Re: [tied] Albanian as a satem langauge

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 37601
Date: 2005-05-05

alex wrote:

> So you say, *3, *c have been "replaced" by "dz" and "ts" but the reflex
> of "k^w" and "kW/+" should have been not replaced at all since it is
> stil "c^". I guess you are making a mistake here.I think the stage "ts"
> and "dz" "c^" is the _real_ aspects of the sounds as they have been in
> the language and they are stil preserved in Rom. in that form while in
> Albanian they evolved to "d/dh", "th" and "s".

At the time of the borrowing, Proto-Albanian sounds in the loanwords
were replaced by the most closely matching Proto-Romanian phonemes. Then
Albanian and Romanian both evolved their ways, Romanian remaining more
conservative in some (not all) respects, like the more-or-less faithful
preservation of the Proto-Albanian affricates. What's controversial
about it? We often see something similar: the donor language keeps
changing while loans taken from it retain their archaic form in some
other language. For example, English has kept the Old French
pronunciation of <ch> and <j, g/+> as affricates while French has
changed them into fricatives (cf. <chance>, <gentle>, <jealous> etc.).
The English pronunciation reflects the Middle English adaptation of
borrowings from Old French.

> But this stage is a
> preroman stage and it will point more to a relationship deep in the
> prehistory. Your statment about "receptor language" makes me wonder.
> The Carpathian-Balkan language which is considered to have been
> latinised is considered now "receptor language"? Or we have to consider
> what BariƧ meant that here we don't have to deal with "loans" but with
> "rests" ?

That would have been the case if Romanian had gradually evolved from
something like Albanian to something like Vulgar Latin, retaining a
residue of its original vocabulary. That, however, is not a realistic
scenario. We have to assume that one part of the "Balkan" population was
affected by a language shift: Latin _replaced_ their older language,
borrowing some of its vocabulary in the process. Another part remained
Proto-Albanian-speaking, but because of their close contacts with
Latin-speakers, widespread bilingualism etc. there was a massive influx
of Latin loans into their language. This means that both Latin and
Proto-Albanian played the role of donors and receptors.

Piotr