From: Torsten
Message: 67611
Date: 2011-05-25
>Because...?
> >I am beginning to suspect, namely that Proto-Romanian, starting
> >as a Latin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin
> >then Latin
> >http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creole_language
> >at the head of the Adriatic, esp. in
> >http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nauportus
> >cf. the presence of a Romanian language, the
> >http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Istro-Romanian_language ,
> >in (H)istria.
> >http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Map-balkans-vlachs.png
>
> It'll lead you to false conclusions, since your "suspicion" is
> wrong. (Bist auf'm Holzweg.)
> Istro-Romanian is a quite recentWhich Istro-Romanian peculiarities prove that Istro-Romanian is a quite recent dialect?
> dialect because of many peculiarities.
> Istro-Romanians must'veThis is based on the assumption that closely related languages must have spread from a common region, and since Istro-Romanian is the smaller community of the two claiming they were the emigrants makes the fact that there is no physical evidence for that becomes easier to ignore.
> wandered thither coming from a central area adjacent to the
> Daco-Romanian dialect (chiefly today's Serbia).
> And theYou provide no evidence for that claim, so I'll ignore it.
> timeframe must have been towards the middle of the 2nd millennium,
> and not prior to the 1st millennium, CE.
> Otherwise, of course, the entire Romanian language (with its 4Banality, this is the standard theory and we all know that.
> dialects - Daco-Romanian, Aromanian, Meglenite Romanian and
> Istro-Romanian) is the continuation of a South-East European
> Latin vernacular spoken by populations having some kind of satem
> IE substrate (it is *assumed* either to have been Dacian-Moesian
> or Thracian).
> To speak of the inception of that vernacular at the beginning ofExplain what you mean by that.
> the 1st century BCE isn't warranted.
> It is too early for the entire area.Because...?
> The Romanization could start only after many decades,If you had backed that claim with evidence I would discuss it, but you haven't.
> actually after several *centuries* of the "SPQR" presence there as
> a *state*, in the whole relevant area (i.e. Pannonia, Croatia,
> Albania, Serbia, Bosnia, Northern Greece, Bulgaria, Northern Dacia,
> and Scythia Minor).
> Because of the lack of documents, you cannot state anything ofBecause of lack of documentation all that can be stated about the situation are linguistic generalities which hold in such situation, and which are that when a native population adopts foreign language as a trade language or
> any "Pidgin" Latin.
> Nobody knows how good or how bad was the LatinTo any Roman, Proto-Romanian would be very bad Latin. So would Proto-Spanish, Proto-French etc. The relationship between those two languages would have been similar to the relationship between English and eg.
> spoken by the Romanized populations in the relevant provinces
> from the 1st century CE until the Avar+Slavic conquests (and
> territorial abandonments by the E-Roman Empire).
> The fact thatHere George, because of the limited number of sockpuppets in his head available for the Punch and Judy show he runs there, has, after giving up on the Fischkopp-puppet, identified me as a Dacian-continuity-Romanian-nationalist and therefore, wasting everybody's time in the process, argues against the belief that the Romanians are a continuation of the Dacian people, a belief I have never expressed nor entertain.
> Romanian dialects and the extinct Dalmatian have a certain
> substrate vocabulary (and various substrate locutions) does not
> mean that *everything* of it was preserved from the times prior
> to the Romanization until the timeframe when one can deem the
> Romance vernaculars spoken there as Protoromanian and
> Protodalmatian.
> (Despite of the big differences between Daco-Romanian (i.e. on
> which is based standard Romanian) and the other three dialects,
> spoken today by only 1-2 hundred thousand people scattered in
> various Balkan Peninsula areas as well as in Romania, Western
> Europe and Northern America, they are still too close; not as
> big as between (1) English and Suebian+Bavarian or (2) Danish
> and Suebian+Bavarian), but rather as the difference is between
> Yiddish and Mittel- + Oberdeutsch dialects.
> Your speculation on history events might have some "granum" ofWhat linguistic realities are you accusing me of neglecting?
