Romanian a MADE up language

Another interesting findi   Wed Feb 15, 2006 1:16 am GMT
Origin and History

Rumanian is picturesquely described either as a barbarized Latin or as a Latinized barbarian tongue. Undoubtedly, such extremely diverging definitions reflect the complicated problem to find out a consistent explanation of its emergence and evolution. The official thesis supported in contemporary Rumania states that Rumanian developed from the Vulgar Latin of the Roman colonists who settled Dacia (modern Transylvania) after its conquest by emperor Trajan in 106 AD. Though the Roman legions abandoned the area in 271 under the pressure of the barbarians, a portion of the Romanized population could survive, as shepherds and primitive farmers, in the Carpathian mountains. In the 9th century, when conditions settled, these Romance-speaking people gradually reoccupied Transylvania. In the late 13th century they moved eastward and established the principalities of Wallachia (1290) and Moldova (1349).

It is known that after 106 Dacia was colonized by a few settlers from the Roman provinces in the Near East (mainly Syria) who could use a corrupted version of Latin as a kind of lingua franca to communicate with the administration and the population in the adjacent areas. Evidently in 271 these settlers were moved southward of the Danube, as the Romans established two provinces of the name of Dacia in the territories of the present North-Eastern Serbia and Western Bulgaria. It is noteworthy that Rumanian does not contain words of Dacian origin, while it shares some old-Balkan and non-Latin terms with Albanian. Thus these two languages reflect special historical contacts of early date.

It is not impossible that the ancestors of modern Rumanians were in the late Antiquity slaves and servants engaged in agriculture and cattle breeding for their masters, the rich Roman colonists of the fortified Balkan cities. Supposedly, the two groups communicated in a kind of creolized Latin. In the course of the successive barbarian invasions in the 5th--8th c. the established political and socio-economic order on the Balkans was reversed. The city-dwellers could survive under the protection of the city-walls, but as the Eastern Roman (or Byzantine) empire was predominantly a Greek speaking state, they became subsequently Hellenized, while their former slaves and servants fled to the mountains, which were suitable for livestock raising, and preserved the Romance tongue (technically known as Eastern Romance), as evidenced by the fact that the Slavs called them Vlachs. The self-designation as Rumanians, under the etymological form of Romîni, is attested in the 16th century (the texts of Coresi),

See the graph Derivation of Romance Languages from Latin.
See Wallachians, Walloons, Welschen etc.
See for more details Vlachs.
The Vlachs concentrated in the south-western parts of the Balkans, mainly in the regions around modern Albania. There they could escape not only the invadors, but also the effective control of the Byzantine authorities. In the course of the centuries the Vlachs absorbed a lot of outlaws, mainly of Slavic origin. After the invasions ceased, the Vlachs began migrating northward. In the 9th-10th centuries they were present in the mountains of the First Bulgarian empire (681-1018), which dominated the inner continental area of the Balkan peninsula. Evidently in this period they adopted for their liturgy the Old Church Slavonic, the official language of medieval Bulgaria. The close and continuous contacts with the Slavic milieu left a profound impact on the vocabulary and phonology of their language.
It is possible that the Vlachs were forced by the Bulgarian emperors to move northward of the Danube and thus to reach Transylvania, which, since the end of the 9th century, was in Hungarian hands. Settling there, the Vlachs gradually outnumbered the other nationalities, making the area a homeland of their own. From Transylvania they penetrated eastward of the Carpathians and established the principalities of Wallachia and Moldova. In these countries Old Church Slavonic was used as official language till the 18th century.

The migrations had as a result that the unity of the Eastern Romance language was broken and between 500 and 1000 AD there developped several distinct tongues:

Arumanian (technically known also as Macedo-Rumanian), spoken in scattered communities in Albania, Epirus, Thessaly and Macedonia;
Megleno-Rumanian around the city of Meglena in Southern Macedonia (now in Greece);
Dalmatian along the northeastern shore of the Adriatic sea, mainly in Ragusa (Dubrovnik);
Istro-Rumanian on the Istrian peninsula in the far north-western corner of the Balkan region;
Daco-Rumanian (or Rumanian proper) in the area to the north of the Danube (Transylvania, Wallachia and Moldova).

