Re: [tied] az+

08-07-03 18:46, fortuna11111 wrote:

> And the similarity in the case of az happens to appear ONLY in
> Bulgarian.

It was already <azU> in OCS, to be precise, and it may owe its survival
Bulgarian to the conservative influence of Church Slavic. But the more
common variant <ja> found elsewhere in Slavic is a shorter form of the
same word, *h1eg^- (final consonants were lost in Proto-Slavic). Compare
Lith. as^, es^, or Classical Greek <eg> beside <ego:(n)>

> Just as many other things "happen to be so" in BG.

Name any language, and I will show you things that "happen to be so"
there and nowhere else. I can't see anything peculiar about Bulgarian.

> If
> Bulgarians came from a region where Iranian languages were spoken
> heavily, I do not see why you would prefer the theory to the
> historical evidence.

What evidence? The existence of a similar word in Iranian? That's no
_evidence_ of borrowing. It's just a conjecture, and not a plausible one
at that, given that all the case forms of the 1.sg. pronoun are Slavic,
and that no other pronoun was replaced beside the least likely one.

> Which may explain why
> Bulgarians and Slavs may have mixed various gramm. features and
> vocabulary readily.

But Bulgarian _is_ Slavic. It isn't a "mixed" language, let alone a
relexified Iranian dialect, even if it contains Iranian loans (and I
don't think there are more of them in Bulgarian than, say, in my native
Polish). If you say "Bulgarians _and_ Slavs", it's clear that you resort
to your private nomenclature, thus making discussion difficult.

> Especially because the languages did not deviate
> from one another so much at this time. So the question would be not
> how to explain everything through Slavic, but how to say which is
> what.

What languages? Slavic and Iranian? Even 2000 years ago the level of
mutual intelligibility between them was zero.

> It is not a particularly big deal to understand such things.

Well, I wonder.

> Many
> people learn them by heart without any understanding. Yet one of the
> worst things I could do is take those "things" and apply them
> indiscriminately to other languages, sometimes in conflict with
> actual evidence.

What "other languages"? The methods of linguistics are not supposed to
be language-specific.

> I am not sure all scientists I meet in my environment share this
> view. You are free to call it an idee fixe, to me it is a topic of
> research.

You will know when it turns into an idée fixe: when it becomes so
important to you that you dismiss more orthodox explanations without
good reason and don't admit the possibility that your topic of research
may be a wild-goose chase.

Piotr