Re: [tied] Re: Daci

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 12665
Date: 2002-03-13

Albanian has postposed articles as well, e.g. <mik> 'friend' (<- Lat. ami:cus) has the following forms (for each case, the indefinite and definite forms are quoted):
 
nom.            mik, mik-u
gen./dat./abl.  mik-u, mik-u-t
acc.            mik, mik-u-n
nom./acc.pl.    miq, miq-t
gen./dat.       miq-ve, miq-ve-t
abl.pl.         miq-sh, mik-ve-t
 
Since Albanian, Macedonian, Bulgarian and Romanian are spoken in adjacent areas, this construction is clearly an areal trait of the Balkan League (a.k.a. Sprachbund, or convergence area). There are many other typological similarities shared by those languages (Aromanian and Megleno-Romanian being more closely involved than the remaining Romance dialects). Greek and Balkan Romani are also members of the league. Some of the areal features are found only in a subset of the Balkan languages, others are more widespread, sometimes "spilling over" into Hungarian and Serbo-Croatian (especially into Serbian dialects); Turkish is also regarded as the source of some regional innovations.
 
The members of the league have converged in several typological respects. For example, a single common form of the genitive/dative case characterises Romanian, Albanian (see the example above) and (Modern) Greek. Bulgarian and Macedonian also merged the genitive and the dative before they lost case inflection altogether, and modern prepositional phrases with <na ...> in those languages also function as "dati-genitives".
 
This has nothing to do with Thraco-Getic "roots". Areal innovations emerge at different points within the Sprachbund and spread rather quickly, forming many historical layers that obscure the earlier stages; their present-day configuration tells us practically nothing about the state of affairs two millennia ago, when the ethnolinguistic map of the Balkans was quite different.
 
In many cases the origin of a given innovation is easy to identify. Compare, for instance, the way in which the "teen" numerals are formed -- a Slavic contribution to the area, shared also by the non-Balkan Slavic languages:
 
Bulg. edi(n)-na-deset 'one on ten'
Rom. un-spre-zece 'one on ten'
Alb. njëm-bë-dhjetë 'one on ten'
Hung. tizen-egy 'on-ten one'
 
(Romanian, by the way, has quite a few grammatical features borrowed from Slavic, e.g. the construction <treizeci de oameni> "thirty _of_ people", where <de ...> calques the Slavic genitive.)
 
Modern Greek verb constructions are probably the source of another Balkanism -- the loss of the infinitive and its replacement by subjunctive clauses, which has diffused as far as Serbian (<hoc'u da pisam> "I-want that I-write", cf. Mod.Gk. thelo na ghrafo), while Croatian generally prefers the older Slavic construction (<hoc'u pisati> "I-want to-write").
 
There are many other famous convergence areas (the Caucasus, India, SE Asia, the Pacific Northwest of North America, the Sepik River Basin in Papua New Guinea, etc.).
 
Piotr
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
----- Original Message -----
From: altamix
To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Wednesday, March 13, 2002 2:15 PM
Subject: Re: [tied] Re: Daci

Hi thorsten
I tried to find similarities in Europa aboout this way to make the definite
artikel at the end of the word.
It happens that in the area just rumanians, bulgarians and .. macedonians
use to make the definite article at the end of the word.
So because the macedonians are a special point i should like to take just
the Bulgarians and Rumanians.
If we take a look on the maps, we are hardly obliged to constat that these
both countries occupe to say so, the old Thracia.
Rumanians in North, Bulgarian in South. More over the linguist agrre that
these gramatical traces in their languages , Bulgars got it from Romanians.
In a way it is acceptable due the salvs "assimilated " the thracian people
in Moesia and so they could get some thraces to languages of the slavs.
OK. I should like to get a "family look"
The Bulgars belong to slavic family
The Rumanins is suposed tobelong to latin family.
But, both of them, they are exceptions in thier families. No another
language in thier own family has this rule with the definite article.
French, italian, portugal, spanish, they do not have this rule
Slovacs, Tschech, Polonians, Russian, Ukrainians, Serbs ( i guess serbs too)
they do not have this rule.
That must lay IMHO on the thracian-dacian root ( es ist ja die einzige
Erklärung die man verfolgen konnte)
Thare are really too many "coincidence" for closing the eyes.Dont you think?