>I was wondering if there might have been a similar strategy used in a
>refugee situation if the original Dacian or Thracian was divided into
>strongly divergent dialects? The Romans were no longer around to be
>used as dictionaries, so there was no one to weed out unwanted
>localisms.
>
>Torsten
In the case of AR & DR, the differences rather pertains to
vocabulary than to grammar and phonology. Even without knowledge
of a linguistics specialist it's clear that these are dialects of
the same language and that their relationship is not the mere one
of one Romance language to another (as, e.g., Italian dialects
to both AR a& DR). Just have a look at "Dimândarea pãrinteascã"
(a poem by Constantin Belimace):
"Părinteasca dimândare
Ne spregiură cu foc mare,
Fraţi di mumă şi di-un tată,
Noi, armâni di eta toată.
Di sum plocile di murminţî
Strigă-a noştri buni părinţî:
„Blăstăm mare se-aibă-n casă
Cari di limba lui se-alasă.
Care-şi-lasă limba lui
S-lu-ardă pira focului,
Si s-dirină viu pri loc,
Si-li si frigă limba-n foc.
El în vatra-li părintească
Fumealia s-nu-şi hărisească;
Di fumeli curuni s-nu başe,
Nat în leagăn si nu-nfaşe.
Care fudze de-a lui mumă
Şi di părinteasca-li numă,
Fuga-li dhoara Domnului
Şi dulţeamea somnului!“
A DR-speaker will immediately understand (without any dictionary)
these parts of the text - based on his/her knowledge of DR common
characteristics (lexems, idiomatics and phonetics) and DR regional
peculiarities:
"Părinteasca [---]
Ne [---] cu foc mare,
Fraţi di mumă şi di-un tată,
Noi, armâni di [---] toată.
Di sum plocile di murminţî
Strigă-a noştri buni părinţî:
„Blăstăm mare se-aibă-n casă
Cari di limba lui se-alasă.
Care-şi-lasă limba lui
S-lu-ardă pira focului,
Si s-[---]ă viu pri loc,
Si-li si frigă limba-n foc.
El în vatra-li părintească
Fumealia s-nu-şi [---]ească;
Di fumeli curuni s-nu [---],
Nat în leagăn si nu-nfaşe.
Care fudze de-a lui mumă
Şi di părinteasca-li numă,
Fuga-li d[---] Domnului
Şi dulţeamea somnului!“
('dimândare' will be understood if one has some idea of French,
Italian and English) (the rest, "[---]", I'd have to look up myself if
I've got knowledge only of DR, despite the speculation that the
earliest stage of my own subdialect must've been a neighbor of
the Northern Albanian dialect :-))
The rest of the wordings contains so many characteristics
of all kind in common with DR, that's overwhelming, whereas
the distance to characteristics in any other Romance language
is extremely long by comparison. The pronunciation is by and
large way much closer than the pronunciation in Low German &
Dutch compared with the High German in the Alps, of the Alemanian
and Suebian as well as of the Bavarian kind.
I'd rather ascribe the AR-DR differences to not living together
for such a long period and to the lack of _synchronous_
*school education & public life* (which inter alia implies
a common Church and lay literature) for the Aromanian population,
as well as to the fact that by and large the DR population hasn't
had the possibility to know chunks of the AR specific vocabulary
propagated by media (books, newspapers, radio & TV), although
in the 19th and esp. 20th centuries a numerous AR population
emigrated to Romanian provinces, and in both centuries there
were many outstanding personalities in politics, literature &
al. arts & sciences who were of AR extraction (even the former
soccer player Gheorghe Hagi is one such "Machidon"). That is
people who either kept mum over their dialect in their contacts
with the DR society or talked AR on special occasions only (e.g.
the popular actor and former minister of culture Ion Caramitru
when reading AR literature for an LP in AR in the seventies) or
who forgot their own AR dialect that was replaced (in 1-2-3
generations) by the DR dialect.
(I'd dare compare the AR-DR relationship to
Jiddisch-Bavarian+Suebian+Frankish and SwissAlemanian to
Alemanian+Suebian+Bavarian.)
George
PS: Pls. give me someone the no. of the message where the
chronology of the [...] > <dh> and <th> is dealt with. (I assume
that the complete lack of these sounds in all Romanian dialects
must play a big chunk of a role in speculating about the when
and where of the Romanian language.)