"After having worked on nuclear fusion experiments for 25 years at the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, I began to look at the fusion enterprise more dispassionately in my retirement. "
Reminds me of that old saw that goes something like “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” (Upton Sinclair and others [https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/30/salary/?amp=1])
No, the idea that a certain layer of Romanian words comes from Dacian is superseded. It only hangs on due to outdated references or a certain strand of Romanian nationalism. In the last 30 years or so, as the reconstruction of earlier stages of Albanian has made great advances, scholars have found that Romanian borrowed words specifically from the ancestor of Albanian, not from some Dacian language possibly related to Albanian.
The Romanian and Albanian languages both spread to their present areas from the Central Balkans, and the linguistic ancestors of Romanian speakers included Albanian speakers who switched to Latin and carried over some of their vocabulary, while Albanian speakers are descended from those who never made that switch. There are still few popular-science books representing this state of the art, but particularly curious readers can look, for example, to the publications of Matzinger and Schumacher.
> The Romanian and Albanian languages both spread to their present areas from the Central Balkans
For those who don't get the subtext, people here are having a political debate disguised as a linguistic/historical debate.
OfSanguineFire is saying Romanians originate in the south and migrated to Romania (known as the "Immigrationist theory") and others are saying Romanians originate from Dacians (the Daco-Roman continuity theory).
The first theory is the favorite of Hungarian nationalists because it places them in Romania before Romanians.
Some people may be having a political debate, but neither myself nor most Indo-Europeanists have any dog in this fight, as we are not from any of the countries involved in the dispute. That advances in the study of the ancient Balkan languages and the reconstruction of earlier stages of Albanian supports what you term the “Immigrationist theory”, is a mere accident and certainly not indicative of sympathies with one party to the Hungarians-versus-Romanians feud.
And yet you espouse one of the theories, despite the historical and linguistic evidence supporting the other at least slightly more.
Ultimately there’s not enough evidence to say with certainty either way. Insisting on one particular option, especially the less likely one, is suspicious.
While you have correctly pointed out that there is no evidence for any word that has been preserved from Dacian into Romanian or into Albanian or into any other language, after that you have been guilty yourself of enunciating an unsubstantiated hypothesis by writing: "The Romanian and Albanian languages both spread to their present areas from the Central Balkans".
There is no evidence about such a "spreading", and especially no linguistic evidence.
We know that Proto-Albanian and Proto-Romanian have been in contact, but that gives no information about the extent of the area inhabited by speakers of Proto-Romanian in the opposite direction. The contact has existed regardless whether the area inhabited by speakers of Proto-Romanian has extended to the North of the Danube or not.
Likewise, even if we knew for sure that no Dacian word has been preserved in Romanian, that would give absolutely no information either pro or contra the immigration theory, because that has nothing to do with the Dacians, but it is about whether the Roman citizens of Dacia have continued to inhabit Dacia permanently, or not.
Therefore all known linguistic data fails to provide any kind of evidence either in favor or against the immigration theory, so such a theory should not be mentioned in a linguistic discussion, unless some new evidence is discovered.
While there exists no direct evidence either in favor or against the immigration theory, this theory is pretty much unbelievable, because it requires for Dacia to have been depopulated.
For the lowlands at the North of Danube it is plausible that they might have been seriously depopulated, especially during several centuries when many invasions have passed through them.
On the other hand, it is completely implausible that the highlands of the Carpathian mountains have ever been depopulated. Those mountains offered exceptionally good life conditions, especially for people whose main activity was raising sheep. With the exception of a very well organized state, like the Roman Empire, no distant authority could have extended its influence into the mountains, so after the Roman Empire abandoned Dacia and there no longer was any central administration, the locals were left to themselves but they had no incentive whatsoever to abandon their good lands.
There is absolutely no chance that any invasion force passing through the lowlands would have risked to lose time and supplies and people by going up into the mountains in attempts to chase some locals who did not have anything valuable enough to be worth the effort.
So for me at least, such a theory based on the premise that some beautiful mountains with everything needed by humans for a decent life and well protected against outside intruders could at any time in history remain empty, waiting for the next passer-by to settle there, is absolutely ridiculous.
As said before, this has nothing to do with linguistics, so it should not be mentioned there without a good reason.
I daresay you’re one of the people here having a political debate, i.e. supporting a vision of your own linguistic community’s history based solely on your own gut feeling, and apparently unaware that your objections have already been dealt with among scholars for a good long time now.
