Re: [tied] Walachians are placed far North the Danube in Nestor (10

What I find unsettling about the Nestor argument is that it has no
conceivable bearing on the problem, even if we grant that
Nestor's/Sylvester's Walachians were speakers of Rumanian. Given the
Balkan potential for small populations of mountain pastoralists to
expand into suitable low-lying areas, demographic conditions in the
ninth century just cannot be projected back into the past.


There is a certain resemblance here with the argument from the
brevity of the Roman transdanubian presence (appr. 100-275).
Virtually nothing is known about conditions at the time. We do know
that generally speaking Latin was contagious, but we have no idea
about how eager or unwilling the local population was to abandon
their language(s). Populations vary in that respect and for all we
know they may have been exceptionally eager. For that reason we can't
exclude the possibility that Latin was adopted by a local population
and survived the dark centuries in Transsylvania or another suitably
mountainous district to emerge and spread at a later stage. I don't
believe things happened that way, but that is a mere belief, which,
moreover, to the extent that it is founded on anything is not founded
on the argument from the brevity of Roman presence.


I'm also surprised by the arguments from Dacian that keep intruding
to support the case for transdanubian continuity. If we assume (with
Georgiev and Duridanov) that Dacian and Thracian were different
languages (as seems plausible), their maps clearly demonstrate a
quite massive presence of Dacian in southern Serbia. Hence Dacian
elements would seem to be irrelevant, to the problem of transdanubian
continuity.


If all non-sequiturs and invalid arguments are removed from the
record, we are left with a limited number of points that appear to be
hard enough to build on, but may well turn out to be compatible with
an entire range of fundamentally different stories.


Willem