[tied] Re: Loans, Slavs, Church (it was : Walachians are placed far

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "willemvermeer" <wrvermeer@...>
wrote:

>
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, willemvermeer had written:
>
>
> > > You can't talk about the early medieval past of Romanian

without

> > > bringing in Albanian or the language of which Albanian is the
> > > descendant, and without bringing in Albanian dialectology. >
> >
>
> Then Alex wrote:
>
> > What are the reference points which will
> > lead one to put the eraly medieval times in connection with Alb.
> and Rom? I
> > suppose these can be just linguistic arguments and I will like

to

> see them.
>
> I'll see how far I can get:
>
> It is not controversial that there are at least four types of
> elements Albanian and Romanian share:
>
> (a) a certain amount of lexical material from an otherwise unknown
> source;
>
> (b) certain details of the phonological development;
>
> (c) certain quite sweeping morphosyntactic details falling under

the

> heading of "balkanisms";
>
> (d) certain features having to do with the dialect map.
>
> For the sake of the argument I'll grant that (a) and (b) do not
> necessarily presuppose immediate geographical contact. As for (a),
> the source of the shared lexical material is unknown, so that it

is

> almost impossible to avoid unconstrained speculation. As for (b),

the

> shared phonological developments may be aren't very specific, at
> least as far as I can see (I may have missed a lot here, though).
>
> But (c) and (d) are different.
>
> (c)
>
> It is almost a clichee of the study of the balkanisms that

Albanian

> and Romanian go very closely together, notably with respect to the
> development of a suffixed definite article and associated changes
> affecting the structure of nominal syntagms.
>
> There is a venerable tradition of talking about the balkanisms in
> terms of formulations like "prolonged symbiosis". True as that may

be

> as far as it goes, it doesn't go far enough because it is thin on
> specifics and does not explain geographical patterns. Now we can
> assume either that Albanian and Romanian were contiguous or
> coterritorial at the stage where these structures arose, or that

they

> were not and that they [the structures, Ed.] developed

independently.

> It is obvious that the former assumption is preferable.
>
>
> (d)
>
> Similarly it is almost a clichee of the study of Albanian and
> Romanian that it is possible to draw a joint Albanian-Romanian
> dialect map. Romanian as a whole is just a shade closer to Tosk
> (North Albanian) than to Geg (South Albanian). But within

Romanian,

> the North (IR&DR) is in turn just a shade more Tosk than the South
> (MR&AR). The simplest explanation is that Albanian and Romanian

were

> still contiguous or coterritorial as the earliest dialectal
> differences were arising in both languages, with Romanian staying

in

> contact longer with the Albanian south than with the north, and

with

> the Romanian north staying in contact longer with Albanian (Tosk)
> than the Romanian south.
>
> Put differently: Romanian just cannot be understood properly

without

> assuming a period of non-trivial Albanian-Romanian interaction.

Such

> a period must have a place and a time.
>
> As for the place, several candidates are available, such as
> Transylvania, Bosnia, or the general area where Albanian is spoken
> nowadays. Although (as I've said several times in earlier

postings)

> no area has been conclusively refuted as yet, in my view the

latter

> area offers a plausible scenario, which could be briefly sketched

as

> follows:
>
> During the period of large-scale military operations and invasions

by

> Huns and Avars/Slavs (roughly 440-630), Byzantine authority is

known

> to have disappeared gradually from all rural areas, and also from

all

> towns except those on the coast, which could be provided from the
> see. There is evidence of large numbers of refugees moving south.

(By

> the way, it is likely that the influx of refugees caused the
> Jirecek/Skok/Gerov line to break down.) Coastal towns apart, the

only

> populations likely to survive such conditions are mountain
> pastoralists, who can most easily stay out of harm's way and are
> generally much too poor to be attractive to raiders. And that is
> exactly what we find afterwards: on the one hand there is

Albanian,

> on the other we find that Latin survived only as the language of
> mountain pastoralists. (It makes no sense, I think, to deny the
> connection of Romanian with pastoralism, which was maintained for
> centuries afterward.)
>
> Given the enormous loss of linguistic and demographic information
> caused by the Hun-Avar/Slav onslaught, there is much room for
> speculation about what went before and it is very difficult to get
> beyond the most general lines. Albanian has often been compared

with

> Brittonic: it was obviously spoken within the Roman empire and

thus

> massively exposed to Latin for a considerable time, but equally
> obviously it was spoken too far from the highway to have been

given

> up entirely by the time Roman structures broke down. So it lived

on.

