in the development of Bulgarian and Macedonia: for example, Old Church Slavonic viděti ("to see") shortened into vidět in Middle Bulgarian which became vidě in Bulgarian. Linguists Jacques Byck and Ion Diaconescu maintain that the infinitive shortened without external influence during the development of Romanian. Alexandru Graur, Ivan Gălăbov and Alexandru Rosetti argue that South Slavic influence gave rise to this specific morphological change. 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. 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. Since other Romance languages have not preserved the Latin neuter gender, Graur, Nandriș, Mallinson and other linguists propose that the existence of the neuter in Romanian should most probably be attributed to Slavic influence. In contrast with them, Petrucci maintains that the Romanian tripartite gender system is the result of the internal development of the language. A couple of words inherited from Latin that have an active voice in Latin and 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"). References Sources Further reading Leschber, Corinna (2021). "Urslavische Spuren im Rumänischen" [Protoslavic lexical influences in the Romanian language]. In: JOURAVEL, Anna, MATHYS, Audrey (Eds.). Wort- und Formenvielfalt. Festschrift für Christoph Koch zum 80. Geburtstag. Frankfurt/M., Berlin, Bern u. a.: Lang, 207-218. Romanian language Language contact History of the Romanian language Balkan sprachbund