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The Romanian-Albanian Connection
A good amount of the non-Latin features present in Romanian language have their correspondence in Albanian, not only concerning lexicon but also structure, phraseology and idioms. These characteristics belong to two linguistic periods: the substratum, that is the language spoken by the Vlach before their Romanization ‒which may be the same of Albanian or a similar language‒, and the subsequent close contact between both peoples throughout a long period, mainly regarding their common life-style as shepherds.
Since the controversy about the origin of Albanians is presented by two main theories, one proposing the Illyrian stem and the other the Thracian stem, the advocates of the Daco-Roman myth vehemently support the second possibility, as they cannot deny the strong links between the Vlach and the Albanian peoples in early times. It is not our task to discuss about the origin of Albanians here, and in any case it is irrelevant whether one or the other theory is the right one, because the whole complex of proofs point out in a definitive manner to the area of present-day Albania and surrounding territory as the birthplace of the early Romanians and not the eastern side of the Balkans ‒ even if the Albanians would not be autochthonous but coming from any other place, it is in the area they live today where both peoples met and not elsewhere. A further factor is that there is not any historical record attesting any hypothetic migration of Albanians from Dacia (and there is not any vestige of their presence in that land), while there are many documents proving that the Vlach people lived since the early centuries by the southern Adriatic coastland ‒even before the Roman occupation of Dacia!‒ and as a matter of fact, there are still historic Romanian communities (Aromanians) living there.
Linguistic research has determined that most of the words shared by Romanian and Albanian are not loans from one tongue to the other but have a common origin in the substratum, before than these two languages began to be distinguished from each other. Romanian terms that are similar to Albanian mainly regard primary elements like body parts, names of animals and plants, and words specifically related with the pastoral life. It is significant that such vocabulary in Romanian is not found in Slavic or any other language spoken in the Balkans but only in Albanian. Another interesting fact concerns the very name of the capital city of Romania: Bucureşti, a word that is similar to the Albanian term "bukurisht", having the same meaning.
While the Vlach people were thoroughly Latinized, Albanian language has also received the influence of Latin since early times. A common territory and life-style shared by both peoples have produced the same semantic changes in both languages: a considerable number of Latin terms have undergone identical changes of meaning without parallel in any other tongue, and they cannot have happened just by chance or by any logical reason except because both peoples were living in a common environment and in the same territory.
Among the unusual features present in Romanian that are explainable by a comparison with Albanian we find also the definite article, that in Classic Latin precedes the noun but is enclitic in Romanian and follows the same patterns as in Albanian, and the personal pronoun in accusative case, that contains the suffix ~ne, exactly like in Albanian.
The Romanian-Italic Relationship
If the Slavic, Hungarian and Albanian terms were removed from Romanian language, it would fully qualify as a Southern Italian dialect. There are many structural, phonetic and idiomatic aspects that are amazingly similar between Romanian and Salentine-Apulian, Neapolitan, Calabrian and other tongues of Southern Italy, and also some elements of the North-eastern Italian dialects spoken by the Adriatic coastland.
Today in Salento (the "heel" of Italy) we can hear that local people greet each other saying "ce faci?", that is exactly like in Romanian, or else in Sicily they leave each other saying "ne vedem", which is also the same expression used in Romanian; if we are in Naples perhaps we can by chance hear the phrase "sora ta" with the same literal meaning as in Romanian, or maybe that a young man would "nsura", pronounced like "însura" in Romanian and with the same meaning... These are only few examples from a long number of similar parallelisms. Such amount of expressions are not a coincidence but the result of an active interaction between the early ancestors of Romanians and Southern Italians in the period previous to the arrival of the Slavic peoples in the Balkans, that is, before the 6th century c.e. ‒ This evidence is not unknown by the Daco-Roman myth supporters, but purposely neglected.
