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> Romanian vocabulary likewise includes words of an unclear pre-Roman substrate language That would be the Dacian language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dacia

> Romanian vocabulary likewise includes words of an unclear pre-Roman substrate language That would be the Dacian language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dacian_language?useskin=vector https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dacian_language?useskin=vector

OfSanguineFire 3y ago
No, the idea that a certain layer of Romanian words comes from Dacian is superseded. It only hangs on due to outdated references or a certain strand of Romanian nationalism. In the last 30 years or so, as the reconstruction of earlier stages of Albanian has made great advances, scholars have found that Romanian borrowed words specifically from the ancestor of Albanian, not from some Dacian language possibly related to Albanian. The Romanian and Albanian languages both spread to their present areas from the Central Balkans, and the linguistic ancestors of Romanian speakers included Albanian speakers who switched to Latin and carried over some of their vocabulary, while Albanian speakers are descended from those who never made that switch. There are still few popular-science books representing this state of the art, but particularly curious readers can look, for example, to the publications of Matzinger and Schumacher.
- VitruviusBen 3y ago
  Albanian is a Paleo-Balkanic language which descends from a language closely related to the ancient Illyrian language(s) as Albanians descend from a mountainous pastoralist people with contact to Daco-Thracians and their romanized descendants - the early Romanians. There is no certain way to say (with a straight face or without being biased yourself) that Dacians words are not present in the Romanian language.
  - OfSanguineFire 3y ago
    Again, what you are saying represents a view that is decades superseded now and only hangs on in out-of-date references. The old idea that Albanian is closely related to ancient Illyrian has been criticized due to the fact that Illyrian evidence shows markedly different reflexes for some Indo-European phonemes than Albanian (see Matzinger’s 2008 paper “Die Albaner als Nachkommen der Illyrer aus der Sicht der historischen Sprachwissenschaft”). The same has been shown for Thracian with regard to Albanian and so “Daco-Thracian” is not a substantiated relative. The ancient Balkans were a place large enough for multiple Indo-European languages. I work in the field of historical linguistics myself (albeit not in Balkan linguistics but an adjacent set of languages, but I keep up with that literature too and I am acquainted with the main scholars currently working therein), so what I am posting is informed and, were there interest, I could cite further publications.
    - adrian_b 3y ago
      What is known for sure is only that Albanian and Romanian share many words of unknown origin and that those words have been borrowed between the ancestors of the two languages at an early stage, e.g. before rhotacism has changed them. However in most cases it is impossible to determine which was the direction of borrowing and there is no evidence to relate them with any of the languages named by ancient historians, because too little has been preserved of those. Also, there is very little evidence, perhaps none, that the Thracian language and the Dacian were closely related languages. The toponyms that are assumed to come from these two languages are not similar. The supposition that they are closely related is based almost only on the claim of Herodotus that the latter were a tribe belonging to the former, but that claim might have been based only on similarities in clothes and weapons, even without related languages.
      - OfSanguineFire 3y ago
        Again, recent work has established the direction of borrowing for many items as Albanian > Romanian due to secure Indo-European etymologies for some of the Albanian material. And for certain other items, recently it has been proposed that the direction is dialectal Latin > Albanian, undercutting any claim to Dacian origins. You are right that little is preserved of certain ancient Balkans languages, but there is enough preserved in toponymy and onomastics in order to establish affiliations based on the reflexes of the PIE velar series and the vocalism. That is what, in the last 30 years or so of scholarship, has excluded Illyrian and Thracian from playing any role in the Albanian–Romanian lexical isoglosses.
        adrian_b 3y ago
        Matzinger himself provides a single example of a word for which there is no doubt that the direction of borrowing was from Proto-Albanian to Romanian ("thark"). For other examples, he sends the reader to a work published by Stefan Schumacher in 2009, which I neither have nor can find online. Perhaps you know the title or some link toward any of the recent work that you have mentioned, about these words shared by Albanian and Romanian. While for the shared words of non-Latin origin it may be that most have been borrowed from Proto-Albanian to Proto-Romanian, the shared words of Latin origin may have been very well borrowed from Proto-Romanian to Proto-Albanian. We cannot know if there has been any descendence relationship between the speakers of Latin from whom the speakers of Proto-Albanian have borrowed words and the current speakers of Romanian, but we also cannot know whether the contrary is true.