> reality in them, but it is quite impardonable for a linguist to
> neglect linguistic realities,
> as well as some simple things: whyFor the same reasons that the natives of New Guinea gave up their "barbarian" tongues in order to speak colloquial English in times when they didn't live within the British Empire. Read the article.
> on earth should have some populations feel compelled or attracted
> to give up their "barbarian" tongues in order to speak colloquial
> Latin in times when they didn't live within the Roman Empire?
> Only a Roman administration and a massive colonization of peopleYour knowledge of sociolinguistics is apparently deficient.
> whose mother tongue was Latin could have provided the appropriate
> conditions.
> Note that, despite the fact that Romanian hasn't preserved manyHere George is again soliloquizing to his Romanian nationalist sockpuppet on the evils of Romanian nationalism.
> features that survived in the western Romance languages, it hasn't
> preserved virtually nothing stemming from the substrate culture,
> religion, onomastics, vocabulary (except for a small vocabulary
> with chiefly PIE origin, but of which nobody can tell from whose
> idiom they have been preserved: Dacian-Moesian? Thracian? Illyrian?
> Scythian/Sarmatian/Yazygian? Or else). Even most of the Latin
> heritage is lost. But what's there is definitely of Latin origin
> (the names of some Roman pagan holidays despite the thorough
> Christianization, the name for the church, which has its roots
> in the imperial era of Roman Christianity after Constantin I's
> Milan edict & al. things, among which the fundamental Christian
> notions, incl. Yahve's "title": dominus deus, as well as the
> names of the days and of the months. The Romanization wrought
> havoc in all those peoples as far as language and culture+religion
> are concerned: any honest researcher has to face that.
> On topAnother irrelevant digression.
> of that, it is extremely difficult to separate the unknown
> elements on which one keeps speculating that they are ancient
> local substrate issues from those imported via the intermediaries
> comming from the East: the numerous Germanic + Iranic-speaking +
> Slavic-speaking + Turkic-speaking waves, in which the latter two
> groups always had strong Iranic (Scythian-Sarmatian-Khwarizmian)
> substrates (in most cases, linguistically, East-Iranian). The
> tiny amount of Dacian and Thracian vocabulary relics show that
> the dialects of languages must have stood in a very close position
> to the big Iranic family within the satem "continuum" from the
> Adriatic to the Altai mountains.).
> > In that scenario that Latin creole, Proto-Romanian would have beenI am afraid it isn't.
> > the language of Burebista's proto-state,
>
> This is nonsense.
> It is so as if you Danes would start in a generationThere are already areas in Copenhagen which are solidly Arab-speaking. Of course, Denmark would not switch from being Danish-speaking as long as there is a functioning admistration promoting it by daily use. In Southern Schleswig, because the language of the church, courts and school was German, and presumably because of a large influx of immigrants from Germany in the late 18th entury with the construction of the
> to speak, instead of Danish, some Pidgin-Turkish or Pidgin-Arab only
> because in Denmark there are some immigrant groups (that keep
> growing). And all that out of the blue, as a whim.
> Neither underUnder
> "Adi von Braunau" were Danes obliged to learn and to speak
> "Bastarnian". :)
> >used because the Dacian language, because of the politicalNo this idea, like most other ideas, does not imply its own opposite.
> >situation in Dacia with small warlords fighting each other for
> >plunder and slaves would have been split into mutually
> >unintelligible dialects.
>
> This idea would imply the contrary:
> the adopting of Burebista'sUnlikely, there is no trace of it anywhere.
> and Decebal's dialect as sort of a standard language, prior to
> the Romanization.
> (As happened in the Eastern Frankish empire,Yes.
> where a certain German dialects group evolved as the standard
> German called "Hochdeutsch", and which you assume is based on
> the dialects spoken by them ol' Bastarnians.)
