Re: Slavs, Gepids and Avars

From: George Stana
Message: 15536
Date: 2002-09-17

>Under such considerations appears as normaly to have such a
>large "substratum" in romanian . There are thousends of words
>not 180

Yes, only "such considerations" have given a chance to those
who've inspired you. As well as the fact that the substrate
idioms (Illyrian, Thracian, Dacian-Getic) are unknown
(except for few antroponyms, toponyms, hydronyms and
few other lexical remnants). Otherwise, they would have
seen themselves compelled to keep mum. Instead of analysing the
extant language, then inserting it in the appropriate "chain"
and only then trying to squeeze out some plausible deduction,
these people postulate "the romanization was impossible", so
the modern language must (in their opinion) have developed
from the ancient one(s). Then, they go on playing
etymological revisionism by re-establishing links to PIE (in a
scientific way, they think, and in any case without the
contribution of Latin), and basta. They even expect that
the plaudit is self-understood. At the same time, they don't
give a darn on the fact that the missing link stays missing,
whatsoever.

Namely, that the ancient language and/or languages in
question keep being unknown to us. But even Albanian, that's
supposed to be the prolongation (to a great extent) of some of
these ancient languages, doesn't disturb these dreamers:
since, if Romanian weren't a Romance language, but, by and
large, the modern variant of that/those ancient languages
itself, then how on earth come that a Romanian cannot
understand what an Albanian is talking about (whenever the
occasion is given)? This in spite of a certain list of words
shared by both people. For many years now, I myself have had
the occasion to listen to this idiom in the streets of Munich,
but nix capito. Moreover, the same thing when listening to
news bulletins broadcast by some radio stations or, even
better (in HiFi quality) by some TV stations via Eutelsat (either
Tirana or VoA). What's for a Romanian to be understood is that
group of lexical items belonging to the international Latin
vocabulary. Whereas, for a Romanian, the affinities are there,
whenever faced with a bit of Italian, Spanish etc.

>Such kind of information shows us that the "billinguism" ,
>together mingling, forgetting own language and stuff was
>not so properly as we will like to think.

Yes, you're right, billingualism wasn't the way you and your
wanna-be thracologists think. The evidence shows that the
Romance idiom, gradually having gotten Dalmatian and
Romanian, overwhelmed the substrate one for good. The
relics of the the secondary "tier" (that'll forever be unknown,
I'm afraid) are indeed vigorous (a few dozen lexems belong to
the main vocabulary of Romanian being circulated by
everyone, irrespective of one's region & education). But by
far they aren't enough to postulate something these people
painstakingly try to prove (actually being driven by a single
impulse: to show their people is autochtonous; as though, a
Romanized populace weren't autochtonous). (But we're
gonna see whether the IE expert community takes'em
seriously.)

George