in all four Balkan Romance variants. 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. 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. 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". 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. 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. Wallachian writers started to advance the adoption of loanwords from Romance languages (especially from French and Italian) in the 19th century. Vocabulary Loanwords 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. The earliest Slavic loanwords which became part of the basic vocabulary are the most likely to have survived. For instance, prag ("threshold"), nevastă ("wife") and rai ("heaven") survived, but postelnic ("chamberlain") disappeared. 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. 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). About 80 loanwords contain the Proto-Slavic *TorT-syllable before it underwent radical changes during the formation of Slavic languages. 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. The Romanian world for hillock (măgură) was likely also borrowed from a reconstructed Proto-Slavic *măgula form. 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. The third phase of the adoption of Slavic loanwords started after the dissolution