Re: [tied] Re: Daci

----- Original Message -----

From: altamix

To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Monday, March 11, 2002 4:34 PM

Subject: [tied] Re: Daci

> it is very interesting to see that such kind of discutions have all the root that hte dacians disappeared. I just want to point a speculation and maybe not a speculation.
Into romanian language, "our people", ours, or "from here" or indigens means in the literraly language "de aici". In the popular way this construciton is shorted in this form "d'aci" And "from here" "from this place" is literally "de aici" the same. but in the popular way of speaking is "d'acia". So, this is the way to write it. In the pronounciation none can observe the apostroph "'" so, the one who hear about he will hear "daci" or "dacia"

> Strange thing i guess.

 

This is irrelevant coincidence. The Dacians of the second century BC cannot have sported a name derived from a Modern Romanian phrase (of approximately the same origin as French d'ici).

> I see that 3 big folks have been latinised and dissapiered from europe in the same way. These are the thracians (implicitely the dacians), the celts in europa and the iberics..
The latinisation have had succes only on these 3 folks. No succes over germanic area, no succes over slavi area, no succes in africa or arabian area...

 

Lots of languages fell victim to the political and cultural impact of Latin: first, numerous languages in Italy, both Indo-European and non-Indo-European ones (Oscan, Umbrian, Faliscan, Picene, Messapic, Venetic, Sicel and Etruscan, to name but a few). The same fate befell all forms of Illyrian across the Adriatic.

 

Each of your "3 big folks" stands for a varied collection of peoples and languages. Iberia, for example, was a linguistic mosaic involving Iberian proper (probably with a good deal of internal differentiation), Proto-Basque, as well as a several Indo-European languages (Lusitanian, Celtiberian and other varieties of Celtic). The Celts were conquered and assimilated by the Roman Empire in Gaul and the adjacent areas, but the Celts of Central Europe (and eventually in most of Britain) succumbed to various Germanic tribes. The Thracians (of Thrace) had been strongly Hellenised before Thrace became a Roman (and then Byzantine) province. As for Dacia, it had the misfortune of being trampled down and ravaged by all the participants of the Marcomannian wars at the same time -- not just the Romans but the Marcomanni, Quadi, Iazyges, etc. Then came the Ostrogoths folowed by the Avars etc., and finally the Slavs, but by that time the Getic language of Dacia was long extinct.

 

The Romans had no success at conquering the Slavs, because Rome never attempted any such thing. During the heyday of the Roman Empire the Slavs were confined to remote parts of Eastern Europe, out of harm's way. The Slavic expansion began in the wake of the Great Migrations, when the Empire had already collapsed. The Germani were not conquered for well-known historical reasons. Don't blame the Romans for their failure to Romanise everybody everywhere. At least they tried :)

> If we remember that the romans themself sustined they are too "thracians" then we must assume something was very common to latin, and these 3 folks.. There is no another way to explain the latinisation of them.

 

This is magical thinking. There is no special affinity connecting Latin with Iberian, Gaulish or Thracian, and the Romans never called themselves "Thracians". The success of Romanisation in some places but not in others was contingent on many historical factors -- and history is capricious.

> Specially of the dacians where the 160 years of roman dmoniation, with just ( at least of this time) 11 cities and the rest of the country fully peasants.. If we remember that the big part of army was withdrwaed from Dacia 12 years after conquest of it, there are really very big questions to answer..

> Moreover, Kekaumenos (i repet myself, but this affirmation was made in XI century after we know that in 4 Century Attila, The King of Huns delcared himself and "duce of the dacians") afirm that the valahs are the the people once called "dacians". Or valahs, are mentioned in slavic documents first by Chronik of Nestor from Kiev as the inhabitants of the actually rumanian theritory..

> Simple we could say dacian were named lately in X-XII centuries "valahi" and in the XIV-XV centuried they became called "rumuni".. But it is not so simple.. It should be so simple, we will have no discutions more about dacian language:))

 

Even the historical continuity between the Latin of Dacia Traiana and the variety that gave rise to Romanian is a moot issue, and there are in fact good reasons to question it. For example, Romanian contains virtually no loans that would demonstrate prolonged contact with Germanic or Sarmatian languages, and few lexemes that can with any luck be Getic (or related). On the other hand, there are significant linguistic affinities connecting Romanian with Dalmatian and with the Latin layer of Albanian vocabulary. Even if some Latin-speaking civilians chose to (and managed to) stay in Dacia throughout the historical upheavals of the second century AD and the next thousand years, it was in all likelihood the slow influx of Romanised groups from the neighbouring provinces that enabled "lingua Romana" to return to former Roman Dacia and to survive there.

 

Piotr