Dacian

Dacian was an Early Balkan language spoken north of the Danube by the Dacian people.It was apparently one of the major languages in the northern and central Balkan region of the period.The hypothesis that Dacian was a dialect of Thracian is disputed.

 

Geographical spread

Geographically it stretched over a large area from eastern Hungary to Moldavia ,present-day southern Serbia,Romania on both sides of Transylvania,and northern Bulgaria.

Roman and free Dacia

knowledge about the language

Our knowledge of the language is scarce to minimal and comes mainly from a few short inscriptions, a list of Dacian plants by Dioscorides and Dacian place names, hydronyms and human names mentioned in classical sources.

The names of Dacian cities are usually suffixed with deva, dava or deba; whereas, on the contrary, Thracian cities usually take the suffix -bara and more rarely -bria, diza.

Strabo mentions that Dacians migrated to Asia Minor and that Dacian and Asia Minor mystic are the same language.

Georgiev

After an extensive study of the available data on Dacian,mainly place names and using the methods of comparative linguistics, the Bulgarian scholar and historian Georgiyev concluded that Dacian was sufficiently different from Thracian to constitute a separate language.However, because of the rarity of the elements, the possibility that the languages were simply two versions, two dialects of the same language, the so-called Thracian-Dacian, cannot be excluded.

The ancient Dacian city of Axiopa or Axioupolis in Greek is now called Chernavoda,black water in Slavic.Georiev, using comparative linguistics, hypothesized that αξιόpa in Dacian means black water.So axi would mean black and opa or oupa or apa would mean water (apa in Romanian and Vlach).In the same way he etymologized Axios Pontus as the Black Sea was originally called.Some other scholars, however, do not accept these etymologies.

Romanian and Albanian.

Romanian and Albanian share a common substrate of about 200 words from an old language which is presumed to be Dacian.Based on the above evidence, Georgiev argued that Albanian is a descendant language of Dacian and that Albanians settled in their present-day homelands from the central Balkans where they inhabited.

The scientific community today accepts that Dacian was an Indo-European language, a relative of Thracian, but this relationship between the two languages cannot yet be shown and our knowledge of them is very limited due to the scarcity of finds.

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