Balkan tongues

[David Kaufman]

Thanks for the enlightenment!  Northern Russian dialects with postposed articles?  Who would have thunk!!!  Thanks.

Dave

Mike Morgan <Mike.Morgan at mb3.seikyou.ne.jp> wrote:
Dave Kaufman asked:

> Is Bulgarian the only Slavic language to have articles?  I've studied Russian, which of course has
> no articles, and I'm thinking most of the other Slavic tongues don't either, with the exception of
> Bulgarian.  Was Bulgarian the only Slavic language to be so influenced by this Romance and Greek
> trait of having articles?

Macedonian also has articles (with the literary dialect actually having a triple series - parallel to the triple series of demonstratives). Of course, some (Bulgarians mostly?) would argue that Macedonian is JUST a dialect of Bulgarian. And the same MIGHT be said for the Prizren Serbian (bordering on Macedonian), which is reported (e.g. p. Comrie & Corbett, 386) to have widespread postposed articles.

In South Slavdom, but outside what would normally be thought of as the Balkan Sprachbund area, we also find both definite and indefinite articles (en and ta, respectively) in Slovene (although discouraged in the literary language) (ibid, p. 411). It must also be said that these articles are pre- rather than postposed. (We also have the theoretical issue of whether we can really justify a separate category of articles in Slovene, since they appear NOT to be formally distinguished from the demonstrative adjectives.)

And clearly far outside the Balkan Sprachbund area, postposed articles are ALSO found in SOME northern Russian dialects. (Sorry, I tried to track down a source - other than my aging memory of years long gone when I was an active Slavicist - but came up blank.)

Sources cited:

Comrie, Bernard & Greville G Corbett (1993) The Slavonic Languages. London & New York: Routledge.

Mike Morgan
Kobe City University of Foreign Studies
Mike.Morgan at mb3.seikyou.ne.jp


		
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