>As for your wider question about what Romanian is, I refer you to Giuliano
>Bonfante, "the Origin of the Romance Languages" (Winter, 1999) Page 81:
>"Romanian lacks all the archaisms which it is easy to discover in the
>languages of the West, including languages which have undergone as
>far-reaching transformations as French....; [_SNIP_] it is neither older nor
>younger than that date, which is the date of the colonization of Dacia."
But, if this implies that a South-East European populace actually...
learnt some kind of Latin vernacular as a foreign idiom in that period,
I'd ask myself though: why should those people have left out those
archaisms? (They didn't attend schools like, say, Berlitz's, where
connoisseur teachers select the vocabulary in a way the US radio
station Voice of America does for broadcasts <<in special English.>>
:-) Isn't this a bit odd? Or perhaps there are other archaisms that
were preserved in Romanian, for that matter.)
Yiddish is a comparable phenomenon: anyone who's in a certain
command of German realizes that Yiddish is sort of an... unfinished
lesson. :-) In spite of that: it preserves some interesting "outdated"
words, e.g. <ets>, <enk> (= "ihr", "euch" = you nominative + dative
+ accusative) that in German dialects almost vanished for good;
even in the most conservative rural communities, esp. in Bavaria &
Austria, hardly any one knows of "ets", although everybody uses it
as an s-suffix attached to the verb: "Seids ihr fertig? Was machts
ihr denn da?" (<enk> was formerly spread up to the Aachen-Cologne
-Berlin line, in the Rhineland area becoming <önch>) Yiddish also
keeps the Bavarian <gwen> [gve:n] participle (= "been"); that's
<gewesen> in standard-official German.
So, if Balkan peninsula Romance is a comparable linguistic occurrence,
then one can expect circumstances where some lexical elements aren't
just simple imports from Italy but... collisions & meltings of Italianisms
and substrate words that must've looked similar; as well as... loan
translations based on local patterns. The problem is that no one knows
how those substrate languages (Illyrian, Thracian, Dacian-Moesian and
Scythian) were like, except for a few dozen of isolated words/names.
While there is... whole lotta Latin - as a vast corpus of literature. And
an overwhelming Slavic environment (i.e. closely related to those lost
satem idioms). No wonder that the tendency has been either Latin
or Slavic & tertium non datur. So therefore Alex's hopes for some
day's... _hic iacet lepus_! :)
>Peter
George