From: alex
Message: 37524
Date: 2005-05-03
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "alex" <alxmoeller@...> wrote:Willem, I did not meant it in the absolute sense and I don't want to go
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>
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>> no educated person doubts abut the autochtony of Albanians in Balcan.
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> I'm sorry but I take issue with that on two counts. First, autochthony
> is a relative concept and, second, we are not talking "Albanians"
> (i.e. people in a biological sense) so much as the Albanian language.
> No person can doubt either that the presence of Albanian on the
> Balkans, like that of any other Indo-European language spoken there
> (or for that matter in Central or Western Europe), is the outcome of
> some kind of secondary migration which must have brought the
> Indo-European language that was to evolve into Albanian to the area.
> And few people can doubt that Albanian as attested involves at least
> one episode of language shift. No Balkan language is autochthonous in
> any absolute sense. The language of the Neolithic agriculturalists
> has been dead for a long time and if it somehow continued the
> language that was carried to Thessaly by colonists from Asia Minor
> (which may or may not be the case) that language, too, was intrusive.
> On the other hand it is quite likely that the present-day speakers of
> Albanian carry genes they inherited from the speakers of that
> long-dead language.