The Dacians ( / ˈ d eɪ ʃ ən z / ; Latin : Daci [ˈdaːkiː] ; ‹See Tfd› Greek : Δάκοι, Δάοι, Δάκαι ) were the ancient Indo-European inhabitants of the cultural region of Dacia , located in the area near the Carpathian Mountains and west of the Black Sea . They are often considered a subgroup of the Thracians . This area includes mainly the present-day countries of Romania and Moldova , as well as parts of Ukraine , Eastern Serbia , Northern Bulgaria , Slovakia , Hungary and Southern Poland . The Dacians and the related Getae spoke the Dacian language , which has a debated relationship with the neighbouring Thracian language and may be a subgroup of it. Dacians were somewhat culturally influenced by the neighbouring Scythians and by the Celtic invaders of the 4th century BC .
96-567: The Dacians were known as Geta (plural Getae ) in Ancient Greek writings, and as Dacus (plural Daci ) or Getae in Roman documents, but also as Dagae and Gaete as depicted on the late Roman map Tabula Peutingeriana . It was Herodotus who first used the ethnonym Getae in his Histories . In Greek and Latin, in the writings of Julius Caesar , Strabo , and Pliny the Elder ,
192-543: A pitch accent . In Modern Greek, all vowels and consonants are short. Many vowels and diphthongs once pronounced distinctly are pronounced as /i/ ( iotacism ). Some of the stops and glides in diphthongs have become fricatives , and the pitch accent has changed to a stress accent . Many of the changes took place in the Koine Greek period. The writing system of Modern Greek, however, does not reflect all pronunciation changes. The examples below represent Attic Greek in
288-731: A sermo Theotiscus ('Germanic language'), the language of the Gothic translation of the Bible, and that they used such a liturgy. Many writers of the medieval texts that mention the Goths used the word Goths to mean any Germanic people in eastern Europe (such as the Varangians ), many of whom certainly did not use the Gothic language as known from the Gothic Bible. Some writers even referred to Slavic -speaking people as "Goths". However, it
384-441: A stress accent rather than the pitch accent of Proto-Indo-European . This is indicated by the shortening of long vowels [eː] and [oː] and the loss of short vowels [a] and [i] in unstressed final syllables. Just as in other Germanic languages, the free moving Proto-Indo-European accent was replaced with one fixed on the first syllable of simple words. Accents do not shift when words are inflected. In most compound words,
480-468: A 6th-century copy of a 4th-century Bible translation, and is the only East Germanic language with a sizeable text corpus . All others, including Burgundian and Vandalic , are known, if at all, only from proper names that survived in historical accounts, and from loanwords in other, mainly Romance , languages. As a Germanic language, Gothic is a part of the Indo-European language family. It
576-534: A church language when the Visigoths converted from Arianism to Nicene Christianity in 589). The language survived as a domestic language in the Iberian Peninsula (modern-day Spain and Portugal) as late as the eighth century. Gothic-seeming terms are found in manuscripts subsequent to this date, but these may or may not belong to the same language. A language known as Crimean Gothic survived in
672-428: A common language. Linguists such as Polomé and Katičić expressed reservations about both theories. The Dacians are generally considered to have been Thracian speakers, representing a cultural continuity from earlier Iron Age communities loosely termed Getic, Since in one interpretation, Dacian is a variety of Thracian, for the reasons of convenience, the generic term ‘Daco-Thracian" is used, with "Dacian" reserved for
768-479: A derivation of the root da ("k" being a suffix); cf. Sanskrit dasa , Bactrian daonha . Tomaschek also proposed the form "Davus", meaning "members of the clan/countryman" cf. Bactrian daqyu , danhu "canton". Since the 19th century, many scholars have proposed an etymological link between the endonym of the Dacians and wolves. However, according to Romanian historian and archaeologist Alexandru Vulpe ,
864-509: A few documents in Gothic have survived – not enough for a complete reconstruction of the language. Most Gothic-language sources are translations or glosses of other languages (namely, Greek ), so foreign linguistic elements most certainly influenced the texts. These are the primary sources: Reports of the discovery of other parts of Ulfilas's Bible have not been substantiated. Heinrich May in 1968 claimed to have found in England twelve leaves of
960-428: A former perfect); three grammatical moods : indicative , subjunctive (from an old optative form) and imperative as well as three kinds of nominal forms: a present infinitive , a present participle , and a past passive . Not all tenses and persons are represented in all moods and voices, as some conjugations use auxiliary forms . Finally, there are forms called 'preterite-present': the old Indo-European perfect
1056-477: A lack of contemporaneous evidence. Several theories exist about what Hellenic dialect groups may have existed between the divergence of early Greek-like speech from the common Proto-Indo-European language and the Classical period. They have the same general outline but differ in some of the detail. The only attested dialect from this period is Mycenaean Greek , but its relationship to the historical dialects and
