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<DIV>Actually, you can also add me to the list of crusty (and more or less old)
Balkanists on the list. I have held off comment because the facts of the Balkan
linguistic area are really quite complicated and not easily summarized in
emails. Two of the features have already been mentioned: (1) the use of
subordinate clauses in place of infinitives and (2) the post-posed article. On
the phonological side, features include the the shift of the vowel /a/ to schwa
(and later, in Romanian, to barred-i) before /n/ and the tendancy for velar
stops to become labials before /t/ and /s/. There are also a variety of shared
lexical items and idioms. The "hard-core" members of the Balkan linguistic area
are Daco-Romanian (i.e. standard Romanian), Istro-Romanian, Macedo-Romanian,
Megleno-Romanian, Aromanian, and Albanian (Geg and Tosk). The Slavic languages
in the area show fewer of the features, presumably because they were relative
late comers. (Note that Bulgaria is called Bulgaria because the language spoken
there before modern Bulgarian was Bulgar, a Turkic language, and Macedonia is
named after the Macedonian people (Philip and Alexander the Great's folks), who
spoke an Indo-European language that was not Slavic). Greek shows fewer of the
features presumably because it is on the periphery of the area. The generally
held hypothesis is that the Balkan features arose due to substratum
influence from Dacian, Thracian, or Illyrian (more likely Thracian, since both
Romanian and Albanian show all the traits); however, there is so little material
available on these languages that no one knows for sure. The Balkan
features might just as well have been independent innovations in one
or another of these languages that spread to the neighboring languages. In any
event, none of the features of the Balkan linguistic area are unique to the
area; what makes it a linguistic area is that the set of features is shared to a
greater or lesser extent among the languages.</DIV>
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<DIV>Blair</DIV>
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