--- In cybalist@..., "Piotr Gasiorowski" <gpiotr@...> wrote:
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: tgpedersen
> To: cybalist@...
> 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.
Some postings back I asked whether Russian and Polish had suffixed
articled too, because I'd heard so, anecdote-wise. Anecdote-wise,
because, 1) when, way back, I took a Russian course our teacher told
us this was the case, but it was not in the text book, and 2) an
acquaintance of mine, who was once married to a Polish woman and
claims he speaks Polish, said this happened in Polish too (but then
he says many other extraordinary things; he used to be a chemical
engineer working with various wood-impregnating materials,
containning, among other things, mercury, which reminds me that since
lithium is a di-valent metallic element, as are lead and mercury, and
not used for any biological compound in living creatures, perhaps it
works by replacing those heavy metals in organic, amino-acid-based
compounds, but this was a digression...).
The point I was trying to make, some sentences back, is that such
constructions may "hide" in the language. You ask native speakers of
the language: "In your language, do you say so-and-so?". "No", they
say. But they do. It may even surface first time in poetry, contrary
to your argument against the early appearance of a "do" construction
in English. Some time back, some writer of Danish pop songs
discovered that in Danish <det er> "it is" is pronounced <de:> or
even <de> (since length has been replaced by quality in Danish (as in
other Germanic, except standard Swedish)) and wrote therefore <det'>
saving a syllable, which was what he needed. Now it has spread to
advertising; and who knows: it might become standard Danish. And the
point is: the form existed long before it was written, but suddenly
someone pointed out that this was what people actually said and now
it has become a "conscious" part of the language.
Now to the application: Obviously the late appearance in the Balkan
languages of suffixed articles can't be used as an argument that it
wasn't used in the spoken language. Imagine the experiment that all
we knew of 21st century Russian was a collection of various laws.
Would we conclude from them that Russian had a suffixed article -ot, -
ta, -to? Not very likely, I'd say.
And as to Greek: Didn't already Classical Greek have a prefixed
independent (*so, *sa, *tod) based definite article?
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.
I personally suspect that the Old Norse almost agglutinative system
of case ending followed by an inflected form of <inn> "yon" is a
hypercorrect construction based on folk etymology, starting from the
old <-on-> weak ending. There is something suspicious about the
complete collapse of the case system in an area (Scandinavia) where
the case-based Germanic language is supposed to go hundred of years
back, as soon as the native elite is discredited by incoming
Christianity. Why is this? I never heard of a case-system collapse in
e.g. any Slavic language outside of Bulgarian and Macedonian,
whatever the ontological status of the latter, and no matter what
strain and hardship our societies might have gone through, the Slavs
can match with ease. Did all of NW Europe originally speak one
sloppy, Etruscan-like language?
As for your argument that Albanian would have lost inherited suffixed
definiteness because of upheavals in the morphology; yes, I
understand your point, but I think you put the cart before the horse:
A language will not let the morphology of a form deteriorate, unless
the language has decided (pardon the metaphor) that that form is
superfluous. Cf. the optional character of the Dutch final -n; this
particular "feature" of the Dutch language solves the I have when
speaking German (and other foreigners had when speaking Anglo-Saxon
etc): Should it end in -n or not? And I solve the problem, like
countless other foreigners before me, by mumbling. In a way, it is as
if the Dutch language represents the point of view: I don't care if
you say -n or not, as long as we can do business (which, after all,
is what Holland is all about).
Answer to Mr. Moeller: Yes, I think you can set up objective criteria
for what a creolized language is, at least if you know its early
forms. Namely: whenever there is a reduction and/or simplification in
systems that to *foreign* learner of the language look arbitrary and
gratuitous. To me, as a Dane, the gender system of German looks at
first sight quite arbitrary; I have no way of telling whether a
German noun is masculine or feminine (but since Danish has neuter
gender, usually I can tell if a similar (and probably cognate) German
noun is neuter). In French I am lost: I have to learn genders of
nouns by heart; no clue in Danish helps me, because I cannot find the
corresponding cognate. Speaking English or German, I am helped by the
fact that the ablaut-inflected strong verbs of those languages are
similar to the ones in my native language (but a speaker of a non-
Germanic language would not have such an advantage); this is the type
of split-second historical linguistics that bi- or tri-lingual non-
linguists do every day.
By this definition Low German is obviously a creole language compared
to High German, and so are English and the Scandinavian languages
compared to their older forms. So is Bulgarian compared to other
Slavic languages, with respect to noun inflection, but not with
respect to verb inflection, where perhaps Russian takes the price in
simplification.
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