Re: Odp: Thracian, Illyrian

----- Original Message -----

From: Rex H. McTyeire

To: cybalist@egroups.com

Sent: Friday, December 31, 1999 7:34 PM

Subject: [cybalist] Re: Thracian, Illyrian

Piotr wrote (responding to Deroubaix Clyv):   ... We know very little about Illyrian proper. Still, I'm absolutely sure of one thing: if Messapic (as usually assumed) represents the Illyrian branch, then Albanian can't have anything to do with Illyrian ...   I think Albanian is related to the extinct Dacian (or Getic) languages spoken more or less in what is now Romania (the southern Carpathian region). If you need any arguments in favour of that position, I'll be happy to oblige you early next year ;-) Rex wrote:   If the last clause means we only have to wait a few hours for those arguments, I can make it. I am most interested to hear them. I don't oppose, its just that I am an interloper anyway (A non linguist lurking from anth oriented historical interest) and you are touching on a complex matrix of questions relating to this area. If Albanian is not Illyrian, and is related to Daci.. then it must be Thracian. I'm not sure... but I think the Albanian shifted as much under Ottoman influence as the Geto-Daci did under Roman. The local position is that there are surviving Daci words (several hundred) in the Romaneste lexicon: home, hearth, food, village and family words. Distinguishing these between, say.. Moesi would be dificult.. but Illyrian is another story, To do any comparison with Albanian, you've got to get back past the Turkic influence.   First, the Albanians probably did not live on the Adriatic in Roman times. Ptolemy's Albanoi (presumably identical with the later Albanoi/Arbanoi) can be placed somewhere in the northern part of Roman Macedonia, possibly in modern Kosovo. Albanian maritime terms are loanwords; Albanian placenames, down to those identifying small-scale landscape features, are often of Latin origin; the form of many toponyms is incompatible with the regular historical development of Albanian sounds, e.g. ancient Scodra > Shkodër (inherited *sk- yields Albanian h-). I suggest that the Albanians, pushed by the southern Slavs, moved into Illyria about the 6th or 7th century, absorbing and superseding provincial Latin.   The languages of the Balkans show much non-genetic convergence caused by prolonged contacts. Of course any comparative analysis of Albanian has to take into account the influence of Latin, Greek (with various chronological layers), Slavic and Turkish on all the languages of the area. However, Romanian etymological dictionaries cite specifically Albanian cognates for about 50-80 non-Romance words in Romanian. At least some of them may represent the Dacian substrate in Romanian, though one must bear in mind that enclaves of Albanian colonisation can be found from Italy to the Sea of Azov and therefore occasional direct borrowing from Albanian into Romanian cannot be excluded. In Albanian, on the other hand, one finds words like karpë 'rock', evidently related to the Dacian name of the Carpathians ('the Rockies') and to such tribal names as the Karpoi or Karpodakai ('Mountain Dacians').   On the linguistic side, Albanian is a satem language like Dacian and Thracian, but unlike Messapic, Macedonian or Greek. As for the question whether Albanian is more closely related to Dacian/Getic or to Thracian, I confess uncertainty. But if an "Armenoid" consonant shift (*t > th, *d > t, *dh > d) can be reconstructed for Thracian (experts have different opinions about it), then Albanian clearly belongs somewhere else. It could represent a southern subbranch of the original satem languages of the Carpathian region – those of the Dacians and the Getae. Traces of those languages survive almost exclusively in the local toponymy. Some features of Albanian correspond to the phonological characteristics of Dacian placenames. These include the change of syllabic liquids to ri, li (cf. Romanian Criş < *Krsos 'Black [River]'; in Messapic/Illyrian they probably yielded or, ol) and the insertion of *t in the PIE cluster *sr (as also in Germanic, Balto-Slavic and Thracian). The last-mentioned change is visible in numerous Balkan river-names such as the Struma/Strimon = Ancient Greek Strymōn (Thracian Strum- from PIE *sreu- 'flow'; cf. Greek rheu- with a completely different development), and the old name of the Danube (Istros < PIE *isHros 'mighty, violently flowing').   Piotr