[HN Gopher] The Almost Romance Languages
___________________________________________________________________
The Almost Romance Languages
Author : sokols
Score : 123 points
Date : 2023-06-21 08:24 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (dannybate.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (dannybate.com)
| xhevahir wrote:
| These sound like examples of Sprachbunder, not some category of
| "almost-" X languages. Does the lexicon of Albanian really owe as
| much to Latin as it does to its position within the Balkan
| Sprachbund? Not to mention, does a table of related words really
| tell indicate a profound similarity between these languages? If
| Albanian and Latin are so much alike, then where, for example,
| are Latin's optative or admirative moods?
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| > Does the lexicon of Albanian really owe as much to Latin as
| it does to its position within the Balkan Sprachbund?
|
| 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.
| paganel wrote:
| Also, the way Albanian is spoken, the intonation, the way the
| words come out of one's mouth is very, very similar to
| Romanian, or at least to the Romanian dialect spoken in
| Southern Romania, between the Danube and the Carpathians.
|
| 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.
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| There is no one Albanian intonation. If you think that the
| standard pronunciation used on Albanian television sounds
| like Romanian, or like Oltenian-dialect Romanian, then OK.
| But in general the Albanian language is extremely fractured
| dialectally - it is quite common in the region to go over a
| mountain pass and find that the people on that side speak
| markedly different, yet it is a distance of only a few km.
| I personally see very little in common in intonation
| between an Albanian speaker from, say, Gjirokaster and one
| from Kukes or Prishtina, and I suspect you might agree too
| if you checked out representatives of all these varieties
| on YouTube.
|
| 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.
| paganel wrote:
| > Thracian has been conclusively shown to represent a
| different branch of Indo-European than Albanian,
|
| 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.
| _dain_ wrote:
| _> The lexical contribution of Latin to Albanian is simply vast;
| one previous estimate for the total today is around 600 words,
| another around 800 (Gramelova 2013: 101)._
|
| That doesn't seem "vast" to me?
| urubu wrote:
| For comparison: Spanish has around 4000 words of Arabic origin.
|
| I don't think anyone ever called Spanish almost Semitic.
| as_bntd wrote:
| It is true that no one would call it almost Semitic, but some
| _very_ common words are of arabic origin.
|
| Taza, guitarra, almohada, albanil, algebra, elixir,
| tamarindo, fulano, alfombra, acimut, cenit, cafe, azucar,
| naranja, azar, ajedrez, arsenal, aceite, alcohol, arroba,
| azulejo, alberca, cero, etc.
|
| And also several toponyms, the most famous probably being
| Andalucia.
| drycobbler wrote:
| Andalucia to name the geography is Arabic-speakers' legacy,
| but as a term for a people, it can be traced further back
| to a Germanic root.
| jefftk wrote:
| Several of the words you list are also English words:
| guitar, algebra, elixir, tamarind, cafe, orange, arsenal,
| alcohol. When talking about English origins do we count
| those for Spanish or Arabic? ;)
| imagainstit wrote:
| Only guitar in that list comes to English from a Spanish
| etymology, the others come from Arabic via medieval
| Latin, French and Italian, not Spanish.
| mike_hock wrote:
| azimuth, zenith
| AuBon320 wrote:
| [dead]
| sharikous wrote:
| Well I would put English in this category too, even if it has a
| much more recent and convoluted history.
|
| 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
| schuyler2d wrote:
| He said it himself:
|
| > 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.
| rob74 wrote:
| Besides being (mostly) from the same Indo-European family, all
| European languages have influenced each other over the
| centuries. I don't know enough about Albanian and Welsh, so
| I'll take Romanian - which is a Romance language, but also has
| plenty of Slavic, Greek, Hungarian etc. etc. loan words. That's
| why the author of the article says he's joking when he calls
| Albanian and Welsh "almost Romance" - loan words, even a lot of
| them, may make a language easier to learn, but don't move it to
| another family.
| xhevahir wrote:
| > That's why the author of the article says he's joking when
| he calls Albanian and Welsh "almost Romance" - loan words,
| even a lot of them, may make a language easier to learn, but
| don't move it to another family.
|
| 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.)
| aix1 wrote:
| I'd highly recommended John McWhorter's lectures to anyone
| interested in languages. I've listened to three or four of his
| popular-linguistics courses. There's a bit of overlap in material
| but I found all of them to be very informative and highly
| entertaining. He's such an engaging lecturer.
|
| 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.
| zetazzed wrote:
| Subscribe to Wondrium (formerly called the Great Courses)! It
| includes many of McWhorter's courses and is a fixed cost per
| month (reasonable IMO). E.g. https://www.wondrium.com/language-
| a-to-z
|
| 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...