- xdennis 3y ago
  > The Romanian and Albanian languages both spread to their present areas from the Central Balkans For those who don't get the subtext, people here are having a political debate disguised as a linguistic/historical debate. OfSanguineFire is saying Romanians originate in the south and migrated to Romania (known as the "Immigrationist theory") and others are saying Romanians originate from Dacians (the Daco-Roman continuity theory). The first theory is the favorite of Hungarian nationalists because it places them in Romania before Romanians.
  - OfSanguineFire 3y ago
    Some people may be having a political debate, but neither myself nor most Indo-Europeanists have any dog in this fight, as we are not from any of the countries involved in the dispute. That advances in the study of the ancient Balkan languages and the reconstruction of earlier stages of Albanian supports what you term the “Immigrationist theory”, is a mere accident and certainly not indicative of sympathies with one party to the Hungarians-versus-Romanians feud.
    - dontlaugh 3y ago
      And yet you espouse one of the theories, despite the historical and linguistic evidence supporting the other at least slightly more. Ultimately there’s not enough evidence to say with certainty either way. Insisting on one particular option, especially the less likely one, is suspicious. I’m Romanian fwiw.
    - adrian_b 3y ago
      While you have correctly pointed out that there is no evidence for any word that has been preserved from Dacian into Romanian or into Albanian or into any other language, after that you have been guilty yourself of enunciating an unsubstantiated hypothesis by writing: "The Romanian and Albanian languages both spread to their present areas from the Central Balkans". There is no evidence about such a "spreading", and especially no linguistic evidence. We know that Proto-Albanian and Proto-Romanian have been in contact, but that gives no information about the extent of the area inhabited by speakers of Proto-Romanian in the opposite direction. The contact has existed regardless whether the area inhabited by speakers of Proto-Romanian has extended to the North of the Danube or not. Likewise, even if we knew for sure that no Dacian word has been preserved in Romanian, that would give absolutely no information either pro or contra the immigration theory, because that has nothing to do with the Dacians, but it is about whether the Roman citizens of Dacia have continued to inhabit Dacia permanently, or not. Therefore all known linguistic data fails to provide any kind of evidence either in favor or against the immigration theory, so such a theory should not be mentioned in a linguistic discussion, unless some new evidence is discovered. While there exists no direct evidence either in favor or against the immigration theory, this theory is pretty much unbelievable, because it requires for Dacia to have been depopulated. For the lowlands at the North of Danube it is plausible that they might have been seriously depopulated, especially during several centuries when many invasions have passed through them. On the other hand, it is completely implausible that the highlands of the Carpathian mountains have ever been depopulated. Those mountains offered exceptionally good life conditions, especially for people whose main activity was raising sheep. With the exception of a very well organized state, like the Roman Empire, no distant authority could have extended its influence into the mountains, so after the Roman Empire abandoned Dacia and there no longer was any central administration, the locals were left to themselves but they had no incentive whatsoever to abandon their good lands. There is absolutely no chance that any invasion force passing through the lowlands would have risked to lose time and supplies and people by going up into the mountains in attempts to chase some locals who did not have anything valuable enough to be worth the effort. So for me at least, such a theory based on the premise that some beautiful mountains with everything needed by humans for a decent life and well protected against outside intruders could at any time in history remain empty, waiting for the next passer-by to settle there, is absolutely ridiculous. As said before, this has nothing to do with linguistics, so it should not be mentioned there without a good reason.
- paganel 3y ago
  > No, the idea that a certain layer of Romanian words comes from Dacian is superseded. As a Romanian that idea is new to me, and I've just gone through half of this book [1] written by two quite decent Romanian historians about the Balkans during the Slav migrations (one of those authors, Florin Curta, is quite well knonwn) > The Romanian and Albanian languages both spread to their present areas from the Central Balkans, Again, as a Romanian this is highly, highly debatable and controversial. I personally think that there was some migration, but saying, point blank, that Romanian spread from "areas from the Central Balkans", which means South of the Danube, is most definitely not an established historical fact. [1] https://www.cetateadescaun.ro/produs/slavii-in-perioada-migratiilor/ https://www.cetateadescaun.ro/produs/slavii-in-perioada-migr...

