17-06-03 22:36, alex wrote:
> I guess the explanation is very simple. Albanian lost the initial "u"
> from *une ( Take a look at how many words begin with "un-" in Albanian.
> The derivation should be as follow:
>
> *oino > une > né > nie > nje > një
Despite your pretension to simplicity, this derivation is actually so
complex that one can legitimately call it crazy. It violates a great
number of regular developments in the history of Albanian, and every
single step in your sequence is arbitrary:
(1) *oi does not yield (Proto-)Albanian *u; it gives e (< *e: < *ai <
*oi); before a nasal *e: would have become a nasalised vowel (*â = [a~])
in Common Albanian.
(2) Stem-final ("thematic") short *o disappears in Albanian. Short *o
doesn't change into /e/ except under some special umlauting conditions
that don't obtain in this case.
(3) *oino- did not have final stress.
(4) You leave dialectal forms totally unaccounted for.
In a word, bullshit.
Piotr