| erikw wrote:
| I liked his podcast _Lexicon Valley_ so much that I went back
| and listened through every episode. It's had a large impact on
| my thinking about language and empathy for communication. I
| went from thinking there was a "right" way to use language, to
| understanding that it's all about communication, and there are
| nearly endless patterns in which languages are structured.
| stefantalpalaru wrote:
| > 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
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| 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.
| paganel wrote:
| > 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-
| migr...
| VitruviusBen wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| For Indo-European etymologies of some other Albanian
| words shared with Romanian, look to the work of Eric
| Hamp: off the top of my head I can list his IE
| etymologies for the Albanian counterparts of Romanian
| _vatra_ , _strunga_ , and _bunget_ that seem generally
| accepted. Getting up to speed with Hamp's work will
| likely require some travel on your part, because Hamp
| tended to publish squibs in some fairly obscure
| collections and Festschriften that are only held by a
| handful of libraries and are not online. Orel's IE
| etymology for the Albanian counterpart of Ro. _zara_ is,
| I believe, the current consensus.
|
| > 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.
| adrian_b wrote:
| I agree than despite traditional claims, there is no
| known relationship between Dacian and any of the words
| shared by Albanian and Romanian.
|
| 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.
| VitruviusBen wrote:
| > Again, what you are saying represents a view that is
| decades superseded now and only hangs on in out-of-date
| references.
|
| 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.
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| > This is a clear "appeal to authority fallacy".
|
| 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?
| adrian_b wrote:
| Dacian and its phoneme inventory are much less known than
| any of those languages.
|
| 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.
| xdennis wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| _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.
| adrian_b wrote:
| 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.
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| I daresay you're one of the people here having a
| political debate, i.e. supporting a vision of your own
| linguistic community's history based solely on your own
| gut feeling, and apparently unaware that your objections
| have already been dealt with among scholars for a good
| long time now.
|
| 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.
| adrian_b wrote:
| The theory variant mentioned by you is only slightly less
| implausible than the depopulation variant and it also is
| a pure speculation that is not supported by any evidence.
|
| 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.
| paganel wrote:
| Related to this, if you're Romanian or happen to know
| Romanian I heartily recommend this recently published
| book [1] about the Balkans and South-Eastern Europe
| during the migrations of the Slavs. Sorin Paliga can have
| some controversial takes but otherwise I find him quite
| ok, all things considered, while Florin Curta is of
| course pretty well known when it comes to his studies on
| the migrations of the Slavs.
|
| [1] https://www.cetateadescaun.ro/produs/slavii-in-
| perioada-migr...
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| Again, your post does come across as political debate
| based on very vague things you have read on the internet,
| and not the actual literature in the field. I am baffled
| by your supposition that superior numbers are required
| for language shift to occur: this has not been believed
| for many decades now and is regarded as an elementary
| fallacy. And what I already mentioned above about
| Aromanian makes unsound your vision of two separate
| Proto-Romanians on either side of the Danube.
|
| 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.
| adrian_b wrote:
| Like I have already said, I completely agree with what
| you have said that there is no role for "Dacian" in the
| Albanian-Romanian lexical isoglosses.
|
| 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.
| ochrist wrote:
| Interesting. This is about Welsh: "Likewise, diwrnod 'day' goes
| back to Latin diurnata, apparently an alternative word for 'day'
| that also led to French journee and Italian giornata."
|
| In Danish the word 'dogn' 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).
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| The Danish word comes from Old Norse _doegn_ , ultimately a
| derivation from Proto-Germanic dogaz 'daily'. (If one is
| familiar with comparative Germanic linguistics, the long vowel
| in the Old Norse form speaks against any borrowing from Latin
| _diurnata_ ). Meanwhile, Latin _diurnata_ is a derivation from
| _dies_ 'day', unrelated to the Germanic word.
|
| 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.
| ochrist wrote:
| Thanks. I had actually checked Wiktionary but only the Danish
| language version.
| tomca32 wrote:
| Its so interesting. If you follow dogaz one more step you get
| to Proto-Indi-European dheg: (to burn).
|
| 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.
| riffraff wrote:
| My favorite trivia related to dyews is that the Greek
| "theos" (theology etc) is unrelated despite the sinilarity,
| but the Greek "Zeus" is :)
| tomca32 wrote:
| Oh yeah that's a good one. Both Zeus and Jupiter are
| cognates of Dyus Pter (Sky Father) of old Indo European
| mythology. They just took different parts of that name.