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#17327721312801152-419: A lesser degree. Pamphylian Greek , spoken in a small area on the southwestern coast of Anatolia and little preserved in inscriptions, may be either a fifth major dialect group, or it is Mycenaean Greek overlaid by Doric, with a non-Greek native influence. Regarding the speech of the ancient Macedonians diverse theories have been put forward, but the epigraphic activity and the archaeological discoveries in
1248-537: A mixture of indigenous peoples and Indo-Europeans from the time of Proto-Indo-European expansion in the Early Bronze Age (3,300–3,000 BC) when the latter, around 1500 BC, conquered the indigenous peoples. The indigenous people were Danubian farmers, and the invading people of the 3rd millennium BC were Kurgan warrior-herders from the Ukrainian and Russian steppes. Indo-Europeanization was complete by
1344-699: A name previously borne by slaves: Greek Daos, Latin Davus (-k- is a known suffix in Indo-European ethnic names). In the 18th century, Grimm proposed the Gothic dags or "day" that would give the meaning of "light, brilliant". Yet dags belongs to the Sanskrit word-root dah- , and a derivation from Dah to Δάσαι "Daci" is difficult. In the 19th century, Tomaschek (1883) proposed the form "Dak", meaning those who understand and can speak , by considering "Dak" as
1440-681: A palimpsest containing parts of the Gospel of Matthew . Only fragments of the Gothic translation of the Bible have been preserved. The translation was apparently done in the Balkans region by people in close contact with Greek Christian culture. The Gothic Bible apparently was used by the Visigoths in Occitania until the loss of Visigothic Occitania at the start of the 6th century, in Visigothic Iberia until about 700, and perhaps for
1536-550: A prefix /e-/, called the augment . This was probably originally a separate word, meaning something like "then", added because tenses in PIE had primarily aspectual meaning. The augment is added to the indicative of the aorist, imperfect, and pluperfect, but not to any of the other forms of the aorist (no other forms of the imperfect and pluperfect exist). The two kinds of augment in Greek are syllabic and quantitative. The syllabic augment
1632-460: A regional power in and around the city of Sarmizegetusa . Sarmizegetusa was their political and spiritual capital. The ruined city lies high in the mountains of central Romania. Ancient Greek Ancient Greek ( Ἑλληνῐκή , Hellēnikḗ ; [hellɛːnikɛ́ː] ) includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It
1728-608: A separate historical stage, though its earliest form closely resembles Attic Greek , and its latest form approaches Medieval Greek . There were several regional dialects of Ancient Greek; Attic Greek developed into Koine. Ancient Greek was a pluricentric language , divided into many dialects. The main dialect groups are Attic and Ionic , Aeolic , Arcadocypriot , and Doric , many of them with several subdivisions. Some dialects are found in standardized literary forms in literature , while others are attested only in inscriptions. There are also several historical forms. Homeric Greek
1824-630: A standard subject of study in educational institutions of the Western world since the Renaissance . This article primarily contains information about the Epic and Classical periods of the language, which are the best-attested periods and considered most typical of Ancient Greek. From the Hellenistic period ( c. 300 BC ), Ancient Greek was followed by Koine Greek , which is regarded as
1920-456: A time in Italy, the Balkans, and Ukraine until at least the mid-9th century. During the extermination of Arianism , Trinitarian Christians probably overwrote many texts in Gothic as palimpsests, or alternatively collected and burned Gothic documents. Apart from biblical texts, the only substantial Gothic document that still exists – and the only lengthy text known to have been composed originally in
2016-510: A vowel or /n s r/ ; final stops were lost, as in γάλα "milk", compared with γάλακτος "of milk" (genitive). Ancient Greek of the classical period also differed in both the inventory and distribution of original PIE phonemes due to numerous sound changes, notably the following: The pronunciation of Ancient Greek was very different from that of Modern Greek . Ancient Greek had long and short vowels ; many diphthongs ; double and single consonants; voiced, voiceless, and aspirated stops ; and
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#17327721312802112-563: A word similar to dáos, meaning 'wolf' in the related language of the Phrygians . One hypothesis is that the name Getae originates in Indo-European * guet- 'to utter, to talk'. Another hypothesis is that Getae and Daci are the Iranian names of two Iranian-speaking Scythian groups that had been assimilated into the larger Thracian-speaking population of the later "Dacia." In the 1st century AD, Strabo suggested that its stem formed
2208-467: Is the verb "to be" , which is athematic in Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, and many other Indo-European languages. Gothic verbs are, like nouns and adjectives, divided into strong verbs and weak verbs. Weak verbs are characterised by preterites formed by appending the suffixes -da or -ta , parallel to past participles formed with -þ / -t . Strong verbs form preterites by ablaut (the alternating of vowels in their root forms) or by reduplication (prefixing
2304-570: Is a literary form of Archaic Greek (derived primarily from Ionic and Aeolic) used in the epic poems , the Iliad and the Odyssey , and in later poems by other authors. Homeric Greek had significant differences in grammar and pronunciation from Classical Attic and other Classical-era dialects. The origins, early form and development of the Hellenic language family are not well understood because of