The scenario that Romanian arrived from across the Danube does not require that the Romanian Carpathians were completely depopulated. Rather, it is possible that the region’s inhabitants first switched to Slavic – this is supported by a great deal of toponymic evidence – and then later both language shift and the arrival of other populations resulted in the extinction of the Transylvanian and Oltenian dialects of Common Slavonic in favor of Romanian and Hungarian instead.
Then, the contemporary view of the relationship between Romanian and Aromanian is not that they were mere sister dialects of Latin but split up at a much later date – they are too similar for an early split, and it appears that their first layer of Slavic loans is identical, so that means a split after the 6th century CE. The scenario that Romanian nationalists support requires believing that Aromanian results from Romanian speakers from Dacia migrating well to the southwest. That both Romanian and Aromanian came from the Central Balkans instead is viewed as vastly more likely, especially in the light of the advances in the reconstruction of early Albanian (because an array of evidence puts early Albanian in the Central Balkans, not Dacia).
> so after the Roman Empire abandoned Dacia and there no longer was any central administration, the locals were left to themselves
While I know that the story of their ancestors “left to themselves” after Rome withdrew from Dacia persists in Romanian pop culture, it never fit well with the facts. Romanian words like biserica ‘church’ suggest that Romanian’s Latin ancestor remained in contact with the rest of the Mediterranean world for a long time, because only after Constantine in the 4th century were basilica buildings used as Christian churches. Again, this would be easily explainable by an origin in the Central Balkans where those cultural contacts persisted.
The theory variant mentioned by you is only slightly less implausible than the depopulation variant and it also is a pure speculation that is not supported by
any evidence.
There is no doubt that when the Slavs have passed through the former Dacia province a part of them have stopped and settled there while the others have continued their journey to the South of the Danube. This explains the Slavic toponyms and the many Slavic loanwords into Romanian.
In your variant, the newly settled Slavs have been much more numerous than the Proto-Romanians, so they eventually assimilated the latter.
But then, several centuries later, there was a miraculous population explosion of the speakers of Proto-Romanian at the South of the Danube (even if in reality it is much more likely that their number was dwindling, by being assimilated by the Slavs that were more numerous in the South) and this great number of Proto-Romanians created out of nothing gathered their belongings and moved at the North of the Danube, where they created new settlements among the Slavs, and this time, unlike a few centuries ago, the number of Proto-Romanians was much greater than that of the Slavs, so the assimilation proceeded in reverse direction, restoring a Romance language as the main language of the land.
While this variant does not need the unbelievable depopulation hypothesis, it requires an unbelievable hypothesis about huge oscillations it the number of Proto-Romanians, for which there exists no explanation and no evidence.
I hardly believe that anyone can say with a straight face that this hypothesis is more plausible than the hypothesis conforming to Occam's razor, i.e. that the Slavs have settled both at the North and at the South of the Danube, but more of them have settled at the South, which was the endpoint of their journey (stopped by the Eastern Roman Empire), while the fewer that have settled at the North were early quitters, who did not want to wait in the hope of finding better lands.
In both places the Slavs have found Proto-Romanians, but eventually in the South most Proto-Romanians have been assimilated by the Slavs, while in the North the reverse happened.
This hypothesis does not include any implausible element, while the other 2 variants need either a depopulation or huge unmotivated demographic oscillations, which both are phenomena never observed in history anywhere else and for each of them there is no evidence.
Words like "basilica" have been obviously brought by missionaries coming from the Eastern Roman Empire, who spread the Christian Faith, and they do not provide any information about the location where this happened.
Again, your post does come across as political debate based on very vague things you have read on the internet, and not the actual literature in the field. I am baffled by your supposition that superior numbers are required for language shift to occur: this has not been believed for many decades now and is regarded as an elementary fallacy. And what I already mentioned above about Aromanian makes unsound your vision of two separate Proto-Romanians on either side of the Danube.
In general, I don’t see the point to debate further, because debate is not something that occurs on general-public internet fora like this. It is something that occurs in the appropriate scholarly venues. My original post up above aimed to emphasize that the contemporary consensus within linguistics – though it is only very slowly trickling into popular-science publications – does not see a role for “Dacian” in the Albanian–Romanian lexical isoglosses, and that has some important consequences for the reconstruction of Balkan linguistic history. That emerging consensus exists regardless of what you or I write here.
And since you are a representative of one of the peoples involved in a political squabble, it might be best for you to sit this out: in general in linguistics, it is often people from outside a region that do the best work on that region’s linguistic history, since they have no dog in the regional ethnic battles.
Like I have already said, I completely agree with what you have said that there is no role for “Dacian” in the Albanian–Romanian lexical isoglosses.
