I daresay you’re one of the people here having a political debate, i.e. supporting a vision of your own linguistic community’s history based solely on your own gut feeling, and apparently unaware that your objections have already been dealt with among scholars for a good long time now.
The scenario that Romanian arrived from across the Danube does not require that the Romanian Carpathians were completely depopulated. Rather, it is possible that the region’s inhabitants first switched to Slavic – this is supported by a great deal of toponymic evidence – and then later both language shift and the arrival of other populations resulted in the extinction of the Transylvanian and Oltenian dialects of Common Slavonic in favor of Romanian and Hungarian instead.
Then, the contemporary view of the relationship between Romanian and Aromanian is not that they were mere sister dialects of Latin but split up at a much later date – they are too similar for an early split, and it appears that their first layer of Slavic loans is identical, so that means a split after the 6th century CE. The scenario that Romanian nationalists support requires believing that Aromanian results from Romanian speakers from Dacia migrating well to the southwest. That both Romanian and Aromanian came from the Central Balkans instead is viewed as vastly more likely, especially in the light of the advances in the reconstruction of early Albanian (because an array of evidence puts early Albanian in the Central Balkans, not Dacia).
> so after the Roman Empire abandoned Dacia and there no longer was any central administration, the locals were left to themselves
While I know that the story of their ancestors “left to themselves” after Rome withdrew from Dacia persists in Romanian pop culture, it never fit well with the facts. Romanian words like biserica ‘church’ suggest that Romanian’s Latin ancestor remained in contact with the rest of the Mediterranean world for a long time, because only after Constantine in the 4th century were basilica buildings used as Christian churches. Again, this would be easily explainable by an origin in the Central Balkans where those cultural contacts persisted.
The theory variant mentioned by you is only slightly less implausible than the depopulation variant and it also is a pure speculation that is not supported by
any evidence.
There is no doubt that when the Slavs have passed through the former Dacia province a part of them have stopped and settled there while the others have continued their journey to the South of the Danube. This explains the Slavic toponyms and the many Slavic loanwords into Romanian.
In your variant, the newly settled Slavs have been much more numerous than the Proto-Romanians, so they eventually assimilated the latter.
But then, several centuries later, there was a miraculous population explosion of the speakers of Proto-Romanian at the South of the Danube (even if in reality it is much more likely that their number was dwindling, by being assimilated by the Slavs that were more numerous in the South) and this great number of Proto-Romanians created out of nothing gathered their belongings and moved at the North of the Danube, where they created new settlements among the Slavs, and this time, unlike a few centuries ago, the number of Proto-Romanians was much greater than that of the Slavs, so the assimilation proceeded in reverse direction, restoring a Romance language as the main language of the land.
While this variant does not need the unbelievable depopulation hypothesis, it requires an unbelievable hypothesis about huge oscillations it the number of Proto-Romanians, for which there exists no explanation and no evidence.
I hardly believe that anyone can say with a straight face that this hypothesis is more plausible than the hypothesis conforming to Occam's razor, i.e. that the Slavs have settled both at the North and at the South of the Danube, but more of them have settled at the South, which was the endpoint of their journey (stopped by the Eastern Roman Empire), while the fewer that have settled at the North were early quitters, who did not want to wait in the hope of finding better lands.
In both places the Slavs have found Proto-Romanians, but eventually in the South most Proto-Romanians have been assimilated by the Slavs, while in the North the reverse happened.
This hypothesis does not include any implausible element, while the other 2 variants need either a depopulation or huge unmotivated demographic oscillations, which both are phenomena never observed in history anywhere else and for each of them there is no evidence.
Words like "basilica" have been obviously brought by missionaries coming from the Eastern Roman Empire, who spread the Christian Faith, and they do not provide any information about the location where this happened.
Again, your post does come across as political debate based on very vague things you have read on the internet, and not the actual literature in the field. I am baffled by your supposition that superior numbers are required for language shift to occur: this has not been believed for many decades now and is regarded as an elementary fallacy. And what I already mentioned above about Aromanian makes unsound your vision of two separate Proto-Romanians on either side of the Danube.
In general, I don’t see the point to debate further, because debate is not something that occurs on general-public internet fora like this. It is something that occurs in the appropriate scholarly venues. My original post up above aimed to emphasize that the contemporary consensus within linguistics – though it is only very slowly trickling into popular-science publications – does not see a role for “Dacian” in the Albanian–Romanian lexical isoglosses, and that has some important consequences for the reconstruction of Balkan linguistic history. That emerging consensus exists regardless of what you or I write here.
And since you are a representative of one of the peoples involved in a political squabble, it might be best for you to sit this out: in general in linguistics, it is often people from outside a region that do the best work on that region’s linguistic history, since they have no dog in the regional ethnic battles.
