Romance languages

[eugene]

Why did Romance languages survived north from Danube and ceased to exist on Balkan peninsula?

[Jona Lendering]

Why did Romance languages survived north from Danube and ceased to exist on Balkan peninsula?

The migration of the Slavs?

[eugene]

The migration of Slavs and Slavic influence tool place in Romania and Moldavia also. But why here Romance languages did not ceased to exist?

[Arminius Primus]

Fratres,

I am not an expert, most likely we have some philologists on RAT somewhere,.... but some Latin elements seem to have survived. For example Domu, as home, Kal (mud) from caligae tramping about in muddy campaigns and Scut,from Scutum,... the protected area of the mothers lap, sometimes translated as a mothers embrace. There might be more, but we would need some linguistics experts to ferret those out.

Maybe the regions closer incorporation into the Greek speaking eastern empire had something to do with it. Those are my sort of random thoughts on the issue.

Regards from a sunny but slightly cool Scupi, Arminius Primus aka Al

[Robert Vermaat]

Why did Romance languages survived north from Danube and ceased to exist on Balkan peninsula?

Maybe we should first establish the amount of Latin that spoken on the Balkan. I think that Greek was a far more common language. Maybe the question should be: why was Latin spoken north of the Danube?

[Arminius Primus]

Fratres
That is an a excellent point! I think that there is some sort of study that exists on that....We are really reaching back in years here, but during university , I think we had a lecture on that subject, Something like " Sprachen Grenzen in der Spaet Antike" Or something like that, The literature is probably in German, maybe the colleagues in Germania can help out.

Another random thought, could the language boundary have something to do where the preponderance of troops were stationed??

Regards from a cloudy Scupi, Arminius Primus aka Al

[Jona Lendering]

why was Latin spoken north of the Danube?

Perhaps the question ought to be the other way round. Normally, the Romans came, saw, conquered, and the local elite accepted the language of its masters. Everywhere, the elite of the new subjects knew that, if it wanted to retain its position, it had to adapt; and the sub-elite copied this. This is the general pattern, no matter whether the people originally Celts, Belgians, Germans, Iberians, Illyrians, Punians, or Berbers.

The exception is: where the Romans found a language that they themselves copied, because they regarded it as superior. In other words: Greek. Moesia was sufficiently hellenized to become part of the Greek world, Dacia wasn't.

Conquests, first along the Rhine, then in Britain, next in the Near East and in Africa, and finally in the Balkans, created -essentially- the modern language boundaries.

[Robert Vermaat]

why was Latin spoken north of the Danube?

Perhaps the question ought to be the other way round. Normally, the Romans came, saw, conquered, and the local elite accepted the language of its masters. Everywhere, the elite of the new subjects knew that, if it wanted to retain its position, it had to adapt; and the sub-elite copied this. This is the general pattern, no matter whether the people originally Celts, Belgians, Germans, Iberians, Illyrians, Punians, or Berbers.

I do not agree entirely. Sure, the elite copied the Romans and may have turned to Latin as first language. But I am not so sure about the sub-elite, and even less sure about the commoners below that. Celtic languages remained in Gaul, Britain and even parts of Roman Germania. Latin was never forced on the population, nor was it adapted by the entire mass of the provincials.
Why Gallic and Brythonic were eventualy forced into small pockets I don't know - I don't think that one of the modern models, that of 'Anglo-Saxon Apartheid', or even genocide, is adaptable for Gaul, where spoken Celtic languages remain in places where British colonists entered during the post-Roman period.

Anyway, if Latin languages remained to be spoken in Dacia, my guess would be that it became the first language of the commoners during some point in history. It need not even have happened during the Roman period (as we have seen in Gaul). That may have differed, indeed, from the situation south of the Danube, where Greek would have been predominant.

[Rumo]

The exception is: where the Romans found a language that they themselves copied, because they regarded it as superior. In other words: Greek. Moesia was sufficiently hellenized to become part of the Greek world, Dacia wasn't.

Traditionally the border between Latin and Greek worlds is set on the Jire?ek Line, running along the Balkan range, south of Danube.

However the linguistic realities of those provinces were significantly more complex than that:

http://www2.rgzm.de/Transformation/Bulg ... VIIIEN.htm