[tied] Re: Daci

From: tgpedersen
Message: 12674
Date: 2002-03-14

>
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: altamix
> To: cybalist@...
> 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?

--- In cybalist@..., "Piotr Gasiorowski" <gpiotr@...> wrote:
> 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
>
>

And Hi! Mr Moeller

By participating in this group I have learned that this part of
Europe is particularly rich in coincidences.

As to Piotr: You offer two pieces of evidence that the Balkan
Sprachbund is not the result of a Daco-Getan or Thracian substrate:
one Slavic and one Greek.
Back in the times where Albanian was considered to be a descendant of
Illyrian, various toponyms outside present Albania but cognates in
Albanian were considered to be "North Illyrian". But let them be
Thracian; suits me fine.
Of the two I remember one was Bucharest (Albanian
<bukure> "beautiful"), the other was Beskidy (and I hope I spelled
them right), a mountain range in Southern Poland (?).
Now if the latter is indeed Thracian/North Illyrian, we have a
Thracian toponym close (well, closer) to the Slavic Urheimat, and who
is to say whether two languages in this geographical proximity did
not both have the "one-on-ten" construction?

As for the Greek example: The centre of the Greek language was moved
in Byzantine times from Athens to Constantinople, a former Thracian
place. How can you be sure that the sudden emergence of the infintive-
less "I-want-that-I-write" construction is not the result of a
Thracian substrate in Byzantine Greek?

And indeed we know a lot of Daco-Getan and Thracian glosses but we
know next to nothing of their morphology. In light of what, making
sweeping statements that none of the common features of the languages
of the Balkan Sprachbund (?) derive from such a substrate are, in my
opinion, hasty. Do we know for sure eg. that Daco-Getan or Thracian
had no postfixed articles? No.

I am wondering myself if such postfixed articles in themselves do not
reflect the old use of what is Germanic the "weak" inflection to
denote determinateness, ie. Lat <cat-us> "clever", <cato> "the clever
one" (and maybe in German nom. <der Franz>, gen. <Franzens>?) And in
this case a reinterpretation (as noun + article) of such a practice
in the substrate language ?

Torsten