Romani language

“ The ruined Roman sits among the ruins; he flies to no green garden; he does not look to heaven; if his intent is defeated, if he is less than he meant to be, he lives no more. The names which end in “us,” seem to speak with lyric cadence. That measured cadence, — that tramp and march, — which are not stilted, because they indicate real force, yet which seem so when compared with any other language, — make Latin a study in itself of mighty influence. The language alone, without the literature, would give one the thought of Rome. ”

“ The Rumanian developed from the vulgar Latin spoken in Dacia and Mœsia under the intluence suecessively of the Turano-Bulgarian, Albanian, Slavic, Hungarian, Turkish, and Modern Greek. These influences affected little the grammatical structure of the language, but greatly changed its vocabulary. About 3800 words are Slavic, about 2600 come from the vulgar Latin, about 700 are Turkish, 650 Greek, 500 Hungarian, and 50 Albanian. ”

“ RUMANIAN LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE. Rumanian Language. A Romance tongue spoken in three dialects, the Daco-Rumanian, in Rumania, Transylvania, Bessarabia, the Hungarian Banat, and Bukowina—that is, in old Dacia, by about 9,000,000 people; the Macedo-Rumanian, in Macedonia, Albania, Thessaly, and Epirus, by several hundred thousand people; and the Istro-Rumanian, in Istria, by about 3000 people. The Daco-Rumanian dialect comprises the Wallachian, Moldavian, Transylvanian, and Banatian sub-dialects. ”

“ It became the basis of the so-called Romance languages—French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Rumanian—which arose in the Middle Ages out of the spoken Latin of the common people. Even our English language, which comes to us from the speech of the Germanic invaders of Britain, contains so many words of Latin origin that we can scarcely utter a sentence without using some of them. The rule of Rome has passed away; the language of Rome still remains to enrich the intellectual life of mankind. ”

“ Every one knows, that in the modern principality of Roumania and in the adjoining parts of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, there is to be seen that phenomenon so unique in the East, a people who not only, as the Greeks did till lately, still keep the Roman name, but who speak neither Greek nor Turkish, neither Slav nor Skipetar, but a dialect of Latin, a tongue akin, not to the tongues of any of their neighbors, but to the tongues of Gaul, Italy, and Spain. ”

“ And yet step by step one can follow up a modification; small at the confines of the Balkans, it grows greater the further it is carried westwards.
The conclusion is obvious. In Rumanian, the language is preponderantly of a Latin origin, but other tongues come in to make up its present character. A comparatively large [18] proportion of the popular language—which alone is of importance—is Slavonic; then follow in decreasing proportions Hungarian, modern Greek, Turkish and Albanian elements, but scarcely any trace of a more ancient local language. ”

“ The Latin predominated, but Sabellian roots were numerous, and more Greek radicals were found in it than in any other of the dialects of Central Italy. As to its name, no one knew to what language that belonged. According to some, Rome was a Trojan word; according to others, a Greek word. There are reasons for believing it to be Latin, but some of the ancients thought it to be Etruscan. The names of Roman families also attest a great diversity of origin. ... The effect of this mixing of the most diverse nations was, that from the beginning Rome was related to all the peoples that it knew. ”

“ But in spite of this, and much else that can in justice be said against Rome and Latin, we cannot afford to throw the language and literature of the Romans entirely overboard. Their history was too remarkable for that; besides, many scribbled in Latin down through the middle ages, and the Latin language has played so conspicuous a part in English literature, and in the sciences, that no educated man can very well do without it. What we respectfully object to is making it the foundation of all education, this bringing the scholar up, so to speak, on Latin language, history and literature ”

“ As for popular Latin, it has never ceased to exist. It is the language of France, Spain, Italy, Roumania, and all the Romance countries to-day. Its history has been unbroken from the founding of Rome to the present time. Various scholars have tried to determine the date before which we shall call the popular speech vulgar Latin, and after which it may better be styled French or Spanish or Italian, as the case may be. Some would fix the dividing line in the early part of the eighth century A.D., when phonetic changes common to all parts of the Roman world would cease to occur. ”

“ The earliest inhabitants of Rumania are tall, dark brachycephs—the Cevenoles of Deniker’s classification. This original element has been repeatedly diluted by Slavic and Tatar percolation. The Roman conquest, which together with the “pax Romana” brought civilization to the land, was not an ethnical victory. The Romans, a mere minority of leaders, ruled in the land much after the fashion in which the British govern India at present. But this occupation of the land by men representing a superior civilization sufficed to stamp the speech of Rome upon Rumania. ”

“ The Roumans of Wallachia, Moldavia, and Transsilvania, are isolated from the scattered Rouman remnant on Pindos and elsewhere. They represent that part of the inhabitants of the peninsula which became Latin, while the Greeks remained Greek, and the Illyrians remained barbarian. Their lands, Mossia, Thrace specially so called, and Dacia, were added to the empire at various times from Augustus to Trajan. That they should gradually adopt the Latin language is in no sort wonderful. Their position with regard to Rome was exactly the same as that of Gaul and Spain. ”

“ Rome’s ancient domination of the Illyrian coast and Wallachian plains led to highly interesting consequences. A genuine Romance language was once spoken by the mountain population of shepherds which extended across the entire Balkan peninsula from the Dalmatian coast, through the Bosnian and Serbian highlands, into the easternmost ranges of the Carpathians. The similarity observable in Balkan and Carpathian mountain dialects thus finds its source in the original easterly expansion of Rome. ”

“ It cannot here be denied, that as new ideas always require new signs to express them, some foreign words, and perhaps phrases, must necessarily, from time to time, have insinuated themselves into the Romansh, by the military and some commercial intercourse of the Grisons with other nations; and this accounts for several modern German words which are now incorporated into the language of the Engadine. ”

