As can be seen, the majority of these Bulgarian and Romanian words show no obvious signs of relatedness. The Bulgarian word море and Romanian mare are similar due to this ancient ”Indo-European” root word, also for example Gaulish *mori.

The words for ”beach” are of course related. Romanian plajă is of the same root word as Bulgarian плаж. This root word is generally an Italic/Romance one, compare for example French plage – beach, Spanish playa – beach. Italian spiaggia is from the same root, but shows a clear difference in initial sounds to the Romanian and other forms. The Bulgarian word is thought to be borrowed from the French, but I find this difficult to believe considering its similarity to the Romanian word.

Another curious set of connected words in the table are Bulgarian пещера – cave, and Romanian peşteră – cave. This Romanian word is quite different to many of the other Italic words for ”cave” which I have encountered, such as French grotte, Spanish cueva and Catalan cova. The Romanian word may be borrowed from a Slavic or pre-Slavic root word, The root word also exists in Croatian as pećina – cave.

 

Untranslated (non-Vinča?) inscriptions found in Romania at the Turtudui Menhir and other sites

 

In Romania there are a number of megalithic sites, not nearly as well-identified culturally as those in Western Europe, and generally those in Romania seem to be located in rather inaccessible areas. I only came across these sites due to browsing the website www(dot)megalithic(dot)co.uk, where the site user Mfrincu has uploaded a photo of a possibly prehistoric inscription at the Turtudui Menhir. This appears to be one of several in the area which is untranslated. Certainly some of the characters bare a resemblance (in my opinion) to some of the Neolithic potential writing examples I have published about before, found at The Tomb of the Otters and at Skara Brae, both on the Orkney Islands. They, and the inscription at the Turdudui Menhir do bare some similarity to characters in the Vinča script. According to what I have found on www(dot)megalithic(dot)co.uk and the photos uploaded by the user Mfrincu, inscriptions are also found at the Fundul Pesterii cave and at the Fundul Pesterii menhir.

 

The Vinča culture and language

 

As well as the discussion in the previous section of this page about untranslated (non-Vinča?) inscriptions, there is also the more widely known Copper Age Vinča culture of the Balkans. This culture has become well known for what may well be an alphabetic script, although as of yet nobody has been able to transliterate this script character by character. It has however been possible in my own work to identify certain characters which may have symbolic meaning attached to them, in the same way that for example runes or hieroglyphs have a phonetic value but also serve as entire concepts in and of themselves, albeit in different ways.

Note that I have discussed in some of my previous publications: other aspects to ancient language in the Balkans, the Iron Gates culture and language, and a little on the Vinča language, culture and script, and Serbo-Croatian etymologies.

 

Croatian and Serbian

 

In terms of the more southern Balkans, the Serbo-Croatian language is for sure a very interesting, albeit for me confusing group of interrelated languages to try and understand and discuss, particularly as several of the books I have on Serbo-Croatian talk about the ”language” as such, whereas now it is necessary for me I think to discuss this in terms of Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian and Montenegrin as separate languages. Although in reality standard Croatian and Serbian can be thought of as standardised dialects of the Shtokavian dialects which are spoken in both Croatia and in Serbia. This is as opposed to the ”other” dialect groups in Croatia and Serbia that are not necessarily Shtokavian. In this sense, standard Croatian is closer to standard Serbian than it is to some of the Croatian dialects within Croatia itself.

Something I find extremely curious about these Slavic areas of the Balkans is an extreme lack of megalithic structures. Compared to Italy, Malta, Sardinia, and the Balearic islands, Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia contain very little evidence of the archaeological megalithic cultures, which is to me, curious to say the least.

Note that the Slovene language to the north is ”close to” Serbian and Croatian, but represents its own complex dialectology, whilst the Macedonian language is closer to Bulgarian. Also in western Croatia, Romance/Italic languages were spoken in the past.

 

This is the end of the article.