From all the common features that regard the Italic dialects on one side and Romanian on the other, it results evident that both groups have undergone the same evolution process since the early stage, when still Classic Latin was spoken, until the arrival of the Slavs in the Balkans, for about six centuries of close contact and geographic proximity. Concerning the similarities between Salentine Apulian and Romanian, a possible link may be the ancient Messapii and Iapigii, peoples that inhabited on both sides of the Adriatic Sea, though mainly in Italy. The origin of these peoples has still not been determined with certainty; some scholars suggest that they were Illyric tribes that sailed to the opposite shore and settled in the south-eastern region of Italy, while others assign them a Mycenean origin. It is not relevant where did they come from, but it is significant the fact that many toponyms and inscriptions left by the Messapii in Italy have a correspondence on the opposite shore of the Adriatic. They probably established colonies or trade centres in Illyria or were in some way related with Illyric peoples. We discard the possibility that the Vlach were Messapii because of their quite different life-styles: the Vlach have been shepherds since old, while the Messapii were strenuous warriors. Notwithstanding, as the same language may be shared by completely different peoples and linguistics by itself alone is irrelevant to determine ethnic origins, it is however essential for establishing where a people sojourned and for how long. So, according to their common characteristics, we can assert that Vlach and Messapii have been neighbours and once they both have adopted Latin as their language, the tongues spoken by both peoples followed a similar evolution.
The Greek influence over both Southern Illyria and Southern Italy ‒called "Magna Grecia"‒ has affected Romanian as well as the Italic dialects in some aspects, like the replacement of the infinitive in composed verbal forms. It is noticeable that Italic and Southern Balkan languages, as well as Romanian, behave according to a common pattern that is exclusive of them, which consist in replacing the infinitive with conjunctive. This feature is absent in Central/Northern Italian dialects. Another phenomenon concerning the infinitive that is verified in the same way in Romanian and Italic is the elision of the Latin ending ~re; for example: cânta[re], asculta[re], dormi[re], etc.
Regarding the pronoun, the genitive used as dative was quite a rarity in Classic Latin but became the rule within a geographically continuous area during the process of transition towards the Romance languages, a case that would not have been verified in Romanian if it was spoken in a separate region. It is from Mediaeval Latin that we can explain, for instance, the use of leur, loro and lor in French, Italian and Romanian respectively (while the same pattern is not valid for the other Neo-Latin languages).
The plural of the noun in modern Italian and Romanian is formed by replacing or adding an ending vowel (~i/~e), while in all the other Romance languages consists in adding a final ~s to the singular form. When these two different patterns arose, they were sharply defined geographically, being the ending vowel the characteristic of the languages spoken from Tuscany southwards.
There are still more features, morphologic and phonetic, which Romanian shares with Southern Italian dialects, like the postposition of the possessive pronoun that is typical of Neapolitan dialect, which assumed the same structure as Romanian, or the frequent ending ~u for the male gender nouns. Romanian shares some linguistic characteristics also with Sardinian as well as with North-eastern Italian dialects and with the unfortunately extinct Dalmatian language.
It is relevant for our research to remark that there is hardly a Latin-derived word in Romanian related with administration, science, arts and crafts, and whatever belongs to normal activity of city-dwellers: this fact is another evidence against the Daco-Roman myth, because Roman occupants in Dacia were officials, legionaries and civilian settlers, not farmers or shepherds; therefore, how is it possible that Romanian language has not inherited any of these words that belonged to the essential Roman vocabulary in that period? Even non-Latin languages have at least few Latin-derived terms concerning this aspect. As a matter of fact, such words in Romanian have not a Germanic origin either, which leads us inexorably to the conclusion that Romanians were not in the Carpathian Basin during the centuries of Gothic-Gepid rule. The Romanian word for city is oraş, whose Magyar origin (város) suggests that they began to dwell in urban centres only when they got in touch with the Hungarian realm ‒ namely, when the mediaeval Romanians, then known as Vlach, were offered asylum in Transylvania by the Hungarian monarchs when the Turks seized Walachia.
Romanian language shows overwhelming evidence to have followed the whole evolution of Latin spoken in the south-western half of the Balkans, that belonged to the Eastern Roman Empire until the Slavic invasions in the 7th century c.e., period in which the ancestors of modern Romanians, namely, the Vlach, had an intensive contact with the peoples living in Southern Italy and by the Adriatic coastlands.