I also agree that this is not the place for such a debate, so I will not post any other comment.
I completely disagree with your claim that this is a political debate. I have not said a single word about anything outside linguistics before you have stepped outside linguistics by presenting the hypothesis that the Romanians have come into Romania from the South of the Danube as being a certain fact. And no, even when a few specialists agree with the same hypothesis, that is not a consensus, especially when the evidence for it is lacking.
What you have mentioned that Aromanian is very close to Romanian, so they must have separated very recently, is a glottochronological kind of argument that may make a hypothesis more plausible, but which can never prove anything with any certainty.
The distance between two sister languages usually increases in time, but not necessarily at an uniform rate. Two languages that become completely isolated may become reciprocally unintelligible after a century, but when there is a continuous contact between them, e.g. due to close commercial connections, they may remain little differentiated after hundreds of years, while having a parallel evolution that makes both of them very different from their parent language.
Much stronger arguments would be needed to support such a weird supposition like a population explosion in the South-Danubian Proto-Romanians that would push them over the Danube in sufficient numbers to occupy the entire much larger North-Danubian area and assimilate all the Slavs who supposedly had become dominant there.
You are right that which language assimilates another is not frequently determined by the number of speakers, even if in the cases when none of the languages is supported by any state authority and when there is no military or cultural dominance of one over the other, there remains not much that can determine the direction of assimilation besides the numbers of speakers.
However that is irrelevant for my argument that such a reversal of the direction of assimilation without any known reason is extremely improbable. Supposing that the Slavs had already assimilated the Romance speakers in the North and knowing for sure from later history that they were on the path of assimilating most of the Romance speakers from the South, what extraordinary events could reverse this and transform a group from the South that could have been only small and without any warrior abilities into a large population dominant over the very much larger Northern territory, despite its supposedly now Slavic population?
Even if for unknown reasons small numbers of South-Danubian Romance speakers would have been able to convert large numbers of North-Danubian Slavic speakers, it would still have been necessary for the South-Danubian Romance speakers to be able to provide an incredibly large number of emigrants only to be able to reach the entire North-Danubian territory, to be in proximity of all of its supposedly Slavic population.
This has nothing to do with politics, because nowadays it does not matter by which means Romanians have arrived in Romania, or the Americans in USA and so on.
Nevertheless, when a historical theory is illogical and it appears to have been conceived by some kind of armchair theoretician, who has never looked on a map, to see the scale of the things implied by their suppositions, e.g. how many people would be needed to occupy a territory densely enough to eventually dominate the former occupants, where could they have come from, and so on, it does not matter if they claim to be in consensus with their bros, such a theory must be challenged.
Related to this, if you're Romanian or happen to know Romanian I heartily recommend this recently published book [1] about the Balkans and South-Eastern Europe during the migrations of the Slavs. Sorin Paliga can have some controversial takes but otherwise I find him quite ok, all things considered, while Florin Curta is of course pretty well known when it comes to his studies on the migrations of the Slavs.
Albanian is a Paleo-Balkanic language which descends from a language closely related to the ancient Illyrian language(s) as Albanians descend from a mountainous pastoralist people with contact to Daco-Thracians and their romanized descendants - the early Romanians.
There is no certain way to say (with a straight face or without being biased yourself) that Dacians words are not present in the Romanian language.
Again, what you are saying represents a view that is decades superseded now and only hangs on in out-of-date references. The old idea that Albanian is closely related to ancient Illyrian has been criticized due to the fact that Illyrian evidence shows markedly different reflexes for some Indo-European phonemes than Albanian (see Matzinger’s 2008 paper “Die Albaner als Nachkommen der Illyrer aus der Sicht der historischen Sprachwissenschaft”). The same has been shown for Thracian with regard to Albanian and so “Daco-Thracian” is not a substantiated relative. The ancient Balkans were a place large enough for multiple Indo-European languages.
I work in the field of historical linguistics myself (albeit not in Balkan linguistics but an adjacent set of languages, but I keep up with that literature too and I am acquainted with the main scholars currently working therein), so what I am posting is informed and, were there interest, I could cite further publications.
What is known for sure is only that Albanian and Romanian share many words of unknown origin and that those words have been borrowed between the ancestors of the two languages at an early stage, e.g. before rhotacism has changed them.
However in most cases it is impossible to determine which was the direction of borrowing and there is no evidence to relate them with any of the languages named by ancient historians, because too little has been preserved of those.
