From: alex
Message: 28086
Date: 2003-12-07
> 07-12-03 05:17, Abdullah Konushevci wrote:If you allow Piotr, I should have a question.
>
>> 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