From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 15359
Date: 2002-09-10
----- Original Message -----From: Richard WordinghamSent: Tuesday, September 10, 2002 4:30 PMSubject: Re: [tied] Keeping up, barely :-)
> Why would Romanian preserve much of the language spoken by the language community prior to the adoption of Latin, whereas English and French show very little of their Celtic substrates? By 'substrate' I mean substrate in the sociolinguistic sense. A close association with Albanian may explain common elements, but isn't that a different issue?We know nothing concrete about the local sociolinguistic conditions between the collapse of the Western Empire and the 8th/9th centuries. Perhaps the status of the "old language" and that of Balkan Latin were roughly equal in the area. Otherwise, would Albanian have survived at all? But it did survive, having absorbed a thick layer of Balkan Latin vocabulary. It seems to me that both languages coexisted symbiotically, interacted strongly for some time and then went their separate ways. The "autochthonous" content of Balkan Latin was perhaps initially as low as in the case of Gaulish and French, but was strengthened through centuries of contact with Proto-Albanian.Piotr