Balkan tongues (was: biloxi update)

[R. Rankin]

> 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?

They're all classified as South Slavic, but the definite article issogloss
splits Serbian dialectally.  It's all essentially areal, not extending much into
Hungarian, Ukrainian, etc. in the NW/NE but including all Romanian dialects, all
of Bulgarian, Macedonian and Albanian.  There are entire books, several of them,
on the Balkan Sprachbund, so I won't try to get into it on this list.  There is
evidence though, that both Bulgaria and Romania were bilingual Slavic/Romance
with the current situation crystalizing out north and south of the Danube.  And
since Albanian seafaring and fishing terminology is all borrowed, the consensus
is that they lived much farther inland to the north and east also.          Bob

>
> 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.
>