Re: Against the theory of 'Albanian Loans in Romanian'

From: m_iacomi
Message: 30135
Date: 2004-01-27

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "altamix" wrote:

> about the relation Alb. "sh"=Rom."s" we can say just that the
> "loans" from Albanian into Rom.

For the moment, the best label would be not "loans" but "words
in correspondence" since their status is still to be clarified.

> It seems there is no way to find out if this change in Albanian
> of "s" > "sh" did happened before the first loans from Latin and
> the Latin sound "s" has been rendered as "sh" or the change
> "s" > "sh" did happened after the loans of the Latin words into
> Albanian.

Since /*s/ > /sh/ happened for sure at some historical moment in
Albanian and since all Latin loanwords in Albanian exhibit this
feature, the most likely assumption is of course that the change
took place afterwards. The idea of perfectly regular rendering of
Latin /s/ with /sh/ due to phoneme mismatch sounds pretty odd.

> There appear for sure just when the phenomenum stoped and that is
> beginning with the first Slavic loans into Albanian.

Rather this phonological phenomenon ceased at some moment before
the first Slavic loanwords in Albanian.

Piotr Gasiorowski wrote:

> What I actually mean is that Proto-Albanian (or Albanoid) loans
> in Romanian show Rom. /c^/ for Alb. /s/ (of whatever origin).

Assuming that the label is rather "corresponding", one should take
into account not only "cioarã" <=> "sorrë" (`crow`) and "cãciulã" <=>
"kësulë" (`(fur) cap`) but also "gresie" (AR: greasã, MgR: grEsE -
`gritstone, whetstone`) <=> "gresë", "abeS" (`really!`) <=> "besë",
"hameS" (`hungry`) <=> "hamës", "raTã" (`duck`) <=> "rosë" or
"traista" (`bag`) <=> "tra(j)stë", not to mention other less clear
correspondences, none of them exhibiting Rom. /c^/ for Alb. /s/.
Is there any other example for your rule out of the two above-
mentioned?!

Regards,
Marius Iacomi