The first known Daco-Rumanian text is a letter written in 1521 to a judge of Braşov, though some manuscript translations of religious texts show Transylvanian dialect features and may be earlier. The language was written in Cyrillic alphabet and the Vlachs of this period, being Eastern Orthodox, identified themselves to a great extent with Slavdom. Italian travellers in eastern Europe noticed that the language of the Vlachs contained many Latin words also existing in Italian. Knowing that the Roman Empire once dominated Dacia Traiana, it was supposed that the Vlachs were the descendants of the Romans, who once subdued the Dacians. Only in the early 19th century, however, the idea of Romance identity became popular amongst the Vlachs. In 1859 the principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia formed a unified state, that assumed the name of Rumania. The Roman (Latin) alphabet was introduced and there were applied remarkable efforts to Latinize the language, while purging it of Slavisms. The emerging nation turned toward other Romance countries, especially France, for cultural inspiration.
greg   Wed Feb 15, 2006 6:19 am GMT
Nostradamus : et si tu te contentais de ***LIRE*** et ***COMPRENDRE*** le message envoyé plutôt que de me faire dire ce que je n'ai pas dit ? T'aurais moins l'air d'un troll..
Sorin   Wed Feb 15, 2006 10:36 am GMT
>>Nostradamus, I agree with you.

The only good thing about french is their women and how they speak it, perhaps OLD french sounded more like latin. But evolution for latin has really sucked out all the latin intonation.<<

greg, the post from above is impersonating me.

I am so curious where this trolls and impersonators are coming from ?

“Nostradamus”
“Another interesting findi”
“something of interest”
“caveat emptor “
“Di piero “
“Pro forma patria”

These insecure Anti-Latin trolls are inciting and impersonating real posters.

They all have something against French and other Romance languages, but know they just discovered Romanian. LOL.They are so pathetic.
Sorin   Wed Feb 15, 2006 10:49 am GMT
These trolls are adopting an Adam style “copy paste” Anti-Latin underground subcultural rubbish.

Why there is so much Germanic –Latin hate on Antimoon ?
Easterner   Wed Feb 15, 2006 11:06 am GMT
I do not know the exact history of Romanian "purism", but I am convinced that Romanian is the language of the descendants of Romanised inhabitants of the Balkans, which became saturated with Slavic loanwords as a result of the co-existence with the Slavs and the influence of Old Church Slavic, the language of the Eastern Orthodox Church. What I know is that in the 19th century, Romanian was somewhat "refreshed" with words of mainly Italian origin, but I don't doubt it was a Romance language from the outset.

It was interesting to read the long post above on the relationship of various Romance dialects on the Balkans (and on other issues I mentioned in the above paragraph). It is exactly in harmony with what I read in a book on balcanology. Although many Romanian scholars still uphold the theory of the Daco-Romanian continuity, there are others (also Romanians) who have taken another look at it. The most notable example is the Romanian historian Lucian Boia, who in 1997 published a book titled "Istorie şi mit în conştiinţa româneasca" ("History and myth in the Romanian consciousness"), which came as a shock to many of those who took Daco-Romanian continuity for granted. Actually, the book is about the evolution of myths that have shaped the theory of origins current in Romanian consciousness. It should be mentioned that I have not read it myself, but have read references to it, and some reviews.

By the way, the term "Daco-Romanian" was coined by the 15th-century Italian Humanist scholar Gian Francesco Poggio di Guccio Bracciolini (doubtlessly in view of the fact that Romanians lived on the territory of fomer Dacia), and later this term was used to support the argument that Romanians are the direct descendants of a mixture of Dacians and Romans. However, some linguistic evidence points to an Albanian influence on Romanian, which suggests that Romanian must have evolved to the south from the former province of Dacia, on the southern and northern coast of the river Danube, approximately, or still a little more to the south. By assuming this, one does not deny its essentially Romance character, but the mutual influence of various languages of the Balkans on each other still raises many unanswered questions.

I personally don't think the origin theory has much relevance today, except as a subject of strictly scientific discussion. It seems to be confirmed, however, that Romanian is also a part of the Eastern Romance "language block" of which the other Romance dialects of the Balkans also belong, regardless of where it actually evolved. As such, it can be considered as similar in status to the other Romance languages, which developed on a non-Romance substratum. It has actually preserved some features characteristic to the languages which are sometimes supposed to have once formed a "linguistic union" or "Sprachbund" on the Balkans: Albanian, Macedonian, Bulgarian and Romanian (together with other, scattered Romance dialects). One of the most important of such features is the post-positive article, common to all of the above.
Anti-troll   Wed Feb 15, 2006 11:16 am GMT
The Anti-Romanian text (copy-pasted) on Antimoon is hosted on a website (C) Zdravko Batzarov.

Zdravko Batzarov. Hm. Typical, Slavic name, Slavs are Romania’s neighbours, insecurely and desperately trying to denigrate the Romanian language and their Latin ancestry. Just like Stalin tried with Moldavian (Romanians), preaching they are a different Slavic nation.

