The Almost Romance Languages
dannybate.com
dannybate.com
"Preservation of the plosive sounds /k/ and /ɡ/ before front vowels /e/ and /i/; for example, centum ..."
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palatalization_(sound_change)
Also as a French walking in the street and saying Tuesday and choose day loud in the street, I got a few curious stares :)
In Italian the written letters ce and ci are pronounced with a soft c.
There are plenty of words with a hard c (a k) followed by an e or an i. Italian alphabet doesn't have a k character so those sounds are written as che and chi. That is, in Italian ch is the k sound. Most (all?) of the other languages of the area use ch for a soft c.
To have the hard C in Italian an H needs to be added, CHE or CHI (while in Spanish that leads to something more like tch).
Keep in mind that Celtic and Latin are both Indo-European languages that split off about 4kya, so 1.5kya-2kya they were a lot closer that Romance languages and Celtic are today, and so what's more likely to have happened is that the Celtic spoken by the Gauls blended with the Latin spoken by the Romans. Germanic and Slavic languages are also Indo-European, so this dynamic worked in much of Europe over the past 2ky.
The point is that the other languages, where they were Indo-European, did not get "ousted", rather they blended with Latin.
Basque, Finnish, Hungarian -- these are not Indo-European, and those haven't Romanized, which I think helps my thesis :)
I also have the impression that the Romans viewed the Celts as more closely related to them both linguistically and culturally than almost any other group. Which is possibly one of the reasons why Gaul adopted Latin so rapidly.
In Danish the word 'døgn' indicates a day and a night (24 hours). I don't know if these words have a shared origin, but it sounds plausible (not a scientist).
If you are curious about where words come from, the English-language Wiktionary often has etymologies in its entries for words, and for the Nordic languages they are usually pretty up-to-date in terms of the scholarly state of the art.
Origin of Latin “dies” is also from PIE but a different word: dyews: (sky, heaven).
Interesting Latin dies (day) and deus (deity) are very much related since both come from dyews.
Yes, definitely, because the extremely heavy Latin impact on the Albanian lexicon is not found in the other Balkan Sprachbund languages Serbian–Macedonian–Bulgarian–Greek.
Moreover, the Balkan Sprachbund is generally defined through shared morphological and syntactic features, not lexicon. And those features spread through the region up to centuries after the Latin > Albanian lexical influence – the Slavic languages in the Sprachbund only arrived in the mid-first-millennium AD.
I’m Romanian myself, and the first time when I heard someone speak Albanian was as a teenager, when zapping through the satellite TV channels and landing on a Albanian news segment.
I was very intrigued because it felt that the lady presenting the news spoke a language that I should have understood, and yet I didn’t, not one word.
Later on I found out that there’s a name for that, i.e. for languages that have very similar intonation, but I forgot which one was exactly. Granted, that similarity between how Romanian and Albanian sound is most likely caused by our common Thracian/Dacian substrate.
As I said elsewhere in this thread, Thracian has been conclusively shown to represent a different branch of Indo-European than Albanian, so the idea of “Thracian/Dacian” playing a role in similarities between Albanian and Romanian is very out of date.
Has it?
And to the intonation thing, maybe I worded it wrong, as English is obviously not my primary language, but I'd say each and every language (or the great majority of them, anyway) have a distinct way of pronouncing their words. For example Italian, which I managed to learn just by watching TV as a kid, has definitely a different intonation compared to how we, Romanians, speak, even though they're both Romance languages and pretty close (closer than Romanian is to French, for example).
Close to us, I find that both Serbs and Bulgarians have different intonation compared to Romanian.
That doesn't seem "vast" to me?
I don't think anyone ever called Spanish almost Semitic.
Taza, guitarra, almohada, albañil, algebra, elíxir, tamarindo, fulano, alfombra, acimut, cenit, café, azúcar, naranja, azar, ajedrez, arsenal, aceite, alcohol, arroba, azulejo, alberca, cero, etc.
And also several toponyms, the most famous probably being Andalucía.