2400-418: Is added to stems beginning with consonants, and simply prefixes e (stems beginning with r , however, add er ). The quantitative augment is added to stems beginning with vowels, and involves lengthening the vowel: Some verbs augment irregularly; the most common variation is e → ei . The irregularity can be explained diachronically by the loss of s between vowels, or that of the letter w , which affected
2496-420: Is an allophone of the others, all found only in complementary distribution with them. Nasals in Gothic, like most other languages, are pronounced at the same point of articulation as the consonant that follows them ( assimilation ). Therefore, clusters like [md] and [nb] are not possible. Accentuation in Gothic can be reconstructed through phonetic comparison, Grimm's law , and Verner's law . Gothic used
2592-666: Is called 'East Greek'. Arcadocypriot apparently descended more closely from the Mycenaean Greek of the Bronze Age. Boeotian Greek had come under a strong Northwest Greek influence, and can in some respects be considered a transitional dialect, as exemplified in the poems of the Boeotian poet Pindar who wrote in Doric with a small Aeolic admixture. Thessalian likewise had come under Northwest Greek influence, though to
2688-473: Is clear from Ulfilas's translation that – despite some puzzles – the Gothic language belongs with the Germanic language-group, not with Slavic. Generally, the term "Gothic language" refers to the language of Ulfilas , but the attestations themselves date largely from the 6th century, long after Ulfilas had died. A few Gothic runic inscriptions were found across Europe, but due to early Christianization of
2784-591: Is clearly identifiable evidence from other branches that the Gothic form is a secondary development. Gothic fails to display a number of innovations shared by all Germanic languages attested later: The language also preserved many features that were mostly lost in other early Germanic languages: Most conspicuously, Gothic shows no sign of morphological umlaut. Gothic fotus , pl. fotjus , can be contrasted with English foot : feet , German Fuß : Füße , Old Norse fótr : fœtr , Danish fod : fødder . These forms contain
2880-448: Is considered by some linguists to have been closely related to Greek . Among Indo-European branches with living descendants, Greek is often argued to have the closest genetic ties with Armenian (see also Graeco-Armenian ) and Indo-Iranian languages (see Graeco-Aryan ). Ancient Greek differs from Proto-Indo-European (PIE) and other Indo-European languages in certain ways. In phonotactics , ancient Greek words could end only in
2976-492: Is fairly free as is typical of other inflected languages. The natural word order of Gothic is assumed to have been like that of the other old Germanic languages; however, nearly all extant Gothic texts are translations of Greek originals and have been heavily influenced by Greek syntax. Sometimes what can be expressed in one word in the original Greek will require a verb and a complement in the Gothic translation; for example, διωχθήσονται ( diōchthēsontai , "they will be persecuted")
Dacians - Misplaced Pages Continue
3072-405: Is found under various forms within ancient sources. Greeks used the forms Δάκοι " Dakoi " ( Strabo , Dio Cassius , and Dioscorides ) and Δάοι "Daoi" (singular Daos). The form Δάοι "Daoi" was frequently used according to Stephan of Byzantium . Latins used the forms Davus , Dacus , and a derived form Dacisci (Vopiscus and inscriptions). There are similarities between the ethnonyms of
3168-634: Is hard to separate the two) derived by the processes described in Grimm's law and Verner's law and characteristic of Germanic languages . Gothic is unusual among Germanic languages in having a /z/ phoneme, which has not become /r/ through rhotacization. Furthermore, the doubling of written consonants between vowels suggests that Gothic made distinctions between long and short, or geminated consonants: atta [atːa] "dad", kunnan [kunːan] "to know" (Dutch kennen , German kennen "to know", Icelandic kunna ). Gothic has three nasal consonants, one of which
3264-469: Is less significant in Gothic because of its conservative nature: the so-called "weak" declensions (those ending in n ) are, in fact, no weaker in Gothic (in terms of having fewer endings) than the "strong" declensions (those ending in a vowel), and the "strong" declensions do not form a coherent class that can be clearly distinguished from the "weak" declensions. Although descriptive adjectives in Gothic (as well as superlatives ending in -ist and -ost ) and
3360-556: Is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek ( c. 1400–1200 BC ), Dark Ages ( c. 1200–800 BC ), the Archaic or Epic period ( c. 800–500 BC ), and the Classical period ( c. 500–300 BC ). Ancient Greek was the language of Homer and of fifth-century Athenian historians, playwrights, and philosophers . It has contributed many words to English vocabulary and has been
3456-411: Is rendered: Likewise Gothic translations of Greek noun phrases may feature a verb and a complement. In both cases, the verb follows the complement, giving weight to the theory that basic word order in Gothic is object–verb. This aligns with what is known of other early Germanic languages. However, this pattern is reversed in imperatives and negations: And in a wh -question the verb directly follows
