From: Miguel Carrasquer
Message: 18583
Date: 2003-02-08
>> I know of no examples at all of Latin loanwords with s- turning up in Albanian with gj-. Are there appealing candidates?A quick look at the Leiden online Demiraj (which doesn't include
>
>My other candidate is <gjarpër>, which you analyse rather satisfactorily in PIE terms (but I wonder if you can acount for <shtërpinj> equally well). Until yesterday I had little doubt that the word was inherited, but the parallel case of <gji> and the strange incident of Rom. $arpe (< *sErpen) have undermined my certainty. Here we have another case of Romanian/Albanian agreement, and the likelihood that <$arpe> is a substrate word is practically zilch (see Miguel's note about the treatment of consonantal stems in Romanian). If so, why not derive both words from Balkan Latin *sErpen, "thematised" in Proto-Albanian? That would save us the trouble of explaining the Albanian form independently of <serpent->. I have no other candidates yet, but it's a fresh idea. Other examples may be lurking somewhere.