Balkan tongues (was: biloxi update)

[BARudes at aol.com]

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.

Blair


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