Re: [tied] Re: Daci

----- Original Message -----

From: tgpedersen

To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Thursday, March 14, 2002 1:14 PM

Subject: [tied] Re: Daci

> And indeed we know a lot of Daco-Getan and Thracian glosses but we know next to nothing of their morphology. In light of what, making sweeping statements that none of the common features of the languages of the Balkan Sprachbund (?) derive from such a substrate are, in my opinion, hasty. Do we know for sure eg. that Daco-Getan or Thracian had no postfixed articles? No.

 

One problem with this is that the use of postfixed articles is rather late, and (importantly, I think) has not spread to Greek, the language that must have been in contact with Thracian until Thracian went extinct, and which absorbed a significant Thracian substrate. I can't see it in Dalmatian either, despite its genetic proximity to Romanian. The early Slavic languages of the Balkans don't show this innovation; it appeared about the 12th century and took some time to be fully implemented, as Bulgarian and Macedonian shifted typologically from inflected to analytic. As there are examples of postfixed articles in Russian dialects, it's possible that the construction had existed in embryonic form already in Common Slavic, but its use was very limited until contact with Balkan Romance and/or early Albanian boosted its frequency. I don't think the postfixed article in Albanian can possibly be inherited from Dacian times; otherwise the sweeping reductions of inflectional syllables in early Albanian would have destroyed the system. My guess is that it all started with the obligatory use of <ill-> after nouns interpreted as definite in Proto-Romanian (*lupu illu > lupul), which need not have been due to any substratal influence (note that Romanian uses N + Adj. in noun phrases). Any language which develops articles and tends towards fixed syntax has to decide where to place the article -- and there are only two possibilities.

 

> I am wondering myself if such postfixed articles in themselves do not reflect the old use of what is Germanic the "weak" inflection to denote determinateness, ie. Lat <cat-us> "clever", <cato> "the clever one" (and maybe in German nom. <der Franz>, gen. Franzens>?) And in this case a reinterpretation (as noun + article) of such a practice in the substrate language?

 

Such tendencies occur at different times in different languages. Enclitic pronouns are common creatures. The agglutination of *-(h1)on- seems to be as old as PIE itself, and it remained a productive process in several branches. Some millennia later, Germanic and Balto-Slavic created, semi-independently but within the North European Sprachbund, a system of weak and strong adjectives, which involved postfixed pronouns (Slavic *novU vs. *novU-jI > *novyjI). This is descriptively and ontologically different from the Balkan noun-marking construction, but in some ways parallel to it.

Piotr