Re: [tied] Re: Indo-Iranian

17-06-03 16:01, fortuna11111 wrote:

> No comment. Less-scientifically said, until 1945 Macedonian
> did not exist. See if you will find historical references to this
> language before that date. I am eager to hear about them.

_Literary standard_ Macedonian was codified in the mid 1940s. Since that
time it has existed as an "official" language. So what? As a linguist, I
can only say that there are no foolproof _linguistic_ criteria of "being
a separate language" (rather than "dialect"). When in doubt, I tend to
respect the sentiments of the native speakers. Kashubian could be
regarded as a peripheral dialect of Polish or as a different language.
Since the Kashubians strongly identify with their speech and the
"separate language" status may help to protect Kashubian, I don't mind
it. The more variety, the longer we'll be paid for doing linguistics :-).

> Just a technical question. Do you exclude the possibility that a
> language adjusts a borrowed word to its own phonetic model?
> The combination "sht" is very foreign to Serbian, just as their
> special way of saying "c" is very foreign to us. My boyfriend tried
> to teach me for a year and gave it up.

First, it's untrue that <s^t> is foreign to Serbo-Croatian (it even has
"s^tokavian" dialects! :-)). The cluster exists there e.g. as the reflex
of old *stj and *sk (before a front vowel). There is no need for
"secondly", really, but... Secondly, if adjustment were the case, other
Church Slavicisms or Bulgarisms would have been adjusted as well, but
they weren't.

> Old Polish leads me to what I have previously said about church
> languages. Or do you mean something else by Old Polish? I
> would be glad to learn more.

Old Polish was slightly affected by OCS, but the influence was
superficial and marginal. We've always been Romewards oriented.

> Bulgarian kUt. It could be etymologically related, yet how does it
> show that kUshta is intrinsically Slavic? Peter's other examples
> showed there are numerous other parallels in other languages.
> How do you decide for the Slavic and exculde the rest?

A straightforward etymology is always preferable to an exotic one, other
things being equal. You know that Alex likes to reject Romance
etymologies of lots of perfectly Romance-looking words in Romanian, and
he smells Thracian and Dacian influence all about the place. Is he right
:-)?

Piotr