> >That BTW, gives us another anchor on Burebista's rise, it wouldMany Germans think they can get by here, like they can in 'Low Germany' by hammering a fist on the table and scream: HABEN SIE VERSTANDEN!! That is a mistake which I suspect you are making too.
> >have occurred because of the almost unlimited funds pouring into
> >the country (countries) when Roman slave procurement had to change
> >markets in 73-71 BCE.
>
> This is an absurd idea. In order to abandon your language and
> adopt the language of another nation there must be something...
> compelling; it must be a... must, a need to you. Gimme one million
> or 100 million euros, and I still won't learn Danish. :-)
> (On the other hand, do not neglect the fact that the Dacian stateExactly. You are arguing with yourself that Torsten may be right while attempting to ascribe his opinions to yourself.
> hadn't the possibilities of a strong, "unitarian" state. Burebista's
> and Decebal's few decades were exceptions, when force, organization
> and enforced discipline assured for the domination over various
> other Dacian-Moesian-Thracian polities. Otherwise, the whole
> relevant territory was highly divided (in a similar way as was
> Germany for many centuries divided up in tens, and hundreds of
> small states, duchies, state-cities & the like; a feature that
> is reflected in the... Romanian realities: the state Romania was
> founded in... 1859, and the unification of Moldavia and Walachia
> was difficult, despite the fact that the inhabitants thereof were
> and are one and the same people with lesser differences between
> them as compared to provinces of Germany, where low German and
> upper German regions are different "planets" :) That was the
> fate of the ancient inhabitants of the Balkan, Carpathian and
> Yugo-Alps regions in ancient times, that was the fate of the
> Romance speaking populatio in the middle ages: numerous, but
> virtually not capable of organizing themselves in such a way
> as to become big regional political and military powers - unlike
> those newcomers with Germanic and Iranic substrates, that were
> extremely eager to found and defend kingdoms. An enormous corpus
> of the Romance population again changed languages "melting" with
> the "upper class" nations: Serbo-Croatians, Bulgarians, Hungarians,
> Greek and Albanians. Perhaps this is due to the pre-Roman heritage).
> >However, reading it as 'he was then leading an army against theHere is the paragraph you dishonestly corrupted by leaving out the last two lines and separating the then last line from the rest:
> >barbarians (who lived beyond the isthmus as far as the Borysthenes
> >and the Adrias)' it becomes a true statement even if Mithridates
> >only made it part of the way. It might be interpreted in another
> >interesting way, namely that the genesis of a Romanian ethnos
>
> This is, mit Verlaub, a complete nonsense. How on earth could
> that guy Mithridates and his ephemerous period contribute to
> the Romanization of a vast quasi-Thracoid population?!? Was
> his Pontus and his civilization a second... Latium? :-)
> >at least defined linguistically as 'those who speak a Latin creole'
> Even this hypothesis is not warranted: AFAIK, no true RomanistAny Romanist who thinks the Romance languages, apart from those (probably non-existent) cases where they originated in a purely Roman milieu (eg colonists), did not go through a pidgin and a creole phase, is incompetent.
> has postulated that South-East Latin vernacular was Pidgin or
> creole Latin.
> And noone gives up one's language in order to speakNot true, cf
> a new language only out of a whim or a fad: you have to have
> major conditions, such as a foreign occupation or a massive
> emigration to an other territory.
> Neither Jews, who repeatedlyJews gave up Aramaic pretty quickly, and kept Hebrew for only liturgical and literary use; in general they are probably the group which has changed language most often.
> had to go through such terribly experiences, gave up Hebrew and
> Aramaic.
> Neither did South-Eastern Slavs give up their SlavicThe fact that some peoples did not switch language under other people's overlordship does not change the fact that some people, like the Danes, did. As they did in the Danish regions east of the Øresund after it was conquered by the Swedes in 1658.
> idiom in order to speak the Turkic-Iranic idioms of their Avar
> and Protobulghar overlords.
> And, OTOH, the populations in Anatolia, in order to adopt theOf course. They already had a long established prestigious standard language.
