Albanian has postposed articles as well,
e.g. <mik> 'friend' (<- Lat. ami:cus) has the following forms (for each
case, the indefinite and definite forms are quoted):
nom.
mik, mik-u
gen./dat./abl. mik-u,
mik-u-t
acc.
mik, mik-u-n
nom./acc.pl. miq,
miq-t
gen./dat. miq-ve,
miq-ve-t
abl.pl. miq-sh,
mik-ve-t
Since Albanian, Macedonian, Bulgarian and
Romanian are spoken in adjacent areas, this construction is clearly an areal
trait of the Balkan League (a.k.a. Sprachbund, or convergence area). There are
many other typological similarities shared by those languages (Aromanian and
Megleno-Romanian being more closely involved than the remaining Romance
dialects). Greek and Balkan Romani are also members of the league. Some of the
areal features are found only in a subset of the Balkan languages, others are
more widespread, sometimes "spilling over" into Hungarian and Serbo-Croatian
(especially into Serbian dialects); Turkish is also regarded as the source of
some regional innovations.
The members of the league have converged in
several typological respects. For example, a single common form of the
genitive/dative case characterises Romanian, Albanian (see the example
above) and (Modern) Greek. Bulgarian and Macedonian also merged the genitive and
the dative before they lost case inflection altogether, and modern prepositional
phrases with <na ...> in those languages also function as
"dati-genitives".
This has nothing to do with Thraco-Getic
"roots". Areal innovations emerge at different points within the Sprachbund and
spread rather quickly, forming many historical layers that obscure the earlier
stages; their present-day configuration tells us practically nothing about
the state of affairs two millennia ago, when the ethnolinguistic map of the
Balkans was quite different.
In many cases the origin of a given
innovation is easy to identify. Compare,
for instance, the way in which the "teen" numerals are formed -- a Slavic
contribution to the area, shared also by the non-Balkan Slavic
languages:
Bulg. edi(n)-na-deset 'one on
ten'
Rom. un-spre-zece 'one on
ten'
Alb. njëm-bë-dhjetë 'one on
ten'
Hung. tizen-egy 'on-ten one'
(Romanian, by the way, has quite a few
grammatical features borrowed from Slavic, e.g. the construction
<treizeci de oameni> "thirty _of_ people", where <de ...> calques
the Slavic genitive.)
Modern Greek verb constructions are
probably the source of another Balkanism -- the loss of the infinitive and
its replacement by subjunctive clauses, which has diffused as far as Serbian
(<hoc'u da pisam> "I-want that I-write", cf. Mod.Gk. thelo na ghrafo),
while Croatian generally prefers the older Slavic construction (<hoc'u
pisati> "I-want to-write").
There are many other famous convergence
areas (the Caucasus, India, SE Asia, the Pacific Northwest of North
America, the Sepik River Basin in Papua New Guinea, etc.).
Piotr
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Wednesday, March 13, 2002 2:15 PM
Subject: Re: [tied] Re: Daci
Hi thorsten
I tried to find similarities in Europa aboout
this way to make the definite
artikel at the end of the word.
It happens
that in the area just rumanians, bulgarians and .. macedonians
use to make
the definite article at the end of the word.
So because the macedonians are a
special point i should like to take just
the Bulgarians and Rumanians.
If
we take a look on the maps, we are hardly obliged to constat that these
both
countries occupe to say so, the old Thracia.
Rumanians in North, Bulgarian in
South. More over the linguist agrre that
these gramatical traces in their
languages , Bulgars got it from Romanians.
In a way it is acceptable due the
salvs "assimilated " the thracian people
in Moesia and so they could get some
thraces to languages of the slavs.
OK. I should like to get a "family
look"
The Bulgars belong to slavic family
The Rumanins is suposed tobelong
to latin family.
But, both of them, they are exceptions in thier families. No
another
language in thier own family has this rule with the definite
article.
French, italian, portugal, spanish, they do not have this
rule
Slovacs, Tschech, Polonians, Russian, Ukrainians, Serbs ( i guess serbs
too)
they do not have this rule.
That must lay IMHO on the thracian-dacian
root ( es ist ja die einzige
Erklärung die man verfolgen konnte)
Thare are
really too many "coincidence" for closing the eyes.Dont you
think?