One famous Romanian once said:

"The only good neighbour we have is the Black Sea"
Easterner   Wed Feb 15, 2006 12:41 pm GMT
Maybe I am wrong, but nobody on this thread seemed to me to deny essentially that Romanian is a Romance language, although it has been impacted by Slavic languages - the two are not mutually exclusive, in the same way as English does not cease to be essentially Germanic despite the fact that most of its current vocabulary is of Latin/Romance origin. It would be wrong to expect that any language can preserve its "pure" character, especially in such an ethnically mixed surrounding as the Balkans has always been. Modern Romanian seems to me mostly to use words of Latin origin, by the way, although there are some synonyms for the same concept, of different origin (for example, "timp" and "vreme", for example, the first one Latin, the second one Slavic, but both meaning "time"). And of course, a number of Slavic loanwords have survived, despite a conscious attempt at "purification" (such "purification" has also happened to other languages, such as Croatian or Turkish, to take two random examples, but this does not make them made-up languages).

The Daco-Romanian theory is another matter, but it is a fact that even some Romanian scholars are now claiming that the former emphasis on the Daco-Romanian continuity was part of a national myth. Recent research has found out that Romanian has some morphological elements in common with other languages to the south (see my previous post above), pointing to the possibility of their co-existence in an earlier phase of history. It is not wrong to revise even the most established beliefs from time to time, when you have reasons to do so. But again, questioning a theory or elements of it does not mean that one denies the Romance character of Romanian, or that one is anti-Romanian.

N.B.: I am from Hungary, and I know what I am talking about - we also have myths, and still some people subscribe to them. On the other hand, just to avoid any misunderstanding, I have never personally had anything against any inhabitant of a neighbouring country, even despite the fact I know that the co-existence of various Central and East European nations has not always been peaceful. It depends on your attitude and the capacity to shape your own values, I guess.
S.P.Q.R   Wed Feb 15, 2006 12:50 pm GMT
@ Easterner
I agree with your position, Romanian is ''De iure'' a romance language, but
would you might consider that the roman influence lasted on the region less than 300 hindrued years, so the language had not to incorporate much latin structure, considering then the barbarian invasion,wich turned the romanian grammar into a mixture of latin and slavic syntax, consider that the gerund in romanain isn't comparable to any of the other latin laguages,for that matter the participle even, so if the syntax changes, the language shapes too...........
Guest   Wed Feb 15, 2006 1:10 pm GMT
If there is any “made up” language that is certainly English.

English is

30% French
30% Latin
25% Germanic
10% Greek
5% others

Not Romanian, 75% latin .
Antimoon archive   Wed Feb 15, 2006 1:55 pm GMT
Posted by "Romanian" a real Romanian from antimoon.
________________________________________________________

Romanian Tuesday, April 26, 2005, 23:45 GMT Re-posting :

>>Only Romanian conserved- declensions and the NEUTER gender from Classical Latin* (not present in Vulgar Latin {Late Latin} or other Romance languages)

Ex: Classical Latin* and Archaic Latin words preserved in Romanian:

Barbat from (Barbatus)– Man (other Romance –inexistent )
Inteleg from (Intellego)– Understand (other Romance –inexistent )
Unde from (Unde)-Where (other Romance –dove,donde,onde,ou )
Frate from (Frater) Brother (other Romance: irmao hermano frere,fratello )
(There are other hundreds of words identical with Classical Latin*)

Genders: Masculine, Feminine and NEUTER

Ex:
Feminine : carte-book
Masculine : caine-dog
NEUTER :mere-apple,

Obviously Romanian was influenced by many other languages but most Latin words are intact as found only in Classical Latin* and archaic Latin
That is why other Romance speakers don’t understand Romanian – not just because of the Slavic loan words but due to the fact that Romanian has a Classical Latin* nucleus, not a Vulgar Latin (Late latin) core.

“Intellego” is Cicero’s Latin but no Romance speaker understand me when I say in Romanian: Inteleg! (I understand) (Ex: other Romance: entender,intendere,comprendre)

Intelegi ? :-)

*I use the term “Classical Latin” as in Cicero's Ancient Latin -with a more complex grammar structure…not necessarily a POSH Latin!

Archaic Latin - Pre Classical Latin
Classical Latin - Latin in the Ancient World
Vulgar Latin - Late Latin
Medieval Latin - Present-day Latin <<
Menelaus   Wed Feb 15, 2006 2:02 pm GMT
It's so funny, that only Romanians despite being sorounded by Slavs, conserved so many Ancient and Clasical Latin words that other "big brothers" Romance languages failed to conserve.

