This hypothesis, if sustained by further study, will provide additional evidence that the site of the development of the Aryan languages and of the Nordic subspecies was in eastern Europe, in a region which is close to the meeting place between the most archaic synthetic languages and the most nearly related Anaryan tongue, the agglutinative Ugrian.
The Aryan tongue was introduced into Greece by the Achæans about 1400 B. C. and later, about 1100 B. C. by the true Hellenes, who brought in the classic dialects of Dorian, Ionian and Æolian.
These Aryan languages superseded their Anaryan predecessor, the Pelasgian. From the language of these early invaders came the Illyrian, Thracian, Albanian, classic Greek and the debased modern Romaic, a descendant of the Ionian dialect.
Aryan speech was introduced among the Anaryan-speaking Etruscans of the Italian Peninsula by the Umbrians and Oscans about 1100 B. C. and from the language of these conquerors was derived Latin which later spread to the uttermost confines of the Roman Empire. Its descendants to-day are the Romance tongues spoken within the ancient imperial boundaries, Portuguese on the west, Castilian, Catalan, Provençal, French, the Langue d’oïl of the Walloons, Romansch, Ladin, Friulian, Tuscan, Calabrian and Rumanian.
The problem of the existence of a language clearly descended from Latin, the Rumanian, in the eastern Carpathians cut off by Slavic and Magyar tongues from the nearest Romance tongues presents difficulties. The Rumanians themselves make two claims; the first, which can be safely disregarded, is an unbroken linguistic descent from a group of Aryan languages which occupied this whole section of Europe, from which Latin was derived and of which Albanian is also a remnant.
The more serious claim, however, made by the Rumanians is to linguistic and racial descent from the military colonists planted by the Emperor Trajan in the great Dacian plain north of the Danube. This may be possible, so far as the language is concerned, but there are some weighty objections to it.
We have little evidence for, and much against, the existence of Rumanian speech north of the Danube for nearly a thousand years after Rome abandoned this outlying region. Dacia was one of the last provinces to be occupied by Rome and was the first from which the legions were withdrawn upon the decline of the Empire. The northern Carpathians, furthermore, where the Rumanians claim to have taken refuge during the barbarian invasions formed part of the Slavic homeland and it was in these same mountains and in the Ruthenian districts of eastern Galicia that the Slavic languages were developed, probably by the Sarmatians and Venethi, from whence they spread in all directions in the centuries that immediately followed the fall of Rome. So it is almost impossible to credit the survival of a frontier community of Romanized natives situated not only in the path of the great invasions of Europe from the east, but also in the very spot where Slavic tongues were at the time evolving.
Rumanian speech occupies large areas outside of the present kingdom of Rumania, in Russian Bessarabia, Austrian Bukowina and above all in Hungarian Transylvania.
The linguistic problem is further complicated by the existence in the Pindus Mountains of Thessaly of another large community of Vlachs of Rumanian speech. How this later community could have survived from Roman times until to-day, untouched either by the Greek language of the Byzantine Empire or by the Turkish conquest is another difficult problem.
The evidence, on the whole, points to the descent of the Vlachs from the early inhabitants of Thrace, who adopted Latin speech in the first centuries of the Christian era and clung to it during the domination of the Bulgarians from the seventh century onward in the lands south of the Danube. In the thirteenth century the mass of these Vlachs, leaving scattered remnants behind them, crossed the Danube and founded Little and Great Wallachia. From there they spread into Transylvania and a century later into Moldavia.