Also, there is very little evidence, perhaps none, that the Thracian language and the Dacian were closely related languages. The toponyms that are assumed to come from these two languages are not similar.
The supposition that they are closely related is based almost only on the claim of Herodotus that the latter were a tribe belonging to the former, but that claim might have been based only on similarities in clothes and weapons, even without related languages.
Again, recent work has established the direction of borrowing for many items as Albanian > Romanian due to secure Indo-European etymologies for some of the Albanian material. And for certain other items, recently it has been proposed that the direction is dialectal Latin > Albanian, undercutting any claim to Dacian origins. You are right that little is preserved of certain ancient Balkans languages, but there is enough preserved in toponymy and onomastics in order to establish affiliations based on the reflexes of the PIE velar series and the vocalism. That is what, in the last 30 years or so of scholarship, has excluded Illyrian and Thracian from playing any role in the Albanian–Romanian lexical isoglosses.
Matzinger himself provides a single example of a word for which there is no doubt that the direction of borrowing was from Proto-Albanian to Romanian ("thark").
For other examples, he sends the reader to a work published by Stefan Schumacher in 2009, which I neither have nor can find online.
Perhaps you know the title or some link toward any of the recent work that you have mentioned, about these words shared by Albanian and Romanian.
While for the shared words of non-Latin origin it may be that most have been borrowed from Proto-Albanian to Proto-Romanian, the shared words of Latin origin may have been very well borrowed from Proto-Romanian to Proto-Albanian.
We cannot know if there has been any descendence relationship between the speakers of Latin from whom the speakers of Proto-Albanian have borrowed words and the current speakers of Romanian, but we also cannot know whether the contrary is true.
For Indo-European etymologies of some other Albanian words shared with Romanian, look to the work of Eric Hamp: off the top of my head I can list his IE etymologies for the Albanian counterparts of Romanian vatră, strungă, and bunget that seem generally accepted. Getting up to speed with Hamp’s work will likely require some travel on your part, because Hamp tended to publish squibs in some fairly obscure collections and Festschriften that are only held by a handful of libraries and are not online. Orel’s IE etymology for the Albanian counterpart of Ro. zară is, I believe, the current consensus.
> The shared words of Latin origin may have been very well borrowed from Proto-Romanian to Proto-Albanian.
Yes, certainly. But if those Proto-Romanian words can be shown to represent dialectal Latin features that came to the Balkans from outside, then there is no case for a Dacian origin for them. Dan Ungureanu has argued this recently for a number of items, and a few of my colleagues working with these languages think this represents a great contribution.
I agree than despite traditional claims, there is no known relationship between Dacian and any of the words shared by Albanian and Romanian.
Unfortunately, Dacian is likely to remain one of the least known ancient languages. While for Thracian there has been some small recent progress and it seems that it might have been more closely related to Phrygian and Greek than previously believed, for Dacian it is unlikely that there will be any future discovery of inscriptions that could provide extra information.
> Again, what you are saying represents a view that is decades superseded now and only hangs on in out-of-date references.
A paper / theory being recent doesn't magically make it true or generally accepted.
> I work in the field of historical linguistics myself (...) so what I am posting is informed
This is a clear "appeal to authority fallacy".
But in all Matzinger's work he doesn't actually claim that Dacian words aren't to be found in Romanian language, is it?
Without proofs of what an extinct language actually sounded like, saying that there isn't any trace of it in any other language, and backing this up by making an appeal to authority is a biased view from my pov.
On HN people usually defer to experts in the sciences, as it is about taking the word of someone with the required training in the field and familiarity with the literature. As I said, I would be happy to cite lots of publications, but on a general forum like this it’s not clear that other posters have the time and interest in reading it all, plus the necessary background for it – this field usually involves 6–10 years of initial university study, after all.
> But in all Matzinger's work he doesn't actually claim that Dacian words aren't to be found in Romanian language, is it?
Matzinger’s view (which generally represents the consensus now inside the field) is indeed that that layer of the Romanian vocabulary can be explained through Albanian without any need to conjecture about Dacian influence.
> Without proofs of what an extinct language actually sounded like
The respective phoneme inventories of Proto-Albanian, Vulgar Latin, and Thracian and Illyrian are well established. Why did you think that proof was lacking?
Dacian and its phoneme inventory are much less known than any of those languages.
I doubt that it has any relationship with any of the old Albanian or Romanian words, but its relationships are mostly unknown, so nothing certain can be said about it.
There has been a theory that Dacian might have been more closely related to the Baltic languages, which could have been possible based on its position in space and time.