3552-433: Is supported by Romanian historian Ioan I. Russu (1967). Mircea Eliade attempted, in his book From Zalmoxis to Genghis Khan , to give a mythological foundation to an alleged special relation between Dacians and the wolves: Evidence of proto-Thracians or proto-Dacians in the prehistoric period depends on the remains of material culture . It is generally proposed that a proto-Dacian or proto-Thracian people developed from
3648-558: Is that of Moesian (or Mysian) for the language of an intermediate area immediately to the south of Danube in Serbia, Bulgaria and Romanian Dobruja: this and the dialects north of the Danube have been grouped together as Daco-Moesian. The language of the indigenous population has left hardly any trace in the anthroponymy of Moesia, but the toponymy indicates that the Moesii on the south bank of
3744-616: Is the earliest Germanic language that is attested in any sizable texts, but it lacks any modern descendants. The oldest documents in Gothic date back to the fourth century. The language was in decline by the mid-sixth century, partly because of the military defeat of the Goths at the hands of the Franks , the elimination of the Goths in Italy, and geographic isolation (in Spain, the Gothic language lost its last and probably already declining function as
3840-647: Is the preservation of the dual number , referring to two people or things; the plural was used only for quantities greater than two. Thus, "the two of us" and "we" for numbers greater than two were expressed as wit and weis respectively. While proto-Indo-European used the dual for all grammatical categories that took a number (as did Classical Greek and Sanskrit ), most Old Germanic languages are unusual in that they preserved it only for pronouns. Gothic preserves an older system with dual marking on both pronouns and verbs (but not nouns or adjectives). The simple demonstrative pronoun sa (neuter: þata , feminine: so , from
3936-529: Is used for transliterating Gothic words into the Latin script . The system mirrors the conventions of the native alphabet, such as writing long /iː/ as ei . The Goths used their equivalents of e and o alone only for long higher vowels, using the digraphs ai and au (much as in French ) for the corresponding short or lower vowels. There are two variant spelling systems: a "raw" one that directly transliterates
Dacians - Misplaced Pages Continue
4032-800: The Dnieper cataracts in the east, and up to the Pripyat , Vistula , and Oder rivers in the north and northwest. In 53 BC, Julius Caesar stated that the Dacian territory was on the eastern border of the Hercynian forest . According to Strabo's Geographica , written around AD 20, the Getes (Geto-Dacians) bordered the Suevi who lived in the Hercynian Forest , which is somewhere in the vicinity of
4128-708: The Greek region of Macedonia during the last decades has brought to light documents, among which the first texts written in Macedonian , such as the Pella curse tablet , as Hatzopoulos and other scholars note. Based on the conclusions drawn by several studies and findings such as Pella curse tablet , Emilio Crespo and other scholars suggest that ancient Macedonian was a Northwest Doric dialect , which shares isoglosses with its neighboring Thessalian dialects spoken in northeastern Thessaly . Some have also suggested an Aeolic Greek classification. The Lesbian dialect
4224-517: The Pannonians and therefore first became known to the Romans. According to Strabo's Geographica , the original name of the Dacians was Δάοι " Daoi ". The name Daoi (one of the ancient Geto-Dacian tribes) was certainly adopted by foreign observers to designate all the inhabitants of the countries north of Danube that had not yet been conquered by Greece or Rome. The ethnographic name Daci
4320-498: The past participle may take both definite and indefinite forms, some adjectival words are restricted to one variant. Some pronouns take only definite forms: for example, sama (English "same"), adjectives like unƕeila ("constantly", from the root ƕeila , "time"; compare to the English "while"), comparative adjective and present participles . Others, such as áins ("some"), take only the indefinite forms. The table below displays
4416-501: The present , future , and imperfect are imperfective in aspect; the aorist , present perfect , pluperfect and future perfect are perfective in aspect. Most tenses display all four moods and three voices, although there is no future subjunctive or imperative. Also, there is no imperfect subjunctive, optative or imperative. The infinitives and participles correspond to the finite combinations of tense, aspect, and voice. The indicative of past tenses adds (conceptually, at least)
4512-635: The wh- at the beginning of many English interrogative, which, as in Gothic, are pronounced with [ʍ] in some dialects. The same etymology is present in the interrogatives of many other Indo-European languages: w- [v] in German, hv- in Danish , the Latin qu- (which persists in modern Romance languages ), the Greek τ- or π-, the Slavic and Indic k- as well as many others. The bulk of Gothic verbs follow
