey by a small Muslim group, and in Serbia. It is considered an endangered language.
The lexis of the Romanian language, a Romance language, has changed over the centuries as the language evolved from Vulgar Latin, to Common Romanian, to medieval, modern and contemporary Romanian. A large proportion of present-day Romanian lexis is not inherited from Latin and in some semantic areas loanwords far outnumber inherited ones making Romanian an example of a language with a high degree of lexical permeability.
Proto-Albanian is the ancestral reconstructed language of Albanian, before the Gheg–Tosk dialectal diversification. Albanoid and other Paleo-Balkan languages had their formative core in the Balkans after the Indo-European migrations in the region. Whether descendants or sister languages of what was called Illyrian by classical sources, Albanian and Messapic, on the basis of shared features and innovations, are grouped together in a common branch in the current phylogenetic classification of the Indo-European language family. The precursor of Albanian can be considered a completely formed independent IE language since at least the first millennium BCE, with the beginning of the early Proto-Albanian phase.
The linguistic classification of the ancient Thracian language has long been a matter of contention and uncertainty, and there are widely varying hypotheses regarding its position among other Paleo-Balkan languages. It is not contested, however, that the Thracian languages were Indo-European languages which had acquired satem characteristics by the time they are attested.
The history of the Romanian language started in Roman provinces north of the Jireček Line in Classical antiquity. There are three main hypotheses around its exact territory: the autochthony thesis, the discontinuation thesis, and the "as-well-as" thesis that supports the language development on both sides of the Danube. Between the 6th and 8th centuries AD, following the accumulated tendencies inherited from the vernacular Latin and, to a much smaller degree, the influences from an unidentified substratum, and in the context of a lessened power of the Roman central authority, the language evolved into Common Romanian. This proto-language then came into close contact with the Slavic languages and subsequently divided into Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian, Istro-Romanian, and Daco-Romanian. Because of limited attestations between the 6th and 16th centuries, entire stages from its history are reconstructed by researchers, often with proposed relative chronologies and loose limits.
The Slavic first palatalization is a Proto-Slavic sound change that manifested as regressive palatalization of inherited Balto-Slavic velar consonants.
The re-latinization of Romanian is the reinforcement of the Romance features of the Romanian language that started in the 18th and 19th centuries. Romanian adopted a Latin-based alphabet to replace the Cyrillic script and borrowed many words from French as well as from Latin and Italian, in order to acquire the lexical tools necessary for modernization. This deliberate process coined words for recently introduced objects or concepts (neologisms), added Latinate synonyms for some Slavic and other loanwords, and strengthened some Romance syntactic features. Some linguistic researchers emphasize that the use of this term is inappropriate as it conflates the larger process of modernization of the language with the more extreme, and in the end unsuccessful, current of eliminating non-Latin influences, and, secondly, the term's lack of precision is susceptible to lead to confusion as the Latin character of the Romanian language had already been noticed since at least the 15th century.
The Albanian–Eastern Romance linguistic parallels are subject of historical and contact linguistic research applied to the Albanian and Eastern Romance languages. It has also been studied to understand the history of Albanian and Eastern Romance speakers. The common phonological, morphological and syntactical features of the two language families have been studied for more than a century. Both are part of the Balkan sprachbund but there are certain elements shared only by Albanian and Eastern Romance languages that descended from Common Romanian. Aside from Latin, and from shared Greek, Slavic and Turkish elements, other characteristics and words are attributed to the Palaeo-Balkan linguistic base. Similarities between Eastern Romance and Albanian are not limited to their common Balkan features and the assumed common lexical items: the two language families share calques and proverbs, and display analogous phonetic changes, some of the latter especially shared between Tosk Albanian and Common Romanian.
Old Romanian is the period of Romanian language from the 16th century until 1780. It continues the intermediary stage when the dialect continuum known as ‘Daco-Romanian’ developed from Common Romanian, and Modern Romanian - the period of Romanian language set in post-Enlightenment times.
Slavicisms or Slavisms are words and expressions borrowed or derived from Slavic languages.
Although the direction of language contact between Romanian and Slavic languages is overwhelmingly towards Romanian as well as its other Eastern Romance sister languages, there is evidence of lesser influence in the opposite direction. Romanian and Eastern Romance influence on Slavic languages is generally limited to neighbouring languages, and of those to the South Slavic languages more than the northern counterparts.
The Romance language Romanian has borrowed so many Slavonic words that scholars for a while believed it was a Slavonic language."
Stalin justified the creation of the Moldavian SSR by claiming that a distinct "Moldavian" language was an indicator that "Moldavians" were a separate nationality from the Romanians in Romania. In order to give greater credence to this claim, in 1940 Stalin imposed the Cyrillic alphabet on "Moldavian" to make it look more like Russian and less like Romanian; archaic Romanian words of Slavic origin were imposed on "Moldavian"; Russian loanwords and phrases were added to "Moldavian"; and a new theory was advanced that "Moldavian" was at least partially Slavic in origin. In 1949 Moldavian citizens were publicly reprimanded in a journal for daring to express themselves in literary Romanian. The Soviet government continued this type of behavior for decades. Proper names were subjected to Russianization (see Glossary) as well. Russian endings were added to purely Romanian names, and individuals were referred to in the Russian manner by using a patronymic (based on one's father's first name) together with a first name.
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