> [Moeller] It could be a link. specialy I have my own feeling
> ( maybe wrong) the south slavic , special the bulgarian
> language are so different from the rest of slavic world
> because of the long bilingvism with the thracians there,
> getting a lot of changes in their languages. But this is just
> a feeling ( ok, I have something here I work about, but too
> little for saying more)
Another thing about Bulgarian and Macedonian: they've both lost the
category of case (as an inflected category, that is). Suppose we call
this process where this happens "categorial collapse". I can
understand why this would happen in this case, since the "basis
language" (here Slavic) was in a situation where it would be learnt
by people (here the Turkic Bulgars) who could "afford to" make
grammatical mistakes and there was no group of Slavic-speaking druids
or linguists or what have you, ie., people like us, to correct their
mistakes. And I can understand why this would have happened in
Britain for similar reasons (loss of inflected case, near loss of
person and number in verbs). But why Dutch, Low German, Continental
North Germanic (Scandinavian)? Where is the invasion that would bring
about a similar situation? Which are those two peoples that would
have collided in those areas? I hear people in North Germany say
things like "mit der Trainer" (mit + nom.!, Bremen) and "mit die
vielen Schäden" (for "mit den vielen Schäden", of a soccer team in
the Ruhr area, interview in "Stern"). This doesn't happen in Southern
Germany.
Now I might get answers like "of course, the rules tells you that it
happened, don't be so stupid". Yes, but why there? Does any one in
the group know of language that is in the process of "categorial
collapse" and doing it spontaneously?
I read some Englishman writing of his language's history dissing the
theory that English was creolized since Danish went through the same
transformation without that sociological background. Wrong. Denmark
ceased to exist 1332-40, when the whole country had been put up for
collateral on loans Danish Kings had taken from counts in Holstein to
wage war in North Gernany. But still, that leaves to be explained why
Low German was creolized itself (merger of acc. and
dat. "Einheitsplural" -n or -t).
That is a puzzle I'd like to see the answer to.
Torsten