That proves Romanian is by far the most archaic Romance language, therfore the closest to Clasical Latin
Nostradamus   Wed Feb 15, 2006 2:16 pm GMT
Greg, first I didn't say a lie, French is hard to understand and pronounce with respect to the other Romance Languages which is a disadvantage for it and probably the reason French has lost popularity worldwide. I've noted that you attack any comment that shows such reality or that somehow unties French from Latin.

"They all have something against French and other Romance languages, but know they just discovered Romanian. LOL.They are so pathetic."

You are the pathetic one here Souris, I'm a native Romance Language speaker too. Ha!
S.P.Q.R   Wed Feb 15, 2006 3:19 pm GMT
@ Menelaus.
It preserved classicla latin word,but dacia was colonised between the 2dc, bit strange huh? The roman soldier spike classical latin? Guess not.
Stefaniel P Spaniel   Wed Feb 15, 2006 5:11 pm GMT
Throughout many of these posts there seems to be a more-or-less unstated assumption that "Slavic" equates with 'barbaric' as an influence on the Latin and Dacian origins of Romanian. Certainly the Slavs of the first millenium AD were barbarians compared to Europeans today, and perhaps to classical Romans (despite their use of slaves and propensity to killing lower class people at random.) Whether the Slavs of the 6th -8th century can be called barbarian compared to the Dacians, who left no literature or stone buildings of any note is more debateable.
Whether modern Romania can be called more 'civilised' than present day nations such as the Poles, Czechs and Slovenians is clear. They can't.

Quite inevitably a kind of competitive and foolish comparison of "peoples" as some kind of ethnic blocks slips into what was (hopefully) supposed to be a discusssion of language. Although a provocative title like "Romanian a made up[ language" perhaps wasn't the most sensible start.
Menelaus   Wed Feb 15, 2006 6:04 pm GMT
< Menelaus.
It preserved classicla latin word,but dacia was colonised between the 2dc, bit strange huh? The roman soldier spike classical latin? Guess not.>

What do you know about Romanian in the first place? from TV and Radio ? I can give you a free lesson. My grandfather is Aromanian or (Vlach).And I speak Aromanian (a Proto-Romanian variety).

Many big cities in Romania still have Dacian names:
Deva
Sucidava
Sarmissegetuza
Ziridava
Petrodava
Argedava
Tamasidava

Dacia was Romanised in the 115 Anno domini, for a period of 170 years. the arrivals of Slavic tribes and Finno-Ugric tribes noted and described a Romanic speaking population and a Romance language Proto-Romanian. The first Romance language that split from Latin. And the most conservative and archaic.

The province of Dacia (Romania) was named “Dacia Felix” (The happy Dacia ) attracted many educated and wealthy Roman population, Dacia being one of the richest Roman province, because of the massive gold discovered in the Apuseni mountains. Al Dacians were given Roman citizenship.

It is known that Constantine the Great - who was born in Dacia Aureliana - and took the title Dacicus, and initiated the building or restoration of a bridge across Danube into Dacia Traiana. The Roman emperor Galerius, also born in Dacia Aureliana and whose mother was from Dacia Traiana, had became an enemy of the Roman name and proposed that the Eastern Roman Empire to be called the Dacian Empire , later ROMANIA (the bizantine empire).Romanized Dacians continued to live in the same place, Transilvania from Latin (Tran-Silvanum) and assimilated the non-Romanized Dacians.

Romanian language was fully developed at the end of the 6th century.

While countries like Spain and Portugal still spoke in parallel Vulgar Latin till 1200 !Romanian language is the closest to classical Latin in grammar and morphology, despite the Slavic influence.

Romanian is not just the closest to classical Latin but is the closest to even Ancient Latin or (pre-clasical latin) the only romance language still using Pre-Clasical latin words an archaic Latin from year -600 (Ante Christus)

Barbat - in Romanian (Man) in English
Barbu in Aromanian (Vlach )
from Barbatus Pre-Clasical Latin (Latin etymology from Barba-beard)

While the other western Romance languages Occitan, Catalan, Castilian, Portuguese : diluted in a soup and intermixed like interlingua. Romanian and Sardinian are by far the most isolated and the closest to Clasical Latin and the most archaic Latin languages.

The Modern Romanians after 2500 years still call a man, BARBAT (A beard holder) from Ancient Latin (500 years before the Classical Latin) or 2500 years of Latin history.