OfSanguineFire 3y ago

No, the idea that a certain layer of Romanian words comes from Dacian is superseded. It only hangs on due to outdated references or a certain strand of Romanian nationalism. In the last 30 years or so, as the reconstruction of earlier stages of Albanian has made great advances, scholars have found that Romanian borrowed words specifically from the ancestor of Albanian, not from some Dacian language possibly related to Albanian. The Romanian and Albanian languages both spread to their present areas from the Central Balkans, and the linguistic ancestors of Romanian speakers included Albanian speakers who switched to Latin and carried over some of their vocabulary, while Albanian speakers are descended from those who never made that switch. There are still few popular-science books representing this state of the art, but particularly curious readers can look, for example, to the publications of Matzinger and Schumacher.

VitruviusBen 3y ago
Albanian is a Paleo-Balkanic language which descends from a language closely related to the ancient Illyrian language(s) as Albanians descend from a mountainous pastoralist people with contact to Daco-Thracians and their romanized descendants - the early Romanians. There is no certain way to say (with a straight face or without being biased yourself) that Dacians words are not present in the Romanian language.
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago
  Again, what you are saying represents a view that is decades superseded now and only hangs on in out-of-date references. The old idea that Albanian is closely related to ancient Illyrian has been criticized due to the fact that Illyrian evidence shows markedly different reflexes for some Indo-European phonemes than Albanian (see Matzinger’s 2008 paper “Die Albaner als Nachkommen der Illyrer aus der Sicht der historischen Sprachwissenschaft”). The same has been shown for Thracian with regard to Albanian and so “Daco-Thracian” is not a substantiated relative. The ancient Balkans were a place large enough for multiple Indo-European languages. I work in the field of historical linguistics myself (albeit not in Balkan linguistics but an adjacent set of languages, but I keep up with that literature too and I am acquainted with the main scholars currently working therein), so what I am posting is informed and, were there interest, I could cite further publications.
  - adrian_b 3y ago
    What is known for sure is only that Albanian and Romanian share many words of unknown origin and that those words have been borrowed between the ancestors of the two languages at an early stage, e.g. before rhotacism has changed them. However in most cases it is impossible to determine which was the direction of borrowing and there is no evidence to relate them with any of the languages named by ancient historians, because too little has been preserved of those. Also, there is very little evidence, perhaps none, that the Thracian language and the Dacian were closely related languages. The toponyms that are assumed to come from these two languages are not similar. The supposition that they are closely related is based almost only on the claim of Herodotus that the latter were a tribe belonging to the former, but that claim might have been based only on similarities in clothes and weapons, even without related languages.
    - OfSanguineFire 3y ago
      Again, recent work has established the direction of borrowing for many items as Albanian > Romanian due to secure Indo-European etymologies for some of the Albanian material. And for certain other items, recently it has been proposed that the direction is dialectal Latin > Albanian, undercutting any claim to Dacian origins. You are right that little is preserved of certain ancient Balkans languages, but there is enough preserved in toponymy and onomastics in order to establish affiliations based on the reflexes of the PIE velar series and the vocalism. That is what, in the last 30 years or so of scholarship, has excluded Illyrian and Thracian from playing any role in the Albanian–Romanian lexical isoglosses.
      - adrian_b 3y ago
        Matzinger himself provides a single example of a word for which there is no doubt that the direction of borrowing was from Proto-Albanian to Romanian ("thark"). For other examples, he sends the reader to a work published by Stefan Schumacher in 2009, which I neither have nor can find online. Perhaps you know the title or some link toward any of the recent work that you have mentioned, about these words shared by Albanian and Romanian. While for the shared words of non-Latin origin it may be that most have been borrowed from Proto-Albanian to Proto-Romanian, the shared words of Latin origin may have been very well borrowed from Proto-Romanian to Proto-Albanian. We cannot know if there has been any descendence relationship between the speakers of Latin from whom the speakers of Proto-Albanian have borrowed words and the current speakers of Romanian, but we also cannot know whether the contrary is true.
xdennis 3y ago
> The Romanian and Albanian languages both spread to their present areas from the Central Balkans For those who don't get the subtext, people here are having a political debate disguised as a linguistic/historical debate. OfSanguineFire is saying Romanians originate in the south and migrated to Romania (known as the "Immigrationist theory") and others are saying Romanians originate from Dacians (the Daco-Roman continuity theory). The first theory is the favorite of Hungarian nationalists because it places them in Romania before Romanians.