Like I have already said, I completely agree with what you have said that there is no role for “Dacian” in the Albanian–Romanian lexical isoglosses.
I also agree that this is not the place for such a debate, so I will not post any other comment.
I completely disagree with your claim that this is a political debate. I have not said a single word about anything outside linguistics before you have stepped outside linguistics by presenting the hypothesis that the Romanians have come into Romania from the South of the Danube as being a certain fact. And no, even when a few specialists agree with the same hypothesis, that is not a consensus, especially when the evidence for it is lacking.
What you have mentioned that Aromanian is very close to Romanian, so they must have separated very recently, is a glottochronological kind of argument that may make a hypothesis more plausible, but which can never prove anything with any certainty.
The distance between two sister languages usually increases in time, but not necessarily at an uniform rate. Two languages that become completely isolated may become reciprocally unintelligible after a century, but when there is a continuous contact between them, e.g. due to close commercial connections, they may remain little differentiated after hundreds of years, while having a parallel evolution that makes both of them very different from their parent language.
Much stronger arguments would be needed to support such a weird supposition like a population explosion in the South-Danubian Proto-Romanians that would push them over the Danube in sufficient numbers to occupy the entire much larger North-Danubian area and assimilate all the Slavs who supposedly had become dominant there.
You are right that which language assimilates another is not frequently determined by the number of speakers, even if in the cases when none of the languages is supported by any state authority and when there is no military or cultural dominance of one over the other, there remains not much that can determine the direction of assimilation besides the numbers of speakers.
However that is irrelevant for my argument that such a reversal of the direction of assimilation without any known reason is extremely improbable. Supposing that the Slavs had already assimilated the Romance speakers in the North and knowing for sure from later history that they were on the path of assimilating most of the Romance speakers from the South, what extraordinary events could reverse this and transform a group from the South that could have been only small and without any warrior abilities into a large population dominant over the very much larger Northern territory, despite its supposedly now Slavic population?
Even if for unknown reasons small numbers of South-Danubian Romance speakers would have been able to convert large numbers of North-Danubian Slavic speakers, it would still have been necessary for the South-Danubian Romance speakers to be able to provide an incredibly large number of emigrants only to be able to reach the entire North-Danubian territory, to be in proximity of all of its supposedly Slavic population.
This has nothing to do with politics, because nowadays it does not matter by which means Romanians have arrived in Romania, or the Americans in USA and so on.
Nevertheless, when a historical theory is illogical and it appears to have been conceived by some kind of armchair theoretician, who has never looked on a map, to see the scale of the things implied by their suppositions, e.g. how many people would be needed to occupy a territory densely enough to eventually dominate the former occupants, where could they have come from, and so on, it does not matter if they claim to be in consensus with their bros, such a theory must be challenged.
Related to this, if you're Romanian or happen to know Romanian I heartily recommend this recently published book [1] about the Balkans and South-Eastern Europe during the migrations of the Slavs. Sorin Paliga can have some controversial takes but otherwise I find him quite ok, all things considered, while Florin Curta is of course pretty well known when it comes to his studies on the migrations of the Slavs.
The scenario that Romanian arrived from across the Danube does not require that the Romanian Carpathians were completely depopulated. Rather, it is possible that the region’s inhabitants first switched to Slavic – this is supported by a great deal of toponymic evidence – and then later both language shift and the arrival of other populations resulted in the extinction of the Transylvanian and Oltenian dialects of Common Slavonic in favor of Romanian and Hungarian instead.
Then, the contemporary view of the relationship between Romanian and Aromanian is not that they were mere sister dialects of Latin but split up at a much later date – they are too similar for an early split, and it appears that their first layer of Slavic loans is identical, so that means a split after the 6th century CE. The scenario that Romanian nationalists support requires believing that Aromanian results from Romanian speakers from Dacia migrating well to the southwest. That both Romanian and Aromanian came from the Central Balkans instead is viewed as vastly more likely, especially in the light of the advances in the reconstruction of early Albanian (because an array of evidence puts early Albanian in the Central Balkans, not Dacia).
> so after the Roman Empire abandoned Dacia and there no longer was any central administration, the locals were left to themselves
While I know that the story of their ancestors “left to themselves” after Rome withdrew from Dacia persists in Romanian pop culture, it never fit well with the facts. Romanian words like biserica ‘church’ suggest that Romanian’s Latin ancestor remained in contact with the rest of the Mediterranean world for a long time, because only after Constantine in the 4th century were basilica buildings used as Christian churches. Again, this would be easily explainable by an origin in the Central Balkans where those cultural contacts persisted.