The Rumanian Question (was: Chronology of the breakup of Common Romance)

X99Lynx at aol.com X99Lynx at aol.com
Fri Jul 16 16:43:18 UTC 1999


In a message dated 7/13/99 6:16:38 PM, rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu wrote:

<<Graham Mallinson, "Rumanian," 391-419. Martin Harris and Nigel
Vincent, eds. The Romance Languages. London: Croom Helm, 1988.

	There is very little substrate vocabulary in Rumanian, and its
origin is unknown. Since the grouping of Dacian, Thracian and Illyrian
within IE is uncertain, it is questionable whether Albanian and Rumanian
shared a substrate language, although they do have cognates:>>

The question of the origins of the Rumanian language have involved historical
linguists and other historians in some pretty sensitive political issues in
southeast Europe.  The matter of the breakup of Hungary and Romanian national
identity have been debated on historical grounds for some time now.  (Whether
such things should really be relevant is another matter.)

One controversy is the question of "Daco-Roman Continuity."  Essentially,
this revolves around whether Romance was always spoken in Romania and
represents a continuation of what began as the Roman colonization of the
province Dacia in the first centuries of the current era.  At first glance,
this would seem logical enough and it had been the official line of most
historians and linguists for a long time.  But that conclusion has been put
into question from time to time and lately some substantial arguments have
been made to the contrary.

In 1996, Andre duNay published "The Origins of the Rumanians: the Early
History of the Rumanian Language." (Matthias Corvinus, Toronto).  It should
be of special interest to the members of this list for its methodology which
attempts to synchronize an apparently exhaustive mass of past linguistic
research with historical data.

Of particular interest is the way duNay goes beyond mere lexical comparisons
(such as those reproduced by rmccalli from Mallinson and Rosetti in the prior
post) and considers the chronology of syntactical developments, innovations
and changes in Latin, Southern Slavic, Greek, Albanian and Romanian - as well
as archaeology and primary historical records - to reach conclusions about
when linguistic events actually occurred.

duNay addresses a long list of linguistic theories regarding Rumanian
language and does a fairly compelling job of dissembling the Daco-Roman
continuity theory.  Particularly compelling is the linguistic and historical
evidence that Rumanian developed in close proximity to Albanian in the
southern Balkans.  The syntactical and other characteristics by which duNays
identifies Rumanian as a "southern Balkan" language joined with Bulgarian,
Albanian and Greek should again be of particular interest to members of this
list from the point of view of methodology.

The book BTW is reproduced in its entirety on the web, on the Hungarian web
site (for reasons that become more apparent as one gets into this.)  I will
get the URL and post it if there's interest.

I don't know if one must conclude that the Albanian or Proto-Albanian
substrate in Rumanian settles the issue of origins.  I do know that I
appreciate the historicity of this work very much - particularly because it
shows how silly statements like this one are:

<<A. Rosetti: "The Thracians, known as Gètes by Greek writers and Dacians by
Latin writers..." >> (This is the type of bad historical summary that must
pollute any understanding of the situation for linguists relying on it.)

There are forwards in the book by Robert A. Hall at Cornell and Adam Makke
that are also interesting, including the following statement:  "Lack of
knowledge of the Slavic languages,...hindered the Rumanian historians from
expressing the problem clearly and recognizing its significance in the study
of the beginnings of the Rumanian people."

This may explain a bit of the 'basic word' substrate mentioned in the prior
post.  E.g.,:

<<Albanian			Romanian
buzë "lip, edge"		buzâ "lip, edge">>

See 'pusa' (Czech), 'buzia' (Pol.) which I believe follow the variances
expected between Romanian and Slavic found in other -a^ > -ia forms.

In fact, the following makes me think that maybe we are dealing with a
transfer of technology here, rather than proof of common ancestry:

<<The total number of words of significance for the everyday life of
shepherds among these  89 words common to Rumanian and Albanian is at least
60  - 66 % of all.  Of the rest, most denote basic human notions and
conditions, such as  parts of the human body and family relations. >>

Hope this is interesting or helpful.

Regards,
S. Long



More information about the Indo-european mailing list