There is not enough evidence to determine if there is any truth in this hypothesis, but as an unscientific impression there is a certain resemblance between the few known Dacian toponyms and personal names with Baltic names.
> No, the idea that a certain layer of Romanian words comes from Dacian is superseded.
As a Romanian that idea is new to me, and I've just gone through half of this book [1] written by two quite decent Romanian historians about the Balkans during the Slav migrations (one of those authors, Florin Curta, is quite well knonwn)
> The Romanian and Albanian languages both spread to their present areas from the Central Balkans,
Again, as a Romanian this is highly, highly debatable and controversial. I personally think that there was some migration, but saying, point blank, that Romanian spread from "areas from the Central Balkans", which means South of the Danube, is most definitely not an established historical fact.
"For a more scientific take on the Jewish origin debate, recent DNA analysis of Ashkenazic Jews – a Jewish ethnic group – revealed that their maternal line is European. It has also been found that their DNA only has 3% ancient ancestry which links them with the Eastern Mediterranean (also known as the Middle East) – namely Israel, Lebanon, parts of Syria, and western Jordan. This is the part of the world Jewish people are said to have originally come from – according to the Old Testament. But 3% is a minuscule amount, and similar to what modern Europeans as a whole share with Neanderthals. So given that the genetic ancestry link is so low, Ashkenazic Jews’ most recent ancestors must be from elsewhere."
"The tolerance of the Persians encouraged the Jews to adopt Persian names, words, traditions, and religious practices, and climb up the social ladder gaining a monopoly on trade. They also converted other people who were living along the Black Sea, to their Jewish faith. This helped to expand their global network.
Among these converts were the Alans (Iranian nomadic pastoral people), Greeks, and Slavs who resided along the southern shores of the Black Sea. Upon conversion, they translated the Old Testament into Greek, built synagogues, and continued expanding the Jewish trade network."
"The Asian group of these DNA mutations, found in Ashkenazic Jews, likely originated from the Ashina elite and other Khazar clans, who converted from Shamanism to Judaism. This means that the Ashina and core Khazar clans were absorbed by the Ashkenazic Jews." - ["Ashkenazic Jews’ mysterious origins unravelled by scientists thanks to ancient DNA" (2018)](https://theconversation.com/ashkenazic-jews-mysterious-origi...)
I can’t comment about the DNA evidence as I am hardly an expert, but they go both ways (cohen lines genes).
However, the entire ‘Ashkenazi Jews are Khazar’ theory has antisemite origins, and it is well known that Jews were already all over Europe at the times of the Roman Empire, way before any Khazar entity
"This study applies Benford’s law to detect anomalies in county-level vote data for the 2020 US presidential election. Most prominent distribution violations are observed with Republican vote counts in blue states, all vote counts in states won by the Democratic candidate, and Democratic vote counts in swing states. Distributions are anomalous in swing states won by the Democratic nominee and not anomalous in swing states won by the Republican nominee. The results are robust to two-digit analysis, Monte Carlo simulations of p-values, broad or narrow swing state definitions, and when compared to distributions observed in 2008, 2012, and 2016 elections." - ["Detecting Anomalies in the 2020 US Presidential Election Votes with Benford’s Law" (2020)](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3728626)
Check the paper and references first before blindly submitting by title alone.
A principal reference to that paper is [1] which strongly states:
The proliferation of elections in even those states that are arguably anything but democratic has given rise to a focused interest on developing methods for detecting fraud in the official statistics of a state's election returns.
Among these efforts are those that employ Benford's Law, with the most common application being an attempt to proclaim some election or another fraud free or replete with fraud.
Despite its apparent utility in looking at other phenomena, Benford's Law is problematical at best as a forensic tool when applied to elections.
Looking at simulations designed to model both fair and fraudulent contests as well as data drawn from elections we know, on the basis of other investigations, were either permeated by fraud or unlikely to have experienced any measurable malfeasance, we find that conformity with and deviations from Benford's Law follow no pattern.
It is not simply that the Law occasionally judges a fraudulent election fair or a fair election fraudulent. Its “success rate” either way is essentially equivalent to a toss of a coin, thereby rendering it problematical at best as a forensic tool and wholly misleading at worst.
Yes - that is a paper that applys Benfords Law to US Election results to see how that turns out .. but NO that paper dos not prove any fraud took place .. it jut reports what happens if Benfords Law is used.
The most startling finding, according to the graphs, was that Democrat candidates in swing states have slightly more vote counts whose leading digit was a 4 and slightly fewer starting with a 5 than the null hypothesis distribution...
