Grigore Nandris writes that the Romanian vocabulary suggests that the Romanians' ancestors were "reduced to a pastoral life in the mountains and to agricultural pursuits in the foothills of their pasture lands" following the collapse of the Roman rule. A great number of Romanian words of uncertain origin are related to animal husbandry: "baci" ("chief shepherd"), "balegă" ("dung"), and "brânză" ("cheese"), for instance, belong to this group. Many words related to a more settled form of animal husbandry were borrowed from Slavic, including "coteţ" ("poultry house"), "grajd" ("stable"), and "stână" ("fenced pasture"). Romanian has preserved Latin terms for agriculture and the Latin names of certain crops, but a significant part of its agricultural lexis originates from a Slavic-speaking population. The first group includes "a ara" ("to plough"), "a semăna" ("to sow"), "a culege" ("to harvest"), "a secera" ("to reap"), "grâu" ("wheat"), "in" ("flax"), and "furcă" ("pitchfork"), while "a croi" ("to cut out"), "a plivi" ("to weed"), "brazdă" ("furrow"), "cobilă" ("plow line"), "coasă" ("scythe"), "lopată" ("shovel") and many others are Slavic loanwords.