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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;+VGO.DVCKS, post: 5006933, member: 110504&quot;][USER=80952]@ambr0zie[/USER], Many thanks for your magnanimously expansive reply to [USER=72790]@kevin McGonigal[/USER]!&nbsp; All of this is truly great.</p><p>A couple of things about your observations struck me immediately.&nbsp; First, the Romanian scurtă, for &#039;brevis,&#039; seems distinctly Germanic in origin.&nbsp; (Cf. the Old English --hence still very Germanic-- origin of &#039;short&#039;: &#039;scort, sceort.&#039;)&nbsp; ...Could any Germanic connection go back to the 4th century, if not even earlier ...perhaps more contemporaneously to Aurelian&#039;s withdrawal from Dacia?</p><p>Second, the whole question of the extent to which speakers of similar languages can understand eachother is very fun in its own right.&nbsp; (...I have about as much luck reading French as you do reading Latin.)&nbsp; Regarding the extant Celtic languages in northwestern Europe, I recall someone, who knew what they were talking about, saying that speakers of Welsh and of Breton (right, in Brittany, across the English Channel) could understand eachother, even in conversation.&nbsp; (...Presumably as long as the subject matter remained on an appropriately prosaic level!)&nbsp; A similar phenomenon (perhaps more nuanced, along the lines of Romanian and Latin, as you noted) seems to have occured between speakers of Old English and the Old Norse of Viking settlers in England.</p><p>...This was terrific fun!&nbsp; Thanks again for your reply.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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