From: Miguel Carrasquer
Message: 23443
Date: 2003-06-17
>17-06-03 22:36, alex wrote:Still, there's definitely a Monty Python sketch lurking somewhere in
>
>> 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.