From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 19388
Date: 2003-02-27
----- Original Message -----
From: <richard.wordingham@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Thursday, February 27, 2003 9:13 PM
Subject: Re: [tied] Lusitanian and Paleo-Balkan
> Caldisticist! If there were once a Hellenic dialect cluster which
> split into Greek, Macedonian and perhaps Phrygian, would not some
> isoglosses separate Macedonian and some Greek dialects on one hand
> from other Greek dialects on the other? (I think I can see something
> like this in lexical similarities between the geographically close
> Northern Tai dialects (e.g. Northern Zhuang) and the Mak language
> which they do not share with other Tai dialects. Unfortunately, my
> knowledge of Mak is limited to what I can get from the Rosetta
> Project, but it gels with Li's treatment in his 'Handbook of
> Comparative Tai' of words restricted to the Northern Tai branch of
> Tai.)
There's something like that in Italy: one of the oldest divides in Romance (the "La Specia-Rimini line") slashed right across what we call Italian, so that the north was originally closer to Western Romance. I'm not a dogmatic cladist, but the fact remains that _all_ the Ancient Greek dialects shared important common innovations not found in Macedonian. Some of them can be considered the defining features of Greek -- e.g. the devoicing of the *dH series and Grassmann's Law. Macedonian had neither, cf. Gk. kepHale: vs. Mac. gabalan (acc.).
Piotr