15-01-04 11:39, alex wrote:
> The simply acceptation "it must be simply Latin and nothing more" is the
> idea which let no way free and thus, one has to accept "exceptions" and
> weierd forms for explaining some phonetical changes. And that seems to
> be a poor/lazy way to solve the things out.
Linguists are no fools, Alex. They know when an alternative solution is
possible, and if Dacian or any other otherwise lost language could be
reconstructed with the help of Romanian, everybody would be more than
happy to have such evidence. Nobody on this list or anywhere claims that
the whole Romanian lexicon is derived from Latin. But the bulk of its
oldest vocabulary is Latin (the same goes for its grammatical
structure), and the "Albanoid" substrate is just a touch of local colour
in Balkan Romance. So much is obvious to anyone who has eyes and can
tell a Latin word from a tomato. The irregularities you allude to are
often found in the other Romance languages as well -- not because
linguists want to force Latin etymologies to the exclusion of anything
else, but because the vocabulary of the "Vulgar" varieties of Latin was
in some ways different from that of Classical Latin.
Piotr