There is no certain way to say (with a straight face or without being biased yourself) that Dacians words are not present in the Romanian language.
I work in the field of historical linguistics myself (albeit not in Balkan linguistics but an adjacent set of languages, but I keep up with that literature too and I am acquainted with the main scholars currently working therein), so what I am posting is informed and, were there interest, I could cite further publications.
However in most cases it is impossible to determine which was the direction of borrowing and there is no evidence to relate them with any of the languages named by ancient historians, because too little has been preserved of those.
Also, there is very little evidence, perhaps none, that the Thracian language and the Dacian were closely related languages. The toponyms that are assumed to come from these two languages are not similar.
The supposition that they are closely related is based almost only on the claim of Herodotus that the latter were a tribe belonging to the former, but that claim might have been based only on similarities in clothes and weapons, even without related languages.
A paper / theory being recent doesn't magically make it true or generally accepted.
> I work in the field of historical linguistics myself (...) so what I am posting is informed
This is a clear "appeal to authority fallacy".
But in all Matzinger's work he doesn't actually claim that Dacian words aren't to be found in Romanian language, is it?
Without proofs of what an extinct language actually sounded like, saying that there isn't any trace of it in any other language, and backing this up by making an appeal to authority is a biased view from my pov.
On HN people usually defer to experts in the sciences, as it is about taking the word of someone with the required training in the field and familiarity with the literature. As I said, I would be happy to cite lots of publications, but on a general forum like this it’s not clear that other posters have the time and interest in reading it all, plus the necessary background for it – this field usually involves 6–10 years of initial university study, after all.
> But in all Matzinger's work he doesn't actually claim that Dacian words aren't to be found in Romanian language, is it?
Matzinger’s view (which generally represents the consensus now inside the field) is indeed that that layer of the Romanian vocabulary can be explained through Albanian without any need to conjecture about Dacian influence.
> Without proofs of what an extinct language actually sounded like
The respective phoneme inventories of Proto-Albanian, Vulgar Latin, and Thracian and Illyrian are well established. Why did you think that proof was lacking?