4608-1031: The 5th century BC. Ancient pronunciation cannot be reconstructed with certainty, but Greek from the period is well documented, and there is little disagreement among linguists as to the general nature of the sounds that the letters represent. /oː/ raised to [uː] , probably by the 4th century BC. Greek, like all of the older Indo-European languages , is highly inflected. It is highly archaic in its preservation of Proto-Indo-European forms. In ancient Greek, nouns (including proper nouns) have five cases ( nominative , genitive , dative , accusative , and vocative ), three genders ( masculine , feminine , and neuter ), and three numbers (singular, dual , and plural ). Verbs have four moods ( indicative , imperative , subjunctive , and optative ) and three voices (active, middle, and passive ), as well as three persons (first, second, and third) and various other forms. Verbs are conjugated through seven combinations of tenses and aspect (generally simply called "tenses"):
4704-701: The 8th to 7th centuries BC, the migration of the Scythians from the east into the Pontic Steppe pushed westwards and away from the steppes the related Scythic Agathyrsi people who had previously dwelt on the Pontic Steppe around the Lake Maeotis . Following this, the Agathyrsi settled in the territories of present-day Moldova , Transylvania and possibly Oltenia , where they mingled with
4800-495: The Archaic period of ancient Greek (see Homeric Greek for more details): Μῆνιν ἄειδε, θεά, Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος οὐλομένην, ἣ μυρί' Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε' ἔθηκε, πολλὰς δ' ἰφθίμους ψυχὰς Ἄϊδι προΐαψεν ἡρώων, αὐτοὺς δὲ ἑλώρια τεῦχε κύνεσσιν οἰωνοῖσί τε πᾶσι· Διὸς δ' ἐτελείετο βουλή· ἐξ οὗ δὴ τὰ πρῶτα διαστήτην ἐρίσαντε Ἀτρεΐδης τε ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν καὶ δῖος Ἀχιλλεύς. The beginning of Apology by Plato exemplifies Attic Greek from
4896-569: The Boii south across the Danube and out of their territory, at which point the Boii abandoned any further plans for invasion. Some Hungarian historians consider the Dacians and Getae the same as the Scythian tribes of the Dahae , Massagetae , also the exonym Daxia one with Dacia. North of the Danube, Dacians occupied a larger territory than Ptolemaic Dacia, stretching between Bohemia in the west and
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#17327721312804992-585: The Classical period of ancient Greek. (The second line is the IPA , the third is transliterated into the Latin alphabet using a modern version of the Erasmian scheme .) Ὅτι [hóti Hóti μὲν men mèn ὑμεῖς, hyːmêːs hūmeîs, Gothic language Gothic is an extinct East Germanic language that was spoken by the Goths . It is known primarily from the Codex Argenteus ,
5088-521: The Dacian etymology explained by daos ("wolf") has little plausibility, as the transformation of daos into dakos is phonetically improbable and the Draco standard was not unique to Dacians. He thus dismisses it as folk etymology . Another etymology, linked to the Proto-Indo-European language roots *dhe- meaning "to set, place" and dheua → dava ("settlement") and dhe-k → daci
5184-468: The Dacians and those of Dahae (Greek Δάσαι Δάοι, Δάαι, Δαι, Δάσαι Dáoi , Dáai , Dai , Dasai ; Latin Dahae , Daci ), an Indo-European people located east of the Caspian Sea , until the 1st millennium BC. Scholars have suggested that there were links between the two peoples since ancient times. The historian David Gordon White has, moreover, stated that the "Dacians ... appear to be related to
5280-482: The Dahae". (Likewise White and other scholars also believe that the names Dacii and Dahae may also have a shared etymology – see the section following for further details.) By the end of the first century AD, all the inhabitants of the lands which now form Romania were known to the Romans as Daci, with the exception of some Celtic and Germanic tribes who infiltrated from the west, and Sarmatian and related people from
5376-864: The Danube, north of the Haemus Mountains, and the Triballi in the valley of the Morava, shared a number of characteristic linguistic features with the Dacii south of the Carpathians and the Getae in the Wallachian plain, which sets them apart from the Thracians though their languages are undoubtedly related. Dacian culture is mostly followed through Roman sources. Ample evidence suggests that they were
5472-589: The Gothic language – is the Skeireins , a few pages of commentary on the Gospel of John . Very few medieval secondary sources make reference to the Gothic language after about 800. In De incrementis ecclesiae Christianae (840–842), Walafrid Strabo , a Frankish monk who lived in Swabia , writes of a group of monks who reported that even then certain peoples in Scythia ( Dobruja ), especially around Tomis , spoke
5568-526: The Goths, the Runic writing was quickly replaced by the newly invented Gothic alphabet. Ulfilas's Gothic, as well as that of the Skeireins and various other manuscripts, was written using an alphabet that was most likely invented by Ulfilas himself for his translation. Some scholars (such as Braune) claim that it was derived from the Greek alphabet only while others maintain that there are some Gothic letters of Runic or Latin origin. A standardized system
5664-530: The Greek of that period is well documented, it is possible to reconstruct much of Gothic pronunciation from translated texts. In addition, the way in which non-Greek names are transcribed in the Greek Bible and in Ulfilas's Bible is very informative. In general, Gothic consonants are devoiced at the ends of words. Gothic is rich in fricative consonants (although many of them may have been approximants ; it
5760-417: The Indo-European root *so , *seh 2 , *tod ; cognate to the Greek article ὁ, ἡ, τό and the Latin is tud ) can be used as an article, allowing constructions of the type definite article + weak adjective + noun . The interrogative pronouns begin with ƕ- , which derives from the proto-Indo-European consonant *kʷ that was present at the beginning of all interrogatives in proto-Indo-European, cognate with
