O scurtă istorie ilustrată a românilor by Neagu Djuvara

There is no historical doubt that the Dacians who inhabited the territory of today’s Romania at the time of the Roman colonisation are, along with the Romans, the forebears of the Romanians. The conclusion? Romanian and Albanian are sister languages as far as the stages and mechanism of their Latinisation is concerned. For example, Latin fossatum (“village”) generated in Romanian fsat (today, sat) and in Albanian fshat Latin leporem (“rabbit”) evolved to Albanian lepur and Romanian iepure.

Secondly, the phonetic evolution of Latin words is very similar in Romanian and in Albanian. First of all, there are a number of words of unknown origin in Romanian which we share with Albanian: mal, barză, mazăre, viezure and since Albanian is thought to be a direct descendant of Dacian, those words could stand proof of the legacy of Dacian in Romanian. The analysis did unearth an interesting hypothesis, though: Romanian and Albanian are related, and that has to do with both Dacian and Latin. That has been labelled by more reliable scholars as “Dacopathy” and it has been analysed repeatedly. So much so that, despite the lack of any written historical records from the Dacians, they claim that Dacia was a great empire with a great culture, and that it was actually Latin that derived from Dacian. Funny, if you think of it: the only descendants of the Romans in the region ended up with the same DNA as those they supposedly differ so much from – a unique situation to be in…Ī certain percentage of the Romanians are great fans of the Dacians. But, it turns out, the Romanians’ blood is actually pretty much the same as the Hungarians’: our genetic makeups have rather equal shares of Celtic and Slavic “blood”, with only a slightly higher percentage of Greco-Roman “blood” in the case of Romania. Well, it was against that background that the Romanians pitted themselves as special in the region: the only “Latin-blooded” people and the only Romance language speakers around. Or almost completely: the exception was Hungary, whose language is neither Romance, nor Slavic, but Uralic. In the case of Romania, the language branched off good old Latin to become a distant relative of Italian, French, Spanish and Portuguese, and it was spoken in a territory completely surrounded by Slavic-speaking states.

That gave them not just an interesting geopolitical role, but also an interesting linguistic status. Dacia, the territory that the Romans colonised to give birth to Romania, and Britannia were the most far-off outposts of the Roman Empire.

O scurtă istorie ilustrată a românilor by Neagu Djuvara