People who speak very unrelated languages find much easier to learn Italian, Spanish or French after they learn English. Not so with e.g. Arabic
That's one of my problems with this article. Even if the author does briefly admit its facetiousness, a lot of readers will come away thinking that language families are about family resemblances, when they're really a matter of genealogy, pure and simple.
That, and it comes across sort of like a Latinist's attempt to prove all roads lead to Rome, giving short shrift to Albanian (which occupies its own branch of the Indo-European family, with its own characteristics) and to English, which among other things is drastically analytic in comparison with the rest of the I-E languages. (I can't comment on the case of Welsh.)
> English is one good candidate for this elite club. Thanks primarily to the Normans, English has been inundated with words of a Latinate origin. That being said, 1066 was some time after the disintegration of the Roman Empire in the west, and it wasn’t Latin that the invaders were speaking. Also, frankly, I’ve written enough about English.
E.g. English imported another ~10k or more Latin words during the English Renaissance. Including the word "lexicon".
Then another wave of Latin influence via scientific discovery in the 17th and 18th centuries creating a need for new terms while Latin and Greek conferred greater cachet (from French to Scottish English around 1630) / prestige (French, from Latin) / status (Latin) over creating new "native" words. Of course helped by them being common languages for scientists to have a certain familiarity with, and sometimes fluency in.
It's particularly fascinating when you find relatively closely related words imported in different waves or from different sources (like cachet, prestige, status), whether because of nuances or perhaps differences in perceived status, or sometimes because the meaning has diverged from the original borrowing.
[Not a linguist by any means, but speak multiple Germanic and Romance languages so the differences and similarities always fascinate me and English still seems like a horrific mishmash, so I spend a disproportionate amount of time learning enough about etymology to make stupid mistakes]
Edit: I'm referring to his Great Courses series. I've just looked them up and the list prices are silly. I don't know if that's still an option, but I got the audio versions on Audible for very little money.
Today, English is global language with an astonishing amount of variation and learning to communicate in English is as important as learning to understand it in all its glorious forms. It places the burden back on the receiver to learn the local mode rather than an Imperial style self-assuming greatness seeking to subdue conquered peoples.
Also, if you ever need chill content while you fall asleep, they have many moderately-interesting classes from professors with calm voices and detailed content...
1. http://markabley.com/books-2/spoken-here-2/ 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subject–verb–object_word_order
Even before the Great Schism of 1054, Greek had been the language used to spread Christianity across southern and eastern Europe, i.e. across the Slavs. Even though the bible was always translated into a local language, Greek retained its prominence in the local education, hence the historical dominance (as opposed to Latin which didn't come into light until after the Renaissance and the spread of the scientific thought all over Europe).
(That model may be too simple, but it got me through school at least, filling many gaps in my French vocabulary with "whatever the English say they isn't almost the same as in German")
I think it's interesting that among the major modern language groups in Europe -- Romance, Germanic, Slavic -- the kinds of typical alcohol are also highly associated with those languages -- grapes (wine), grain (beer), potato (distilled) -- and their alignment with north-south/east-west differences.
That would be the Dacian language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dacian_language?useskin=vector
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> The shared words of Latin origin may have been very well borrowed from Proto-Romanian to Proto-Albanian.
Yes, certainly. But if those Proto-Romanian words can be shown to represent dialectal Latin features that came to the Balkans from outside, then there is no case for a Dacian origin for them. Dan Ungureanu has argued this recently for a number of items, and a few of my colleagues working with these languages think this represents a great contribution.
Unfortunately, Dacian is likely to remain one of the least known ancient languages. While for Thracian there has been some small recent progress and it seems that it might have been more closely related to Phrygian and Greek than previously believed, for Dacian it is unlikely that there will be any future discovery of inscriptions that could provide extra information.
A paper / theory being recent doesn't magically make it true or generally accepted.
> I work in the field of historical linguistics myself (...) so what I am posting is informed
This is a clear "appeal to authority fallacy".
But in all Matzinger's work he doesn't actually claim that Dacian words aren't to be found in Romanian language, is it?