5856-422: The ancients (Dio Cassius, Trogus Pompeius, Appian , Strabo and Pliny the Elder), and were both said to speak the same Thracian language . The linguistic affiliation of Dacian is uncertain, since the ancient Indo-European language in question became extinct and left very limited traces, usually in the form of place names, plant names and personal names. Thraco-Dacian (or Thracian and Daco-Mysian) seems to belong to
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#17327721312805952-550: The aorist. Following Homer 's practice, the augment is sometimes not made in poetry , especially epic poetry. The augment sometimes substitutes for reduplication; see below. Almost all forms of the perfect, pluperfect, and future perfect reduplicate the initial syllable of the verb stem. (A few irregular forms of perfect do not reduplicate, whereas a handful of irregular aorists reduplicate.) The three types of reduplication are: Irregular duplication can be understood diachronically. For example, lambanō (root lab ) has
6048-419: The augment when it was word-initial. In verbs with a preposition as a prefix, the augment is placed not at the start of the word, but between the preposition and the original verb. For example, προσ(-)βάλλω (I attack) goes to προσ έ βαλoν in the aorist. However compound verbs consisting of a prefix that is not a preposition retain the augment at the start of the word: αὐτο(-)μολῶ goes to ηὐ τομόλησα in
6144-401: The beginning of the Bronze Age. The people of that time are best described as proto-Thracians, which later developed in the Iron Age into Danubian-Carpathian Geto-Dacians as well as Thracians of the eastern Balkan Peninsula. Between 15th–12th century BC, the Dacian-Getae culture was influenced by the Bronze Age Tumulus-Urnfield warriors who were on their way through the Balkans to Anatolia. In
6240-438: The center of Greek scholarship, this division of people and language is quite similar to the results of modern archaeological-linguistic investigation. One standard formulation for the dialects is: West vs. non-West Greek is the strongest-marked and earliest division, with non-West in subsets of Ionic-Attic (or Attic-Ionic) and Aeolic vs. Arcadocypriot, or Aeolic and Arcado-Cypriot vs. Ionic-Attic. Often non-West
6336-410: The correspondence between spelling and sound for consonants: It is possible to determine more or less exactly how the Gothic of Ulfilas was pronounced, primarily through comparative phonetic reconstruction. Furthermore, because Ulfilas tried to follow the original Greek text as much as possible in his translation, it is known that he used the same writing conventions as those of contemporary Greek. Since
6432-466: The declension of the Gothic adjective blind (English: "blind"), compared with the an -stem noun guma "man, human" and the a -stem noun dags "day": This table is, of course, not exhaustive. (There are secondary inflexions of various sorts not described here.) An exhaustive table of only the types of endings that Gothic took is presented below. Gothic adjectives follow noun declensions closely; they take same types of inflection. Gothic inherited
6528-416: The definite determiners (such as the definite article sa / þata / sō ) while indefinite adjectives are used in other circumstances., Indefinite adjectives generally use a combination of a -stem and ō -stem endings, and definite adjectives use a combination of an -stem and ōn -stem endings. The concept of "strong" and "weak" declensions that is prevalent in the grammar of many other Germanic languages
6624-563: The dialect of Sparta ), and Northern Peloponnesus Doric (including Corinthian ). All the groups were represented by colonies beyond Greece proper as well, and these colonies generally developed local characteristics, often under the influence of settlers or neighbors speaking different Greek dialects. After the conquests of Alexander the Great in the late 4th century BC, a new international dialect known as Koine or Common Greek developed, largely based on Attic Greek , but with influence from other dialects. This dialect slowly replaced most of
6720-454: The east. The name Daci , or "Dacians" is a collective ethnonym . Dio Cassius reported that the Dacians themselves used that name, and the Romans so called them, while the Greeks called them Getae. Opinions on the origins of the name Daci are divided. Some scholars consider it to originate in the Indo-European * dha-k -, with the stem * dhe - 'to put, to place', while others think that the name Daci originates in * daca 'knife, dagger' or in
6816-527: The eastern (satem) group of Indo-European languages. There are two contradictory theories: some scholars (such as Tomaschek 1883; Russu 1967; Solta 1980; Crossland 1982; Vraciu 1980) consider Dacian to be a Thracian language or a dialect thereof. This view is supported by R. G. Solta, who says that Thracian and Dacian are very closely related languages. Other scholars (such as Georgiev 1965, Duridanov 1976) consider that Thracian and Dacian are two different and specific Indo-European languages which cannot be reduced to
6912-480: The end of a word, to their voiced form; another such example is wileid-u "do you ( pl. ) want" from wileiþ "you ( pl. ) want". If the first word has a preverb attached, the clitic actually splits the preverb from the verb: ga-u-láubjats "do you both believe...?" from galáubjats "you both believe". Another such clitic is -uh "and", appearing as -h after a vowel: ga-h-mēlida "and he wrote" from gamēlida "he wrote", urreis nim-uh "arise and take!" from
