Through language the Rumanian culture has produced a system of categories that lay emphasis on and defines more precisely the relations of alliance than those of collaterality, and, in turn, the relations of collaterality than those of filiation, a system very different indeed from the clearly patrilinear system that prevailed in Rome in the times of Trajan and the Dacic wars. As if relations between affines by marriage were more important than those between cousins, relations between oncle and nephew more important than those between grand-father and grandson. As if in the ascent line it were sufficient to be related to the ancestors, no matter through which parent. Such a system would bear marks of a past society and nothing else according to the ideologists of the then prevalent communist regime. (...) But is it not rather one of these original systems of Middle and northern Europe that have resisted patrilinearity and a too constraining exogamy imposed by Rome and the Church ? Are there not sufficiently strong reasons in present Rumanian society to explain the great stability of such a categorization, while institutions never stop changing ?