Renfrew and IE Overlords

[Sean Crist]

On Sat, 22 Jan 2000, Stanley Friesen wrote:

> On the other hand Romania speaks Romanian, a derivative of the language of
> a dominant elite that only ruled *there* for a short time.

Actually, it doesn't appear that there's a continual Romance presence in
what's now Romania from Roman times down to the present.  There's a book
by a Romanian scholar who claims that the area was underpopulated in early
medieval times, and that two leaders from a Romance-speaking area near
what is now Albania got permission from the Emporer to settle their people
in this land.  The names of the leaders happen to Romanian names.

The author had to publish under a pseudonym, because this claim could be
considered seditious by the Romanian government.  There is a substantial
Hungarian minority in Transylvania, and if this minority wanted to
separate from Romania, this author's book would allow the ethnic
Hungarians to claim that they were in the land first.

The linguistic evidence seems to be consistent with this picture as well;
there was a very dense and diverse set of Romance languages, including
Dalmatian, etc. in the western Balkan area where the early Romanians are
believed to have migrated from; but in the larger Romanian-speaking area
to the east, there is much more uniformity.  It's much like the case of
British vs. American English; you get a tremendous and very dense
diversity of local dialects within Britain, but a much greater uniformity
in the huge area of America which the speakers of the language conquered.

  \/ __ __    _\_     --Sean Crist  (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu)
 ---  |  |    \ /     http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/
  _| ,| ,|   -----
  _| ,| ,|    [_]
   |  |  |    [_]