7008-443: The full set of Indo-European pronouns: personal pronouns (including reflexive pronouns for each of the three grammatical persons ), possessive pronouns , both simple and compound demonstratives , relative pronouns , interrogatives and indefinite pronouns . Each follows a particular pattern of inflection (partially mirroring the noun declension), much like other Indo-European languages. One particularly noteworthy characteristic
7104-561: The historical Dorians . The invasion is known to have displaced population to the later Attic-Ionic regions, who regarded themselves as descendants of the population displaced by or contending with the Dorians. The Greeks of this period believed there were three major divisions of all Greek people – Dorians, Aeolians, and Ionians (including Athenians), each with their own defining and distinctive dialects. Allowing for their oversight of Arcadian, an obscure mountain dialect, and Cypriot, far from
7200-476: The historical circumstances of the times imply that the overall groups already existed in some form. Scholars assume that major Ancient Greek period dialect groups developed not later than 1120 BC, at the time of the Dorian invasions —and that their first appearances as precise alphabetic writing began in the 8th century BC. The invasion would not be "Dorian" unless the invaders had some cultural relationship to
7296-561: The imperative form nim "take". After iþ or any indefinite besides sums "some" and anþar "another", - uh cannot be placed; in the latter category, this is only because indefinite determiner phrases cannot move to the front of a clause. Unlike, for example, Latin - que , - uh can only join two or more main clauses. In all other cases, the word jah "and" is used, which can also join main clauses. More than one such clitics can occur in one word: diz-uh-þan-sat ijōs "and then he seized them ( fem. )" from dissat "he seized" (notice again
7392-578: The indigenous population of Thracian origins. When the Agathyrsi were later completely assimilated by the Geto-Thracian populations;, their fortified settlements became the centres of the Getic groups who would later transform into the Dacian culture; an important part of the Dacian people descended from the Agathyrsi. When the La Tène Celts arrived in the 4th century BC, the Dacians were under
7488-566: The influence of the Scythians. Alexander the Great attacked the Getae in 335 BC on the lower Danube, but by 300 BC they had formed a state founded on a military democracy, and began a period of conquest. More Celts arrived during the 3rd century BC, and in the 1st century BC the people of Boii tried to conquer some of the Dacian territory on the eastern side of the Teiss river. The Dacians drove
7584-538: The language or dialect that was spoken north of Danube, in present-day Romania and eastern Hungary, and "Thracian" for the variety spoken south of the Danube. There is no doubt that the Thracian language was related to the Dacian language which was spoken in what is today Romania, before some of that area was occupied by the Romans. Also, both Thracian and Dacian have one of the main satem characteristic changes of Indo-European language, *k and *g to *s and *z. With regard to
7680-415: The location of the stress depends on the type of compound: For example, with comparable words from modern Germanic languages: Gothic preserves many archaic Indo-European features that are not always present in modern Germanic languages, in particular the rich Indo-European declension system. Gothic had nominative , accusative , genitive and dative cases , as well as vestiges of a vocative case that
7776-525: The lower Danube area and in isolated mountain regions in Crimea as late as the second half of the 18th century. Lacking certain sound changes characteristic of Gothic, however, Crimean Gothic cannot be a lineal descendant of the language attested in the Codex Argenteus. The existence of such early attested texts makes Gothic a language of considerable interest in comparative linguistics . Only
7872-508: The older dialects, although the Doric dialect has survived in the Tsakonian language , which is spoken in the region of modern Sparta. Doric has also passed down its aorist terminations into most verbs of Demotic Greek . By about the 6th century AD, the Koine had slowly metamorphosed into Medieval Greek . Phrygian is an extinct Indo-European language of West and Central Anatolia , which
7968-487: The original Gothic script and a "normalized" one that adds diacritics ( macrons and acute accents ) to certain vowels to clarify the pronunciation or, in certain cases, to indicate the Proto-Germanic origin of the vowel in question. The latter system is usually used in the academic literature. The following table shows the correspondence between spelling and sound for vowels: Notes: The following table shows
8064-467: The people became known as 'the Dacians'. Getae and Dacians were interchangeable terms, or used with some confusion by the Greeks. Latin poets often used the name Getae . Vergil called them Getae four times, and Daci once, Lucian Getae three times and Daci twice, Horace named them Getae twice and Daci five times, while Juvenal one time Getae and two times Daci . In AD 113, Hadrian used
8160-487: The perfect stem eilēpha (not * lelēpha ) because it was originally slambanō , with perfect seslēpha , becoming eilēpha through compensatory lengthening. Reduplication is also visible in the present tense stems of certain verbs. These stems add a syllable consisting of the root's initial consonant followed by i . A nasal stop appears after the reduplication in some verbs. The earliest extant examples of ancient Greek writing ( c. 1450 BC ) are in