“ Latin influence, shipping, colonization, and art were always supreme on the eastern shores of the Adriatic, just as were those of Greece on the shores of the Black Sea. The Albanians even, descendants of the ancient Illyrians, were affected by the supremacy of the Latin language, from which no less than a quarter of their own meagre vocabulary is derived; though driven southwards by the Romans and northwards by the Greeks, they have remained in their mountain fastnesses to this day, impervious to any of the civilizations to which they have been exposed. ”

“ The air of Rome inspires lassitude, and renders the inhabitants inert. The Romans who live in the healthy parts of the city are all inclined to grow fat; their language, unidiomatic, and, so to speak, long-winded in its expressions, is pronounced with a grace of accent, a slow and melodious emphasis, that renders it more agreeable than any other Italian to the ears of strangers, and is strangely in harmony with the dreamy contentment of their minds. ”

“ In the first Christian centuries the influence of Latin was so overpowering in official life and in the schools that it obstructed a natural development. But soon after the third century the educational level rapidly sank, and political events broke the power not only of Rome, but also of its language. The speech of the masses, which had been held in fetters for so long, now asserted itself in full freedom and with elemental violence, the result being those far-reaching changes by which the Romanic languages are marked off from Latin. ”

“ Generally speaking, the Western Empire was Latin in language and character, while the Eastern was Greek, though owing to the importance of the Danubian provinces to Rome from the military point of view, and the lively intercourse maintained between them, Latin influence in them was for a long time stronger than Greek. Its extent is proved by the fact that the people of modern Rumania are partly, and their language very largely, defended from those of the legions and colonies of the Emperor Trajan. ”

“ The languages of highly civilized nations, on the contrary, become more and more stationary, and seem sometimes almost to lose their power of change. Where there is a classical literature, and where its language is spread to every town and village, it seems almost impossible that any further changes should take place. Nevertheless, the language of Rome, for so many centuries the queen of the whole civilized world, was deposed by the modern Romance dialects, and the ancient Greek was supplanted in the end by the modern Romaic. ”

“ On the given basis the various languages carried on their various developments, influenced partly by contiguity of other idioms, partly by causes unknown to us. Among neighbouring idioms, Greek had by right of its degree of civilization and its political power great influence in giving Rumanian and South Italian a similar direction, and that at a time when every trace of a geographical connexion between these two language-groups had long vanished. Thus, the replacing of the construction “I will come” by “I will that I come” took its rise in Greece and was passed on to Rumania and Apulia. ”

“ It was the efforts of this group that led to the replacement of the Cyrillic alphabet, then in common use, with the Latin, the writing of the first latinized Romanian grammar and, later, the introduction of the first dictionary that traced the full historical development of the Romanian language. These reforms helped to create a uniform literary language as an essential basis for the broad development of Romanian culture (see ch. 7) . ”

“ After the Social War the Italian peoples became citizens of Rome, and with Roman citizenship went the use of the Latin tongue.
LATIN IN THE WESTERN PROVINCES The Romans carried their language to the barbarian peoples of the West, as they had carried it to Italy. Their missionaries were colonists, merchants, soldiers, and public officials. The Latin spoken by them was eagerly taken up by the rude, unlettered natives, who tried to make themselves as Roman as possible in dress, customs, and speech. ”

“ Religion has never played an important part in Rumanian national life, and was generally limited to merely external practices. This may be attributed largely to the fact that as the Slavonic language had been used in the Church since the ninth century and then was superseded by Greek up to the nineteenth century, the clergy was foreign, and was neither in a position nor did it endeavour to acquire a spiritual influence over the Rumanian peasant. There is no record whatever in Rumanian history of any religious feuds or dissensions. ”

“ To speak of Latin dying in giving birth to her offspring is again pure mythology, and it would be easy to prove that Latin was a living language long after Italian had learnt to run alone. Only let us clearly see what we mean by Latin. The classical Latin is one out of many dialects spoken by the Aryan inhabitants of Italy. It was the dialect of Latium, in Latium the dialect of Rome, at Rome the dialect of the patricians. It was fixed by Livius Andronicus, Ennius, Nævius, Cato, and Lucretius, polished by the Scipios, Hortensius, and Cicero. ”

“ The very family names of the Roumanians, when not artificially brought into harmony with modern academic sentiment, reveal a non-Latin origin. Those of the peasantry are frequently Slavonic, while those of the nobility are not infrequently Greek. Yet the purists banished the Slavonic element from the dictionary of the Roumanian language compiled under the auspices of the Roumanian Academy by two native Latinists. ”

“ The Albanian dialects in the Illyrian Alps are another ancient survival with unknown but doubtless Indo-European affinities, and also a considerable Romance element.
Albanian and Letto-Lithuanian apart, the four great families of Indo-European language, Classical and Romance, Celtic, Teutonic, and Slavonic, must have become distinct before the days of the Roman Empire, and must already at that time have developed diverse forms in their various areas. The Classical languages seem to have reached Greece and Italy from the north; how and when we shall not attempt to speculate. ”

“ If we knew nothing of the existence of Latin—if all historical documents previous to the fifteenth century had been lost—if tradition, even, was silent as to the former existence of a Roman empire, a mere comparison of the six Roman dialects would enable us to say, that at some time there must have been a language from which all these modern dialects derived their origin in common ”

“ The Romans continued to take an interest in questions of grammar and of etymology down to the last. It is true that they confined their inquiries to their own and [23] the Greek language; the descent they claimed from Æneas and the Trojans inspired them with no desire to investigate the dialects of Asia, and even the Etruscan language and literature which lingered on almost to the Christian era at their own doors, were left unregarded by the leading philologists of Rome. In language, as in everything else, the provincial had to adapt himself to the prejudices of his conqueror. ”