Without proofs of what an extinct language actually sounded like, saying that there isn't any trace of it in any other language, and backing this up by making an appeal to authority is a biased view from my pov.
On HN people usually defer to experts in the sciences, as it is about taking the word of someone with the required training in the field and familiarity with the literature. As I said, I would be happy to cite lots of publications, but on a general forum like this it’s not clear that other posters have the time and interest in reading it all, plus the necessary background for it – this field usually involves 6–10 years of initial university study, after all.
> But in all Matzinger's work he doesn't actually claim that Dacian words aren't to be found in Romanian language, is it?
Matzinger’s view (which generally represents the consensus now inside the field) is indeed that that layer of the Romanian vocabulary can be explained through Albanian without any need to conjecture about Dacian influence.
> Without proofs of what an extinct language actually sounded like
The respective phoneme inventories of Proto-Albanian, Vulgar Latin, and Thracian and Illyrian are well established. Why did you think that proof was lacking?
I doubt that it has any relationship with any of the old Albanian or Romanian words, but its relationships are mostly unknown, so nothing certain can be said about it.
There has been a theory that Dacian might have been more closely related to the Baltic languages, which could have been possible based on its position in space and time.
There is not enough evidence to determine if there is any truth in this hypothesis, but as an unscientific impression there is a certain resemblance between the few known Dacian toponyms and personal names with Baltic names.
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.
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.
The scenario that Romanian arrived from across the Danube does not require that the Romanian Carpathians were completely depopulated. Rather, it is possible that the region’s inhabitants first switched to Slavic – this is supported by a great deal of toponymic evidence – and then later both language shift and the arrival of other populations resulted in the extinction of the Transylvanian and Oltenian dialects of Common Slavonic in favor of Romanian and Hungarian instead.
Then, the contemporary view of the relationship between Romanian and Aromanian is not that they were mere sister dialects of Latin but split up at a much later date – they are too similar for an early split, and it appears that their first layer of Slavic loans is identical, so that means a split after the 6th century CE. The scenario that Romanian nationalists support requires believing that Aromanian results from Romanian speakers from Dacia migrating well to the southwest. That both Romanian and Aromanian came from the Central Balkans instead is viewed as vastly more likely, especially in the light of the advances in the reconstruction of early Albanian (because an array of evidence puts early Albanian in the Central Balkans, not Dacia).
> so after the Roman Empire abandoned Dacia and there no longer was any central administration, the locals were left to themselves
While I know that the story of their ancestors “left to themselves” after Rome withdrew from Dacia persists in Romanian pop culture, it never fit well with the facts. Romanian words like biserica ‘church’ suggest that Romanian’s Latin ancestor remained in contact with the rest of the Mediterranean world for a long time, because only after Constantine in the 4th century were basilica buildings used as Christian churches. Again, this would be easily explainable by an origin in the Central Balkans where those cultural contacts persisted.
There is no doubt that when the Slavs have passed through the former Dacia province a part of them have stopped and settled there while the others have continued their journey to the South of the Danube. This explains the Slavic toponyms and the many Slavic loanwords into Romanian.
In your variant, the newly settled Slavs have been much more numerous than the Proto-Romanians, so they eventually assimilated the latter.
But then, several centuries later, there was a miraculous population explosion of the speakers of Proto-Romanian at the South of the Danube (even if in reality it is much more likely that their number was dwindling, by being assimilated by the Slavs that were more numerous in the South) and this great number of Proto-Romanians created out of nothing gathered their belongings and moved at the North of the Danube, where they created new settlements among the Slavs, and this time, unlike a few centuries ago, the number of Proto-Romanians was much greater than that of the Slavs, so the assimilation proceeded in reverse direction, restoring a Romance language as the main language of the land.
While this variant does not need the unbelievable depopulation hypothesis, it requires an unbelievable hypothesis about huge oscillations it the number of Proto-Romanians, for which there exists no explanation and no evidence.
I hardly believe that anyone can say with a straight face that this hypothesis is more plausible than the hypothesis conforming to Occam's razor, i.e. that the Slavs have settled both at the North and at the South of the Danube, but more of them have settled at the South, which was the endpoint of their journey (stopped by the Eastern Roman Empire), while the fewer that have settled at the North were early quitters, who did not want to wait in the hope of finding better lands.
