From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 28210
Date: 2003-12-09
----- Original Message -----
From: "alexandru_mg3" <alexandru_mg3@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Tuesday, December 09, 2003 5:54 AM
Subject: [tied] Romanian Swadesh list -> 10% substratual
> Please review your list with the words below:
> 1. Romanian 'trei' :
> - also with its form 'tri' -> basic form in NW of the country
> don't seem to me related to Latin 'tres'
> - it contains an 'i' (present in PIE) that Latin form had lost.
> - Both romanian forms (but especially 'tri') is more related to
> others IE forms than to Latin.
What about Latin <tria>, <tri:s>, <trium>, <tribus>? If you don't know what
they are, you evidently have some reading to do before you can start to
discuss Latin and Romance numerals. What about <tri> and <trei> in Italian
dialects (see also below)?
> ==> the sufix in 'oi' (diftong) on the 'basic' words such :
It isn't a suffix. It's just a sequence of phonemes, not constituting a
separate morpheme, and not of the same origin in different words.
> Rom. Engl. Latin
> 'doi' - 'two' - 'dos'
Rather than discuss each case separately, I'll concentrate on this one to
show the general fallacy of your reasoning.
First of all, you put forward bold theories concerning the relationship
between Latin and Romanian, but you don't seem to know much about Latin.
<dos> may be good Spanish, but the Latin masculine (nom.sg.) was <duo>.
Secondly, Romanian derives from Latin, which doesn't mean that every
Romanian word derives via regular sound changes from its Latin counterpart.
No language develops like that. You can always expect morphology to interact
with phonology, disturbing the patterns produced by sound changes. The fact
that Modern English has <books> rather than *<beech> (expected as the reflex
of OE be:c) as the plural of "book" is due to trivial analogical levelling,
not to a mysterious archaic substrate in English (where the IE plural ending
was kept and the palatal umlaut didn't happen).
Similarly, Vulgar Latin speakers attempted to regularise the Classical forms
of the numeral '2' by introducing analogical innovations, including
masculine *du-i and *do-i. They were used even in Old French before the
collapse of the two-case system in the language, but more importantly for
the matter at hand we get dialectal Italian <dui> and <doi> (beside Standard
Italian <due>), Dalmatian (Vegliot) <doi> and of course Romanian <doi>. This
form is neither exclusively Balkan nor mysterious in any way, but in order
to understand how it developed you need at least some rudiments of knowledge
about Classical Latin, Vulgar Latin and Romance historical linguistics.
*tre-i is likewise a late analogical form (perhaps modelled on *du-i), not
an archaism. We have Old French <troi>, and Old Occitan and Old Italian
<trei>, for example, so Romanian <trei> is not an isolated enigmatic form.
It's as Romance as the rest.
Piotr