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago
  Some people may be having a political debate, but neither myself nor most Indo-Europeanists have any dog in this fight, as we are not from any of the countries involved in the dispute. That advances in the study of the ancient Balkan languages and the reconstruction of earlier stages of Albanian supports what you term the “Immigrationist theory”, is a mere accident and certainly not indicative of sympathies with one party to the Hungarians-versus-Romanians feud.
  - dontlaugh 3y ago
    And yet you espouse one of the theories, despite the historical and linguistic evidence supporting the other at least slightly more. Ultimately there’s not enough evidence to say with certainty either way. Insisting on one particular option, especially the less likely one, is suspicious. I’m Romanian fwiw.
  - adrian_b 3y ago
    While you have correctly pointed out that there is no evidence for any word that has been preserved from Dacian into Romanian or into Albanian or into any other language, after that you have been guilty yourself of enunciating an unsubstantiated hypothesis by writing: "The Romanian and Albanian languages both spread to their present areas from the Central Balkans". There is no evidence about such a "spreading", and especially no linguistic evidence. We know that Proto-Albanian and Proto-Romanian have been in contact, but that gives no information about the extent of the area inhabited by speakers of Proto-Romanian in the opposite direction. The contact has existed regardless whether the area inhabited by speakers of Proto-Romanian has extended to the North of the Danube or not. Likewise, even if we knew for sure that no Dacian word has been preserved in Romanian, that would give absolutely no information either pro or contra the immigration theory, because that has nothing to do with the Dacians, but it is about whether the Roman citizens of Dacia have continued to inhabit Dacia permanently, or not. Therefore all known linguistic data fails to provide any kind of evidence either in favor or against the immigration theory, so such a theory should not be mentioned in a linguistic discussion, unless some new evidence is discovered. While there exists no direct evidence either in favor or against the immigration theory, this theory is pretty much unbelievable, because it requires for Dacia to have been depopulated. For the lowlands at the North of Danube it is plausible that they might have been seriously depopulated, especially during several centuries when many invasions have passed through them. On the other hand, it is completely implausible that the highlands of the Carpathian mountains have ever been depopulated. Those mountains offered exceptionally good life conditions, especially for people whose main activity was raising sheep. With the exception of a very well organized state, like the Roman Empire, no distant authority could have extended its influence into the mountains, so after the Roman Empire abandoned Dacia and there no longer was any central administration, the locals were left to themselves but they had no incentive whatsoever to abandon their good lands. There is absolutely no chance that any invasion force passing through the lowlands would have risked to lose time and supplies and people by going up into the mountains in attempts to chase some locals who did not have anything valuable enough to be worth the effort. So for me at least, such a theory based on the premise that some beautiful mountains with everything needed by humans for a decent life and well protected against outside intruders could at any time in history remain empty, waiting for the next passer-by to settle there, is absolutely ridiculous. As said before, this has nothing to do with linguistics, so it should not be mentioned there without a good reason.
paganel 3y ago
> No, the idea that a certain layer of Romanian words comes from Dacian is superseded. As a Romanian that idea is new to me, and I've just gone through half of this book [1] written by two quite decent Romanian historians about the Balkans during the Slav migrations (one of those authors, Florin Curta, is quite well knonwn) > The Romanian and Albanian languages both spread to their present areas from the Central Balkans, Again, as a Romanian this is highly, highly debatable and controversial. I personally think that there was some migration, but saying, point blank, that Romanian spread from "areas from the Central Balkans", which means South of the Danube, is most definitely not an established historical fact. [1] https://www.cetateadescaun.ro/produs/slavii-in-perioada-migratiilor/ https://www.cetateadescaun.ro/produs/slavii-in-perioada-migr...