In both places the Slavs have found Proto-Romanians, but eventually in the South most Proto-Romanians have been assimilated by the Slavs, while in the North the reverse happened.
This hypothesis does not include any implausible element, while the other 2 variants need either a depopulation or huge unmotivated demographic oscillations, which both are phenomena never observed in history anywhere else and for each of them there is no evidence.
Words like "basilica" have been obviously brought by missionaries coming from the Eastern Roman Empire, who spread the Christian Faith, and they do not provide any information about the location where this happened.
In general, I don’t see the point to debate further, because debate is not something that occurs on general-public internet fora like this. It is something that occurs in the appropriate scholarly venues. My original post up above aimed to emphasize that the contemporary consensus within linguistics – though it is only very slowly trickling into popular-science publications – does not see a role for “Dacian” in the Albanian–Romanian lexical isoglosses, and that has some important consequences for the reconstruction of Balkan linguistic history. That emerging consensus exists regardless of what you or I write here.
And since you are a representative of one of the peoples involved in a political squabble, it might be best for you to sit this out: in general in linguistics, it is often people from outside a region that do the best work on that region’s linguistic history, since they have no dog in the regional ethnic battles.
I also agree that this is not the place for such a debate, so I will not post any other comment.
I completely disagree with your claim that this is a political debate. I have not said a single word about anything outside linguistics before you have stepped outside linguistics by presenting the hypothesis that the Romanians have come into Romania from the South of the Danube as being a certain fact. And no, even when a few specialists agree with the same hypothesis, that is not a consensus, especially when the evidence for it is lacking.
What you have mentioned that Aromanian is very close to Romanian, so they must have separated very recently, is a glottochronological kind of argument that may make a hypothesis more plausible, but which can never prove anything with any certainty.
The distance between two sister languages usually increases in time, but not necessarily at an uniform rate. Two languages that become completely isolated may become reciprocally unintelligible after a century, but when there is a continuous contact between them, e.g. due to close commercial connections, they may remain little differentiated after hundreds of years, while having a parallel evolution that makes both of them very different from their parent language.
Much stronger arguments would be needed to support such a weird supposition like a population explosion in the South-Danubian Proto-Romanians that would push them over the Danube in sufficient numbers to occupy the entire much larger North-Danubian area and assimilate all the Slavs who supposedly had become dominant there.
You are right that which language assimilates another is not frequently determined by the number of speakers, even if in the cases when none of the languages is supported by any state authority and when there is no military or cultural dominance of one over the other, there remains not much that can determine the direction of assimilation besides the numbers of speakers.
However that is irrelevant for my argument that such a reversal of the direction of assimilation without any known reason is extremely improbable. Supposing that the Slavs had already assimilated the Romance speakers in the North and knowing for sure from later history that they were on the path of assimilating most of the Romance speakers from the South, what extraordinary events could reverse this and transform a group from the South that could have been only small and without any warrior abilities into a large population dominant over the very much larger Northern territory, despite its supposedly now Slavic population?
Even if for unknown reasons small numbers of South-Danubian Romance speakers would have been able to convert large numbers of North-Danubian Slavic speakers, it would still have been necessary for the South-Danubian Romance speakers to be able to provide an incredibly large number of emigrants only to be able to reach the entire North-Danubian territory, to be in proximity of all of its supposedly Slavic population.
This has nothing to do with politics, because nowadays it does not matter by which means Romanians have arrived in Romania, or the Americans in USA and so on.
Nevertheless, when a historical theory is illogical and it appears to have been conceived by some kind of armchair theoretician, who has never looked on a map, to see the scale of the things implied by their suppositions, e.g. how many people would be needed to occupy a territory densely enough to eventually dominate the former occupants, where could they have come from, and so on, it does not matter if they claim to be in consensus with their bros, such a theory must be challenged.
[1] https://www.cetateadescaun.ro/produs/slavii-in-perioada-migr...
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.
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-migr...