Protochronism
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Protochronism is a term referring to various nationalist pseudohistorical and pseudolinguistic theories that try to glorify the Dacians, who inhabited what is now Romania.
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[edit] Background
In Romania, it is widely considered that Romanians are the descendants of the Romans, who occupied Dacia in the 2nd century, and the native Dacians. The Dacians abandoned their language and mixed with the Roman occupiers, and the resulting Daco-Romans (as they are called) preserved their dialect of Latin until the present day, in the form of Romanian.[1] Because of the various territorial claims of neighboring Hungarian and Slavic nationalists, Romanian nationalists have historically felt the need to use this Daco-Roman identity to give legitimacy to their possession of the said territories — since the Dacians and Romans were present in Romania before the arrival of Slavs and Magyars in the mid-to-late first millennium, Romanians claim to be the descendants of a people "that was there first".[2] Consequently, Dacian history is very politicized, with Hungarians trying to show that Romanians are actually migrants from south of the Danube, and Romanians trying to show that they are Daco-Romans. In Romania, the idea that Romanian might not derived from Daco-Roman Latin is seen as being equivalent to supporting Hungarian irredentism.
[edit] Protochronism
Because of this strong national obsession with ancient Dacia, some Romanian nationalists have taken this identification with the Dacians even further, and have tried to prove that they are not really Daco-Romans, but pure Dacians, with no Roman ancestry whatsoever.[3] One theory based on this assumption is that the language spoken by the Dacians before the Roman conquest is actually the ancestor of Latin.[4] According to this theory, the Dacian language (of which there are very few, if any, remains) somehow migrated from Dacia to Italy, and from there, it became the language of Rome, and thus, later, of most of Europe. When the Romans conquered Dacia, they allegedly found that the Dacians spoke the same language they did. So everybody speaking a Romance language, from the Americas, to Africa, to Europe, is actually speaking various forms of Dacian. You can see how this would be appealing for nationalists who consider themselves Dacians.
Yet another wacko theory is that Punjabi is actually a form of Romanian.[5] How is this possible? Well, the Dacians (under various names) actually extended over a huge swath of land, from Central Europe all the way to China and India. The Punjabi are the descendants of one of these branches of Dacians that settled in India approximately 2500 years ago; the fact that 2000 Punjabi words are similar to Romanian ones proves this.[6] In addition, many of these 2000 words are also similar to Latin ones, and since there was no Roman Empire 2500 years ago, when the Dacians entered India, that proves the Dacians spoke Latin before the Romans did. QED.
[edit] See also
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[edit] Footnotes
- ↑ Whether Romanian is derived from Daco-Roman Latin or from a form of Balkan Latin whose speakers migrated from south of the Danube is still an open question.
- ↑ Of course, language is not the same thing as ancestry; all ethnic groups are "mixed-breed". Even if the Romanian language is descended from the Latin dialect spoken in Dacia, during the ~1500 years that its speakers inhabited the same territory as Hungarians, Slavs, and Germanic peoples, the Daco-Romans underwent interbreeding with the neighboring groups (as all ethnicities do), so that modern Romanians cannot reasonably claim to be their only genetic descendants. (A case could be made for linguistic descent, which is, however, not the same thing – and in the context of Protochronism's claims, not even that is tenable, since the Dacian language has no known descendants.) Similarly, Bulgarians are not the only descendants of the Bulgars, and Hungarians are not the only descendants of the Magyars, which means that, strictly speaking, political arguments about "whose ancestors were first" don't make much sense.
- ↑ Some nationalists actually state the opposite, and claim that Romanians are descended only from the Romans that colonized Dacia, and not the "barbaric" Dacians. Some argue, in favor of this idea, that the Dacians were exterminated by the Romans.
- ↑ In another sense entirely, this might be true. Many historical linguists identify the Indo-Europeans with the Yamna culture[wp] or kurgan-burial[wp] cultures. The westward movement of this culture into parts of current Romania and Bulgaria may well represent the expansion of the western Indo-European dialects. But Vulgar Latin[wp] is fairly obviously a necessary intermediate step between any form of Late Proto-Indo-European and contemporary Romanian.
- ↑ În Asia, 80.000.000 de oameni vorbesc limba română! (In Asia, 80,000,000 people speak Romanian!)
- ↑ And it has absolutely nothing to do with both of them being Indo-European languages. At all. Note also that the ancient Dacians were in contact with the Scythian peoples of the Pontic steppe, who spoke an Indo-Iranian language from the same subfamily as Punjabi.
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