28-01-04 23:29, alexandru_mg3 wrote:
> Hello Piotr,
> You wrote :
> " After the main wave of Balkan Latin loans in Albanian but
> before the main wave of borrowings from Slavic the
> fricatives *s and *z became retracted, yielding postalveolar *s^ and
> *z^. "
> This is only an afirmation. You have to sustain it with
> arguments.
> My analysis that I post today , shows that in a worst case
> scenario, the activation of s -> s^ started about 200AD and was fully
> spreading acrros all albanian around 600 AD. But once again it is a
> worst case scenario. The activatation could be well in place at 200
> AD, 300 AD or at 400AD so during and not after the main wave of
> Balkan Latin loans.
OK. I don't know what's "worst" for you and why. The hard facts are as
follows:
(1) All Latin loans are affected.
(2) Some Slavic loans are affected but most aren't.
The most parsimonious interpretation of these facts is this: the change
occurred at a time when the Latin lexical stratum had already been
absorbed, and was still operative when the Slavic loans began to trickle
in. Of course you can invent any number of more complicated solutions,
but what for?
At the time when *s was the only strident fricative in the
(Proto-)Albanian sound system, it may have had retracted allophones
(like, e.g. Castilian or Modern Greek /s/), but such pronunciations were
phonologically _irrelevant_ until *[s^] began to contrast with *[s], and
there was no such contrast in Roman-time Albanian.
The change I desribed was part of a shift: the slots vacated by *s and
*z were filled as *c^ and *3^ changed into *s and *z. It was only then
that a new system of fricatives emerged. Some of the oldest loans from
Slavic show Modern Albanian /s/ for Slavic *c^, which is sufficient
proof that the two processes (the retraction of sibilants and the
simplification of "shibilant" affricates) overlapped chronologically.
Piotr