> language of the invaders after AD 1000, Turkish, and forget their
> old idioms (Armenian, Greek et al.),
> had to go through centuries of Seldjuk and Ottoman epochs; yet
> still today, in the 21st c., there are populations there who
> still speak the old languages (among them the most numerous the
> Kurds, who speak an Iranic idiom).
> And you speculate that various *free* nations there startedI never mentioned Sarmizegetusa. Those hoards are found all over Dacia.
> to be Romanized only because there were some merchants and some
> slaves moved to and fro, and some cartloads of gold moved to
> Sarmizegetusa!
> In time periods when Roman military legions stillWell, in that sense Dahomey would be a free nation too. Here you can behold the effects of moving some slaves and some gold to and fro:
> had to consolidate power in Italy. (Zum Lachen sowas. :))
> >living in the area between the Borysthenes and the Adrias (whichBecause? Evidence?
> >incidentally is where there are found today), was underway already
> >in 108 BCE.
>
> Not even in 108 CE (when Decibalus had been dead for two years)
> was there a Romanization of Northern Dacia, nor of Southern Dacia,
> Thracia and much of what's today FYROM, Serbia, Croatia.
> OnlyBecause? Evidence?
> western parts of the latter along with what's today Albania and
> Northern Greece (and along the Via Egnantia )got gradually
> Romanized.
> And it took further 3-4-5 centuries (until the process wasEvidence?
> "shredded" by the inroads made by Slavicization and Grecization,
> once that the Roman Empire collapsed and the Eastern one replaced
> Latin with Greek, the new Romance idiom being spoken after the 6th
> c. virtually only by the later on so-called "Vlachos", a very low
> social stratum, that during several centuries turned from a chiefly
> urban population to a rural and pastoral mountain population,
> living in regions that weren't attractive for the Turkic, Slavic
> and "Byzantine" upper classes).
> If the Romanization's onset was supposed to have been so earlyThat's blasphemy. God created the world out of nothing. ;-)
> and due to such pettitesses and nothingness,
> then how can youI don't understand your reasoning. You said yourself that some languages survive in spite of their populations being subjugated. Why wouldn't part of Dacian/Thracian survive as Albanian?
> imagine that Thracian was still attested as spoken by some people
> even in the 6th-7th century?
> How can you imagine that a compact??? That is exactly what I am imagining. What makes think I'm not?
> population called Albanians could have preserved a separate idiom
> that shows myriads of elements illustrating the "freezing" of
> the Romanization process in an early phase (as compared with
> its neighbor, Romanian)?
> If your assumption had something in it,Why??
> then Albanian must have sounded today almost as Romance as
> Sicilianu as well as the Veneto and Furlan dialects!
> But of thoseAnd therefore what??
> Arbäräsh Albanians who've been present in Southern Italy since
> the 15th c. (Puglia, Calabria etc.) many are even *today* bilingual,
> i.e. they haven't assimilated completely linguistically in 5-6
> centuries.
> >except, I repeat, Strabo's statement and numismatic evidence fromNo, to Crawford, and he convinced me:
> >the Greek cities on the northwestern Black Sea litoral.
>
> Numismatic evidence in territories neighboring Greek colonies, but
> outside Greek colonies, mean to you money only paid for slaves?!
> If so, why do you thing all those Getae, Sarmatians etc.I think they did accept them, but it is unlikely such enormous sums, paid only in a short span of time was part of a permanent regular tribute arrangement.
> "barbarians" wouldn't have accepted coins in other commercial
> exchanges or as tribute paid by Greek colonies to local "Barbarian"
> princelings? (Esp. if silver and golden or at least gilded coins.
> :))
> >His mother endebted his kingdom (probably to the Romans)If I'm influenced by anything, also in my evaluation of the debt situation of the formerly white nations, it is this episode of Danish history
>
> Aren't you a bit too much influenced by the situation of
> indebtedness by modern states, within the EU and beyond, as
> well as by the troubles of certain states, esp. "PIIGS"? :-)