Re: [tied] Re: illyrian lexicon or inventory

On Sat, 15 Nov 2003 12:58:38 +0100, Piotr Gasiorowski
<piotr.gasiorowski@...> wrote:

>I mean absolutely no disrespect to the Albanians when I
>contest the theory of Albanian origins that is almost unanimously
>favoured by scholars in you country as well as having much support
>abroad. But no matter how many people believe in it, and no matter what
>the intensity of their conviction, I simply find the evidence for an
>Illyrian-Albanian connection flawed and insufficient (assuming that we
>can agree what "Illyrian" means),

That's the problem. We know practically nothing about "Illyrian" (defined
as the pre-Roman, pre-Slavic language or languages spoken in the
geographical region known as Illyria).

>while the similarity of reconstructed
>Proto-Albanian to the Satem substrate in Romanian makes a connection
>with Dacian likely, as far as I'm concerned.

Well, I don't believe in the Daco-Roman continuity story, and I think that
Romanian (i.e. the Romance dialect cluster including Daco-Romanian,
Istro-Romanian, Megleno-Romanian and Aromanian) developed South of the
Danube, i.e. somewhere either in Illyria or in Thracia. The fact that
Romanian is a Romance language, and that it shares a substrate with
Albanian, both point to Illyria rather than Thrace (Thrace, if I'm not
mistaken, belongs rather within the Greek half of the Empire). The
Bulgarian, rather than Serbian, Slavic adstrate may represent a secondary
spread into Thrace (from Macedonia), and then to North of the Danube.


=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...