Balkan tongues (was: biloxi update)

[Koontz John E]

On Thu, 14 Oct 2004 BARudes at aol.com wrote:
> 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.

When you put it this way it occurs to me that the Balkan area coincides
more or less with the territory of the mediaeval (Balkan) Bulgar Empire,
especially the "second" version, and also with the Balkan section of the
Byzantine Empire at its peak, both of which had extensive, interconnected,
and literate state and church hierachies.

Turkish more or less obliterated the pre-existing languages of the
Anatolian or "Eastern" Greek (etc.) section of the Byzantine Empire, and
the Byzantine Empire itself recolonized the extensive Slavic intrusions
into the area of modern Greece, so the characterization of the "area" as
"Balkan" may be more or less accidental.

I have the impression that Serbo-Croatian and Macedonian-Bulgarian Slavic
dialect groups are fairly closely related, right?  But the latter more or
less participates in the area, while the former doesn't?

It appears that you generally get angry disapproving noises from the Greek
side of the frontier if you refer to the any Slavic language or the people
speaking it as Macedonian, but the usage seems to be fairly well
established at present.  And it appears that a great many of the
inhabitants of Macedonia in Alexander's day spoke non-Greek Indo-Euroepean
languages, anyway, so the evolution of the term has an ancient precedent.