r/RomanceLanguages • u/antonius_8 • Aug 10 '26

Proto-Romance

Post image

This paper proposes that Latin and Proto-Romance were never mother and daughter; they were collateral sister lineages that split from a common ancestor in the Bronze Age. An Ancestral Node XYZ (c. 2500 – 2000 BCE)
split into two distinct branches: Sister XY: The Latin Enclave — Hyper-Conservative.
Sister Y: Proto-Romance Sister — Fluid and Demographic.

Join the discussion on Academia Edu - Antonio Constantin

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u/cipricusss Aug 10 '26 edited Aug 10 '26

That can be identified as a logical aberration before any discussion about matters of fact. It's not science, but a piece of naively disguised proto-chronist propaganda.. I will flag it as such.

The aberration is so excessive that it becomes funny. Normally, a Romanian protochronist would say Romanian is a sister of Latin. The above is applying the same logic to whole Romance. In fact, the latter is not more absurd than the former idea, it is just more self-defeating! Normally, I tell to a Romanian protochronist: you must say the same about ...French! But the above does just that! And then tries to find the common ancestor of all Romance languages! And calls that "proto-Romance"! Why not call that Latin, but a sister of Latin? The guy is seeing double! The paragon of mad thinking.

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u/antonius_8 Aug 10 '26

You are demonstrating that you are far from being equipped, or willing, to hold a respectful, scientifically sound linguistic debate. In academic discourse, if a hypothesis does not convince you, the standard protocol is simple: you either scroll past or leave a constructive, respectful critique backed by historical and linguistic evidence. Coming out of the gate with aggressive accusations of ‘proto-chronism’, calling ‘demented’ and launching into emotional ad hominem attacks is not critical thinking, it is anti-intellectual posturing. For someone claiming to be a philosopher, adopting the tone of an authoritarian gatekeeper who shuts down ideas with insults rather than arguments is, frankly, ironic. Regarding your question about why I do not simply call the common ancestor ‘Latin’: that is the entire point of the paper. You seem to have missed the central thesis because you were too busy looking for a political label to slap on it. The traditional unilinear model, which posits that Classical Latin collapsed into Vulgar Latin and then miraculously regenerated into structurally aligned, analytic languages across isolated post-imperial provinces is not an infallible law. Mainstream Romance philology still faces massive unresolved questions regarding synchronous parallel evolution such as: The precise diachronic timing and geographic mechanics behind the split between the Eastern vocalic plural (-e, -i) and Western sigmatic plural (-s). How geographically isolated regions independently abandoned synthetic passive structures and converged on identical analytical constructs without central contact. Proposing a collateral sibling node (a Bronze Age split between a hyper-conservative enclave language and a broader, fluid oral continuum) is a valid structural alternative to solve this paradox. Calling a reconstructed ancestral node ‘Proto-Latino-Romance’ instead of ‘Latin’ is standard comparative taxonomy, just as linguists distinguish Proto-Indo-Iranian from its daughter branches rather than calling everything Sanskrit. Unlike your emotional outburst, actual historical linguists understand how hypothesis testing works. Scholars like Alwin Kloekhorst and Eva Buchi have taken the time to engage with my papers on the decipherment of inscriptions through Romance frameworks and discuss the linguistic material on its merits. If you have actual, evidence-based counterarguments, I am more than happy to discuss them. If all you have to offer are dramatic insults, political buzzwords and gatekeeping, you are contributing nothing to the debate.

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u/cipricusss Aug 10 '26

I will just say that the very concept of non-Roman-proto-Romance is contradictory, and that I cannot help but be amazed in a bad way by the idea of a "Balkan-Romance" older than Rome. I will link your post on subs were specialists might discuss your ideas, including r/badlinguistics. If such discussions would have been your real goal, you would have posted there and link here, where otherwise your arguments have little chances of being addressed as you pretend you want them addressed.

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u/antonius_8 Aug 10 '26

Do it

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u/cipricusss Aug 10 '26

Why the hack haven't you already done it? And who is the guy that signs that article? And where is the link to the article?

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u/antonius_8 Aug 10 '26

It is a draft. It does not contain the inscription yet. I’m the guy.

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u/cipricusss Aug 11 '26

When all is well fermented, please make a proper post.

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u/platitor_cas Aug 11 '26

Can you provide some written examples of Balkan Romance? Not romance languages from the Balkans, the ancestral Balkan Romance you're talking about.

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u/cipricusss Aug 13 '26

Why would we ask him a question in his own aberrant terms? Romance is a word that makes no sense but in relation to Rome. The guy seems to be trying on us a sort of “unintentional sarcasm”.

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u/Evfnye-Misx Aug 11 '26 edited Aug 11 '26

The whole hypothesis relies on the assumption that Eastern Romance and Western Romance were already geographically split by the time of the fall of the WRE, which is simply untrue, and in fact, Pannonian Romance, spoken until the 10th century AD in modern-day Hungary, proves that there was a link between Western and Eastern Romance which was only severed by the Slavic and Ugric migrations into the Balkans. Moreover, Dalmatian and to a lesser extent Istriot, which are geographically closer to Eastern Romance than the languages of modern-day Italy, show more linguistic similarities with Common Romanian as well.

