Re: [tied] Proto Romanian Cradle

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

From: altamix

To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Tuesday, April 09, 2002 1:34 AM

Subject: Re: [tied] Proto Romanian Cradle

... In this case, where from they got these stories? Certanly, the people must have a big phantasie, but without a bit of truth there is no story ...

 

It's precisely this kind of logic ("people say so, so there must be something in it") that makes people believe in gossip and urban myths and spread such stuff: "It _really_ happened to one of my sister's friends ..." (which means that your sister mentioned that it had "really" happened to somebody who'd told it to a friend of hers). The visceral romantic appeal of folk tales makes them even more irresistible, but not necessarily more credible.

 

> mmmm.. and what does speak against a common language in balkan until on the scene apears the slavs?I mean, not folk myths , but "reliable historical evidences" ? Nothing, so far i know.

"A little" is not the same thing as "nothing". There's quite a lot of onomastic material representing Illyrian, Getic and Thracian; we have some vernacular vocabulary surviving in glosses in ancient texts, and we have some Thracian inscriptions, which are obscure but at least prove that Thracian was not, for example, a form of Greek, which, after all, is also an ancient Balkan language. The material is scarce but sufficient to show that the languages in question were different from one another. We also know Greek and Albanian to represent different branches of IE. Ancient Macedonian was different from both (though evidently related to Greek), and Messapic (probably a form of Illyrian) was still different. The linguistic diversity of the ancient Balkans is undeniable.

Piotr