The Slavic Influence
Romanian language has received a relevant contribution from Southern Slavic, even though such influence has been artificially reduced in the later 19th century c.e. by the so-called "re-Latinization" of Romanian ‒ actually, it must be properly referred to as "Latinization", because it was not a return to a previous situation but the introduction of new foreign elements to reform the language. It was also within this process that the former national name was changed from Vlah to Român. The original Romanian alphabet, that was Cyrillic until 1868 c.e., was replaced by the Latin alphabet, to which some additional characters (not existing in any other Neo-Latin language) were added in order to represent the phonemic elements that previously were satisfactorily supplied by the Cyrillic characters. Through this process of Latinization, the percentage of Slavic terms in Romanian had been halved. Nevertheless, there are still many Slavic words and other linguistic features that attest the long sojourn of the Vlach/Romanians in the Slavic territories south of the lower Danube, mainly in Bulgaria.
One of the features of Slavic origin that has been widely exploited in favour of the Daco-Roman myth regards a Roman character that was adopted by Southern Slavs since they settled in the Balkans, that is Trajan, the conqueror of Dacia. Several Roman constructions in Illyria (roads, towers, gates, garrisons) were either built by that emperor or ascribed to him, toponyms that the Slavs have conserved as a standard designation of any Roman structure, under the Slavic forms Trojanj, Trojanov, Trojanski, etc. The name of the Roman emperor became legendary among Southern Slavs, a character that was transferred to their Vlach neighbours and that would have been used many centuries later by the supporters of Romanian extremist nationalism.
There was only one Vlach language until the 11th century c.e.; it is in that epoch that the earliest differences between present-day Romanian and Aromanian began to arise, as the Vlach people expanded over a vast area from the original homeland by the Adriatic Sea throughout the Bulgarian Kingdom and subsequently numerous Vlach settled in Cumania, north of the lower Danube (then re-named Walachia). Since that period, the influence of Bulgarian was stronger on the Romanian branch than on the Aromanian one. However, well documented sources attest that until the 13th century c.e., there were still Vlach people of the northern group living in Kosovo and some of their names are mentioned in an account written by Stefan Prvovenčani Nemanja, king of Serbia: what is interesting is that those names do not belong to the Aromanian branch because they contain a pattern that is exclusive of the Romanian language spoken in the north.
It is in fact when the whole Vlach people were living within the borders of the Bulgarian Kingdom that they acquired the words regarding social and politic organization (7th-8th centuries c.e.) and ecclesiastic order (9th century c.e.), as well as the first alphabet ‒Cyrillic‒. Romanian, indeed, was not a written language but only spoken until that time, being the bulk of the Vlach population transhumant shepherds and not town-dwellers. Of course, if they would have been descendants of Roman soldiers and settlers, they would have already had a written language with Latin characters... The religious vocabulary in Romanian language shows in a clear manner that the Vlach people were educated within the Bulgarian Orthodox church, a fact that would be unexplainable if Romanians would have been outside the borders of the Bulgarian realm before the schism (1054 c.e.) or immediately after, as the terminology that is properly Orthodox should have needed some years to be consolidated as different from the one of the earlier common church. This evidence implies that Romanians were closely related with Bulgaria at least until the 12th century c.e.
Among the extensive Slavic lexicon present in Romanian language, there are most of the words related with human feelings and relationship: terms like "love", "dear", "bride", "wife", "betrothal", etc. are all of Slavic origin. Many words that belong to everybody's essential vocabulary are Slavic, including every time that a Romanian says «yes»: «da». Furthermore, Slavic has heavily influenced on Romanian pronunciation and cadence, for example in the iotification of the vowel "e", that in Romanian is often pronounced "ye", which is a typical feature of Slavic languages.
The Slavic influence on Romanian was clearly exerted by Southern Slavs, namely, the branch that founded the historic kingdoms of Bulgaria and Serbia, after centuries of coexistence in the same territory. Contrary to the Daco-Roman myth, the Slavs that dwelled in Transylvania were not the Southern but the Western Slavs, to which belong Czech, Slovaks, Slovenes and Poles (and later the Slavicized Croats), and their impact in Transylvania has never been so strong as they were not the rulers of that land but subject to the Avar Ring. Furthermore, none of the Western Slavs adopted Cyrillic alphabet, and they did not join the Orthodox church but remained under the Roman Catholic one. Consequently, if the Daco-Roman myth was true, today Romanians would not be Orthodox but Roman-Catholic, they would have always had a Latin alphabet and their Slavic words would not be of Bulgarian-Serbian background but rather Slovenian-Slovak terms.
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Originally Posted by Carpatz
România
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