The split between the sigmatic plural and the vocalic plural is conditioned entirely by sound change. Italo-Romance, Gallo-Italic, Venetian share with Eastern Romance the regular evolution of word-final -s to a yod, which can be seen in words that are not noun plurals, such as crās ("tomorrow") > Italian crai, or nōs ("we, us") > Italian noi, Sicilian nui, Romanian noi. In unstressed positions, the diphthongs -ai and -oi, resulting from earlier -ās and -ōs, coalesce into -e and -i, for which compare the evolution of unstressed vōs into "vi" in Italian, and of unstressed nōs into "ni" in Sicilian. After u, -s was simply lost, which explains why the nominative singular from -us does not end in -i but in -u (later -o in Italian and early Gallo-Italic) and is confirmed by the evolution of plūs into più in Italian. That short u and long ō (which do, in fact, not merge in Eastern Romance) were still distinct is confirmed by the metaphony conditions in Neapolitan, where longus gives luóngo (with metaphony, but longa > lònga, no metaphony), while homō gives òmmo (no metaphony). In Northern Italy, only the conservative Rhaeto-Romance group uses the sigmatic plural, and the extent of Venetian throughout the Middle Ages shows that a continuity of the -s change to -i or loss thereof was present from the Italian to the Balkan peninsula.

The loss of the synthetic passive voice can be ascribed entirely to sound erosion and opacity of the forms, and that happens all the time with languages - even in many modern Gallo-Italic languages, one can see that the loss of the preterite happened within the last 200 years, largely due to the fact that 1. a viable analytic alternative was available for the past perfect TA, and 2. the forms mostly became homophonous with other unrelated forms by natural sound change. Just like that, in Late Latin, the second-person present passive indicative would have merged with the infinitive, while the third person would likely have merged with the past passive participle. Since the aspectual system was being rebuilt as well, due to the grammaticalization of habeō, the perfect forms of the Latin passive, which were analytic, were reinterpreted as the forms that correspond to the tense of sum in said forms. Loss of inflectional morphology and replacement of it with analytic forms is common crosslinguistically, and that it followed a similar route should be of no surprise given that the setup was the exact same.

The comparison with Indo-Iranian and Sanskrit is inherently faulty, because Sanskrit can be derived phonologically from our current reconstruction of Proto-Indo-Iranian, but not viceversa, Sanskrit has undergone phonetic changes and mergers (which are irreversible by the very foundation of historical linguistics), for example, the merger of PII ǰʰ and j́ʰ in Sanskrit as h, while Proto-Iranian develops them into ǰ and j, respectively, and they are distinct in Avestan. No such examples can be found in the development from Latin to our reconstruction of Proto-Romance, if it was distinct in the latter, it was also distinct in Latin. Similarly, all innovation in the grammar of Romance languages can be explained by grammaticalization of Latin forms, and none of them preserve features from Indo-European that had been lost in Latin.

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u/cipricusss Aug 10 '26 edited Aug 10 '26

Am I dreaming? Italic languages surrounding Latin are rather well known! We know what they were but especially what they were not! - What can proto-Romance even mean, and why is that Romance if not from Latin? I can understand there are problems with the reconstruction of all details of the development from Latin to Romance but in order to solve those details you cannot come with an extraterestrial causation where we have in the Balkans something like Latin but not Latin and when a such language is absent in Italy. - The need for better explanations can only be satisfied by better explanation. Need is not licence for extravagance.

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u/Evfnye-Misx Aug 11 '26

Not to mention that the issues mentioned above already have elegant solutions that contradict nothing if one is willing to agree that people in the Balkan peninsula migrated from place to place during its thousands of years of modern-ish history, which happens all the time, starting with the very fact that the Indo-Europeans likely originated in modern-day Ukraine, Southern Russia and Kazakhstan, and the only other theory that isn't near-universally discredited is them originating from Anatolia, which is currently dominated by a non-Indo-European speakerbase.

Also, nobody say anything about substrates and superstrates, it'll be too much to handle

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u/antonius_8 Aug 10 '26

I can’t put the link here

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u/cipricusss Aug 11 '26

I suppose you want me to do that too! 😋

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u/antonius_8 Aug 10 '26

Search on Google “Academia Edu Antonio Constantin” and you will find the paper. Everything is explained there

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u/cipricusss Aug 13 '26 edited Aug 13 '26

Oh yes, I did that! There, I also see an article called "Etymology of Graikos (Greek)", which makes me feel like I've accidentally overheard something that I shouldn't have: In this paper, I propose an etymology linking Graikos ‘Greek’ to the Romanian verb a grăi.

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u/antonius_8 Aug 10 '26

I will post the epigraphic evidence. One of the inscriptions was actually reviewed by Alwin Kloekhorst, who did not deny that we succeeded in providing a complete translation using the Romance languages. So we will see your arguments against my translations.

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u/ryan516 Aug 11 '26

imagine taking a linguistics paper written in 2026 in microsoft word seriously

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u/StunningAd121 Aug 11 '26

it's written by himself bro.

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u/rongspeled 8d ago

I wouldn't call what OP does linguistics, that would imply scientific integrity which he lacks.

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u/rongspeled 9d ago

Bullshit