Romanian 500y ago [Re: Celts & Cimmerians]

>Oh, really?! As far as in your quoted text (a part of the whole
>letter) one can see "den" instead of "din", "se-au" instead of
>"s-au", "pre" instead of "pe"; the document contains also other
>spellings which might be related to some minor phonetical changes.

e.g. <umin'> or <omin'> (I don't remember exactly) for <oameni>
"people; men" (the plural of <om>). Which is quite close esp. to
today's Transylvanian variants thereof, such as ['wO-miNj], and
hence quite close to Ital. <uomini>.

> Old English, as even the guys from which you took your wav file
>precise in their pages, "is generally taken to cover the period
>c600-1100 AD". It is not the same period with Neacsu's letter
>(1521 AD).

Neac$u's letter is contemporary with, say, Shakespeare's English
(i.e. quasi-modern English) and Martin Luther's Deutsch (which
is practically modern German) as well as with the German in
the Nuremberg pamphlets against "Dracole Wayde" (Vlad the
Impaler) and Martin Behaim's German, a poet who wrote similar
gruesome verses on "Dracole".

In other words, by and large, in most European languages
differences between today's basic language and those 4-5 c. ago
aren't that considerable in order to linguistically make distinct
categories, such as "Old", "Middle" and "New/Modern."

> The thing you should keep in mind from the OE example is that
>normal languages' behaviour is to modify themselves in time.

OE was contemporary with Althochdeutsch, that is as... exotic to
any today's German native speaker (e.g. "ben zi bena, gelid zi
geliden" :-)).

> Marius Iacomi

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