07-12-03 05:17, Abdullah Konushevci wrote:
> I think that Albanian-Romanian concordances are misused, mostly by
> political reasons, to deny the autochtony of Albanians in today
> territories and of the Romanians in their territories too. Such
> misuse is present even today.
Look 'ere, Abdullah. It's one thing to disagree with somebody because
you prefer a different interpretation of the linguistic evidence, and
it's a different thing to insinuate that you opponent has political
motives. It's the favourite stratagem of all autochthonists when they
run out of other arguments. Thus, anyone who doesn't believe that PIE
was spoken in the Indus Valley will be called a "Eurocentrist" or an
"Aryan invasionist" by Indian autochthonists (and Roger Pearson's
neo-Nazi sympathies will of course be dragged out of the closet). Since
charity begins at home, I should perhaps mention those Polish
autochthonists who might call me a black sheep and a puppet of German
revanchists for not thinking Poland was the Proto-Slavic homeland.
As it happens, it's precisely this irrational obsession with autochthony
that prevents people from thinking rationally and nourishes political
propaganda. No linguist worth the name would want to "deny" the
Albanians anything or, for that matter, "grant" them anything just to
please them. I don't care a brass farthing about any nation's
autochthony since time out of mind, since I'm just a historian of
language and have no political agenda to promote. Aggressive nationalism
is disgusting and defensive nationalism is embarrassing; both are
foolish. Very few languages are spoken nowadays in exactly the same
areas where their ancestral stages were spoken twenty centuries ago --
and who should care anyway? If you think I have some kind of political
bias, I'm interested to know what on earth it might be. I'm not aware of
any such bias myself.
As a matter of fact, I don't even deny the autochthony of Albanians (not
since time immemorial, to be sure, but since the Roman period) in areas
that are now Albanian-speaking, irrelevant as this autochthony is to
modern political disputes. For example, I include at least parts of
Kosovo, Macedonia and perhaps northeastern Albania in the approximate
area where Proto-Albanian developed (in linguistic symbiosis with
Proto-Balkan Romance). That won't satisfy you, I suppose, since you
insist on the full identification of Proto-Albanian with Illyrian and on
Albanian autochthony all along the Adriatic coast -- something that's
hard to accept for linguistic reasons.
> V. Georgiev's theory is outdated, as you may see from many messages
> also in Cybalist.
Just for the record, I'm not a disciple of Georgiev's. Georgiev is
simply wrong on many counts. For example, his theory that Etruscan was
an IE language closely related to Luwian and Lydian is absolutely
untenable. Many of his Balkan etymologies and toponymic analyses are
arbitrary and fanciful. While all that is true, I think his argument
about Albanian being related to Dacian rather than Illyrian is basically
sound.
> I think that as was Albanian and Romanian close related, also
> Illyrian and Dacian was too, even we know so little about both of
> them.
> There are much arguments in favor of Albanian as dialect of Illyrian.
> But, it's up to you do you accept it or not.
Where are those arguments? So far, you've only given us an alphabetic
list of ancient "Illyrian" placenames, showing that their phonological
form has been transformed by Albanian sound changes. Well, that's what
we should expect anyway, since the sound changes in question are
post-Roman and would have affected any word borrowed during the early
Middle Ages. Some of the most celebrated placename studies allegedly
demonstrating the Illyrian-Albanian continuity (Dyrrachium, Ulcinium
etc.) are so flawed that they can actually be used as arguments
_against_ such continuity.
Piotr