>Note BTW that the Gothic term for "church" (and this
>must have spread to all Germanic Arian churches too)
>was not the later Germanic term, but rather
>"aikklesjon" (var.), testifying to the power of this
>term in the Balkans. Due to the influence of the
>church hierarchy of course.******
A nice judgment, indeed. But there is nothing we
can do about it: in Romanian, for whatever reason,
basilica > biserica has been the word. Even if pre-
proto-Romanians also once used ecclesia. We should
pay heed to the fact that the lack of a term does
not automatically mean the term was always absent:
it can also mean the term was forgotten or replaced
by another. Romanian is unfortunate because it
hasn't texts that are old... enough. But OTOH the
extant oldest texts still show us this phenomenon:
words that disappeared because people prefered
synonyms. In some cases, there are so called
"doublettes," i.e. inherited words co-exist with
words of the same origin (now with more or less
different meaning) that re-entered the language as
neologisms.
George