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[edit] Dacia and Romanization
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Map of Balkans with regions inhabited by Romanians/Vlachs highlighted
The Romanian territory was inhabited in ancient times by the Dacians, an Indo-European people. They were defeated by the Roman Empire in 106 and part of Dacia (Oltenia, Banat and Transylvania) became a Roman province. Because the province was rich in ores, and especially silver and gold ,[1] the Romans heavily colonized the province,[2] brought with them the Vulgar Latin as the language of administration and commerce, and started a period of intense romanization (giving birth to proto-Romanian language.[3] [4] But in the 3rd century AD, with the pressure of Free Dacians and invasions of migratory populations such as Goths, the Roman Empire was forced to pull out of Dacia in 271 AD, thus making it the first province to be abandoned. [5] [6] Whether the Romanians are the descendants of these people that abandoned the area and settled south of the Danube or of the people that remained in Dacia is a matter of debate. (See also Origin of the Romanians.)
[edit] Proto-Romanian
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Due to its geographical isolation, Romanian was probably among the first of the Romance languages that split from Latin. It received little influence from other Romance languages until the modern period (until the middle of the 18th century), which can explain why it is one of the most uniform languages in Europe. It is the most important of the remaining Eastern Romance languages and more conservative than other Romance languages in nominal morphology. Romanian has preserved declension, but whereas Latin had seven cases, Romanian has five" the nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, and the vocative, and still holds the neuter gender as well. However, the verb morphology of Romanian has shown the same move towards a compound perfect and future tense as the other Romance languages.
All the dialects of Romanian are believed to have been unified in a Proto-Romanian language up to sometime between the 7th and 10th centuries, when the area came under the influence of the Byzantine Empire. It was then when Romanian became influenced by the Slavic languages and to some degree Greek. For example, Aromanian, one of the closest relatives of Romanian, has very few Slavic words. Also, the variations in the Daco-Romanian dialect (spoken throughout Romania and Moldova) are very small.
[edit] Daco-Romanian
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The use of this uniform Daco-Romanian dialect extends well beyond the borders of the Romanian state: a Romanian-speaker from Moldova speaks the same language as a Romanian-speaker from the Serbian Banat. Romanian was influenced by Slavic (due to migration/assimilation, and feudal/ecclesiastical relations), Greek (Byzantine, then Phanariote), Turkish, and Hungarian, while the other Romance languages adopted words and features of Germanic.
[edit] References
- ^ Dacia-Province of the Roman Empire. United Nations of Roma Victor.
- ^ Deletant, Dennis (1995). Colloquial Romanian. New York: Routledge, 1.
- ^ Matley, Ian (1970). Romania; a Profile. Praeger, 85.
- ^ Giurescu, Constantin C. (1972). The Making of the Romanian People and Language. Bucharest: Meridiane Publishing House, 43, 98-101,141.
- ^ Eutropius; Justin, Cornelius Nepos (1886). Eutropius, Abridgment of Roman History. London: George Bell and Sons.
- ^ Watkins, Thayer. The Economic History of the Western Roman Empire.
[edit] See also