| danjac wrote:
| It's interesting that while Latin spread across Western Europe
| (whether through conquest, commerce or religion), the eastern
| Mediterranean stubbornly held onto Greek long after the Western
| empire had fallen.
| simiones wrote:
| Given that the greek-speaking eastern half of the Roman Empire
| (the so-called Byzantine empire) went on for a thousand more
| years after the fall of the Western half, is it that
| surprising?
| danjac wrote:
| Sure, but the eastern half never adopted Latin to begin with,
| unlike the West.
| laylomo2 wrote:
| I'm not a linguist, but I always love finding (possible) examples
| of hard C in Latin in other languages. For instance "Caesar" is
| borrowed into German as "Kaiser", and the borrowing of Latin
| "piscis" into Albanian as "peshk" appears to me as another
| example of that vestigial hard C.
| aeortiz wrote:
| That reminds me of "pescatarian" in English, and "pescado" in
| Spanish: both use a hard C sound.
| ycombinete wrote:
| The Caesarea area in Israel is pronounced with the hard C in
| Hebrew. I wonder if that Latin influence or an artefact of
| Hebrew itself.
| rolleiflex wrote:
| Turkish also retains the hard C in some forms, the city of
| Kayseri in Asia Minor is also from Caesarea. However some of
| that has been eradicated by the more recent influence of
| French. An example of that is Julius Caesar, which is Jul
| Sezar.
| bodhiandphysics wrote:
| Modern hebrew gets the name from the Mishnaic hebrew name for
| the city. It's also spelled with a unvoiced glottal in
| arabic. Note that Israel was in the hellenistic part of the
| empire, and caesarea was very much a greek speaking city,
| where there wasn't palatalization of latin c (which was
| rendered as a kappa). Note russian Czar.
| pravus wrote:
| My understanding is that both would have been derived from
| Phoenician which was itself from a Proto-Indo-European
| origin.
| bodhiandphysics wrote:
| No... first hebrew is basically just a dialect of
| Phoenician, and phoenecian isn't an indo european language!
| It's semitic, like arabic and Akkadian. Also the name
| Casesarea is of course from Caesar (the city was founded in
| honor of Augustus by Herod)
| alberto_ol wrote:
| Another example is Sardinian. From the wikipedia page about the
| Sardinian phonology:
|
| "Preservation of the plosive sounds /k/ and /g/ before front
| vowels /e/ and /i/; for example, centum ..."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sardinian_phonology
| barrkel wrote:
| And of course Tsar & czar, also from Caesar.
| simiones wrote:
| Those are using a tz sound, similar to the zz in pizza. It's
| probably closer to the "s" in English pronunciation of
| "Caesar" than it is to the K used in Caesar's time.
| elnatro wrote:
| Why some Romance languages had the hard C sound lost before e
| and i?
| linguistics__ wrote:
| Because of palatalization [0], a very common sound change.
|
| 0:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palatalization_(sound_change)
| elnatro wrote:
| Thanks for the insight!
| retrac wrote:
| A similar process is currently ongoing in some English
| dialects with initial t/d. "Tuesday" and "choose day" are
| homophones for some British speakers. It may well morph
| into "shoes jay" within another century or two. Or not.
| Sound changes tend to follow patterns but they are not
| really predictable.
| pmontra wrote:
| Only when written, of course.
|
| 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.
| usrusr wrote:
| If Old English lacks Brythonic influences because, as the article
| speculates, Angles and Saxons settled in thoroughly latinized
| regions, are there many traces of that pre-Norman latin in Old
| English? That's something I've often wondered when considering
| that simple mental model od English as "a Germanic language with
| lots of 11th century French sprinkled in".
|
| (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")
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| The problem would be determining that Latin words entered Old
| English directly from the Latin spoken in England, instead of
| being part of the Latin influence on Old English while it was
| still spoken on the continent. English already had such Latin
| loanwords as _street_ (from Latin _strata_ 'paved road') before
| the Anglo-Saxons set off to to invade England.
| DrBazza wrote:
| Linguistic history is interesting. I read Spoken Here [1] which
| talked about subject-verb-order [2], and how there was only a one
| or two languages in the entire world that were OSV.
|
| 1. http://markabley.com/books-2/spoken-here-2/ 2.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subject-verb-object_word_order
| cryptonector wrote:
| > This centuries-slow ousting of other languages is the reason
| behind the Romance family and its wide spread.
|
| 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 :)
| piranha wrote:
| Basque - sure, but Finnish and Hungarian? :-) Those were too
| far away for Romans even to have contacts with them. :)
| cryptonector wrote:
| Fair point, but it's not like they've not experienced
| interfacing with Romance language speaking peoples in the
| last 1ky.
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