8256-430: The poetic term Getae for the Dacians. Modern historians prefer to use the name Geto-Dacians . Strabo describes the Getae and Dacians as distinct but cognate tribes. This distinction refers to the regions they occupied. Strabo and Pliny the Elder also state that Getae and Dacians spoke the same language. By contrast, the name of Dacians , whatever the origin of the name, was used by the more western tribes who adjoined
8352-404: The question word: Gothic has two clitic particles placed in the second position in a sentence, in accordance with Wackernagel's Law . One such clitic particle is - u , indicating a yes–no question or an indirect question, like Latin - ne : The prepositional phrase without the clitic - u appears as af þus silbin : the clitic causes the reversion of originally voiced fricatives, unvoiced at
8448-1093: The river Duria, the present-day Váh (Waag). Dacians lived on both sides of the Danube. According to Strabo , Moesians also lived on both sides of the Danube. According to Agrippa , Dacia was limited by the Baltic Ocean in the North and by the Vistula in the West. The names of the people and settlements confirm Dacia's borders as described by Agrippa. Dacian people also lived south of the Danube. Pontic Steppe Caucasus East Asia Eastern Europe Northern Europe Pontic Steppe Northern/Eastern Steppe Europe South Asia Steppe Europe Caucasus India Indo-Aryans Iranians East Asia Europe East Asia Europe Indo-Aryan Iranian Indo-Aryan Iranian Others European The Dacians and Getae were always considered as Thracians by
8544-419: The root with the first consonant in the root plus aí ) but without adding a suffix in either case. This parallels the Greek and Sanskrit perfects . The dichotomy is still present in modern Germanic languages: Verbal conjugation in Gothic have two grammatical voices : the active and the medial; three numbers: singular, dual (except in the third person) and plural; two tenses: present and preterite (derived from
8640-517: The syllabic script Linear B . Beginning in the 8th century BC, however, the Greek alphabet became standard, albeit with some variation among dialects. Early texts are written in boustrophedon style, but left-to-right became standard during the classic period. Modern editions of ancient Greek texts are usually written with accents and breathing marks , interword spacing , modern punctuation , and sometimes mixed case , but these were all introduced later. The beginning of Homer 's Iliad exemplifies
8736-487: The term "Getic" (Getae), even though attempts have been made to distinguish between Dacian and Getic, there seems no compelling reason to disregard the view of the Greek geographer Strabo that the Daci and the Getae, Thracian tribes dwelling north of the Danube (the Daci in the west of the area and the Getae further east), were one and the same people and spoke the same language. Another variety that has sometimes been recognized
8832-458: The type of Indo-European conjugation called ' thematic ' because they insert a vowel derived from the reconstructed proto-Indo-European phonemes *e or *o between roots and inflexional suffixes. The pattern is also present in Greek and Latin: The other conjugation, called ' athematic ', in which suffixes are added directly to roots, exists only in unproductive vestigial forms in Gothic, just like in Greek and Latin. The most important such instance
8928-520: The voicing of diz- ), ga-u-ƕa-sēƕi "whether he saw anything" from gasēƕi "he saw". For the most part, Gothic is known to be significantly closer to Proto-Germanic than any other Germanic language except for that of the (scantily attested) Ancient Nordic runic inscriptions, which has made it invaluable in the reconstruction of Proto-Germanic . In fact, Gothic tends to serve as the primary foundation for reconstructing Proto-Germanic . The reconstructed Proto-Germanic conflicts with Gothic only when there
9024-480: Was Aeolic. For example, fragments of the works of the poet Sappho from the island of Lesbos are in Aeolian. Most of the dialect sub-groups listed above had further subdivisions, generally equivalent to a city-state and its surrounding territory, or to an island. Doric notably had several intermediate divisions as well, into Island Doric (including Cretan Doric ), Southern Peloponnesus Doric (including Laconian ,
9120-526: Was reinterpreted as present tense. The Gothic word wáit , from the proto-Indo-European *woid-h 2 e ("to see" in the perfect), corresponds exactly to its Sanskrit cognate véda and in Greek to ϝοἶδα. Both etymologically should mean "I have seen" (in the perfect sense) but mean "I know" (in the preterite-present meaning). Latin follows the same rule with nōuī ("I have learned" and "I know"). The preterite-present verbs include áigan ("to possess") and kunnan ("to know") among others. The word order of Gothic
9216-538: Was sometimes identical to the nominative and sometimes to the accusative. The three genders of Indo-European were all present. Nouns and adjectives were inflected according to one of two grammatical numbers : the singular and the plural. Nouns can be divided into numerous declensions according to the form of the stem: a , ō , i , u , an , ōn , ein , r , etc. Adjectives have two variants, indefinite and definite (sometimes indeterminate and determinate ), with definite adjectives normally used in combination with
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