Dacian Language - Fringe Theories

Fringe Theories

Another theory maintains that the Dacians spoke a language akin to Latin and that the people who settled in the Italian Peninsula shared the same ancestors, but no ancient texts support this idea. The Romanian philologist Nicolae Densuşianu argued in his book Dacia Preistorică (Prehistoric Dacia) that Latin and Dacian were the same language or were mutually intelligible. His work was considered by mainstream linguists to be pseudoscience, but it was reprinted under the regime of Nicolae Ceauşescu.

The first article to revive Densuşianu's theory was an unsigned paper, "The Beginnings of the History of the Romanian People", included in Anale de istorie, a journal published by the Romanian Communist Party's Institute of Historical and Social-Political Studies. The article claimed that the Thracian language was a pre-Romance or Latin language; it used a demonstration which Lucian Boia describes as "a lack of basic professionalism and a straightforward contempt for the truth". Arguments used in the article include the absence of interpreters between the Dacians and the Romans, as depicted on the bas-reliefs of Trajan's column. The bibliography mentions, apart from Densuşianu, the work of French academician Louis Armand, an engineer who allegedly showed that "the Thraco-Dacians spoke a pre-Romance language". Similar arguments are found in Iosif Constantin Drăgan's We, the Thracians (1976). About the same time Ion Horaţiu Crişan wrote "Burebista and His Age" (1975). But opinions about a hypothetical latinity of Dacian can be found in earlier authors: Sextus Rufus (Breviarum C.VIII, cf. Bocking Not, Dign. II, 6), Ovid (Trist. II, 188–189) and Horace (Odes, I, 20). Some authors claimed there was a need to reconstruct the language and proposed the creation of a Dacian language department at the University of Bucharest, but such initiatives failed. Even in recent years Iosif Constantin Drăgan and the New York City-based physician Napoleon Săvescu continued to support this theory and published a book entitled We are not Rome's Descendents. They also published a magazine called Noi, Dacii ("Us Dacians") and organised a yearly "International Congress of Dacology".