>
> Since Albanian is Indo-European and Romanian is Latin, their

location

> in mountainous areas is in both cases the outcome of secondary
> developments, which as likely as not implied the linguistic
> assimilation of one or more populations already living there. That
> may be the ultimate source of most of the balkanisms. At least I'm
> unwilling to believe that the balkanisms developed spontaneously

as a

> consequence of language contact. Unfortunately otherwise nothing

is

> known about those languages and we are reduced to speculaion.
>
> Slavs are in evidence in southern Serbia in the fifties of the

sixth

> century. It is a well-known fact that some of the most important
> toponyms of this area (Nis^, S^tip) were adopted by Slavic not by

way

> of Latin but by way of a language sharing important features with
> Albanian (the point received som attention in earlier postings).

This

> would seem to imply the presence at the time of speakers of such a
> language. It is important, though, to realize that this was a
> transitional stage. In later centuries Albanian is no longer in
> evidence here (at least until relatively recently) and southern
> Serbia became Slavic-speaking only in the course of the middle

ages

> (the point has received attention in earlier postings). Those
> demographic changes are more or less what one expects because the
> most traumatic Avar/Slav incursions took place only after the

middle

> of the sixth century and it is those that may well have dealt
> remaining local languages of southern Serbia and Macedonia the
> deathblow.
>
> Starting with the second half of the seventh century, conditions
> gradually became more bearable. Two important reasons for that

have

> been mentioned in earlier postings: the Avar style of operating

lost

> its destructive edge and the First Bulgar State (681-1018) subdued
> the Slavs of Bulgaria and Macedonia and reinstated the rudiments

of

> something resembling orderly administration.
>
> As a consequence, enormous tracts of lands suitable for mountain
> pastoralism became available and it is my contention that the
> speakers of northern Romanian gradually filled the void during the
> ensuing centuries.
>
> All this gave rise to a vast bilingual area where agriculturalists
> spoke Slavic and mountain pastoralists Romanian. The latter appear
> generally to have been known als "Vlachs" and show up as such in
> historical sources well before the end of the first millennium.
>
> Sooner or later, one expects mutual assimilation and the
> disappearance of the one or the other of the languages. In such

cases

> one expects the language of the agriculturalists to prevail, but

that

> is only a general tendency and local conditions can yield quite
> different outcomes, e.g. where agriculturalists are scarce to

begin

> with, or where pastoralists move into the valleys on a massive

scale

> and take up agriculturalism themselves. That may have happened

most

> spectacularly in what is now Romania.
>
>
> The linguistic outcomes differ accordingly. The Slavic element of
> northern Romanian reflects centuries of life in bilingual

conditions.

> The balkanisms of Bulgarian-Macedonian reflect the structure of
> Slavic as spoken by speakers of Romanian who had recently shifted

to

> Slavic. (The language of Cyril and Method was free of balkanisms

and

> fairly complete case systems have survived into this century in
> remote areas.) In Bosnia and Montenegro, where onomastic evidence

for

> Romanian presence is convincingly present, the shift took place
> without exerting strong influence on Slavic, suggesting that the
> Romanian-speaking element, though present, was not very numerous

by

> the time they shifted to Slavic (or rather to SCr). Etcetera.
>
>
> I'm not saying that this scenario is the only one that is

possible,

> but I'm convinced it accounts better for the observed facts than

the

> transdanubian hypothesis. Note in particular that it is quite
> compatible with a comfortable presence of speakers of Romanian in
> what is now Romania well before any Hungarian had ever been around
> and with evidence for Vlachs in ninth- ot tenth-century narrative
> sources.
>
>
> ---
>
>
> > It happens the Chornic of Ragussa tells as about a migration in

the

> VIII
> > century. From North to South. There have been Valachs comming to
> Ragussa and
> > they have had not only sheeps but a lot of big breed, catles and
> cows.
>
>
> This came up in earlier postings too, but do you have specifics?
>
> ---
>
> [On the Church Slavonic tradition:]
>
>
>
> > The OCS is not the language spoken by actual Bulgarians so far I
> know. It
> > should have been an "another" slavic dialect, actualy dead. I

hope

> I do not
> > mistake too much here.
>
>
> That is a misunderstanding. The general interpretation of Old

Church

> Slavonic is that it is a fairly direct reflection of early

Bulgarian

> as actually spoken and that it remained so for a time. Of course
> eventually it turned into a dead language, but that definitely

wasn't

> the case during the early period.
>
>
> Willem

************
Dear Willem I forward this message to BALKANISTIKA, if you agree,
with desire to discuss your view at length, for in Cybalist the
topic about Albanian-Romanian relationships became so boring.

Konushevci