Re: [tied] Re: Albanian (3)

29-01-04 18:39, alex wrote:

> hmmmm.. hmmmmm. something deos not fit well here. It cannot be that latin
> "ke" becam palatal but Slavic "c^" became "s". Simply , chronologicaly it
> does not fit.
> Assuming ProtoAlbanians loaned some words from BalkanLatin, there must have
> had the sound "c^" which should be reflected by Albanian as "s" if there are
> indeed Slavic loans where "c^" is reflected as "s".
> The exampel of "tërsira" .. from Slavic "trak" from an *tark... strange...
> there is Latin "torquere" which should give in PBR "torc^e and will fit for
> Albanian "tërsira" as well, don't you find?

<torquere> is the infinitive of a verb meaning 'twist, wrench'. It fits
the Albanian word neither semantically nor formally (Lat. <que> doesn't
give Alb. s, the stress pattern is all wrong, Albanian didn't borrow
Latin infinitives, let alone changing them into nouns). Now *torkU
'ribbon, string' is an attested Slavic word, and *-ina is a very
productive Slavic suffix which originally meant 'a piece of ...'.
*torc^ina is therefore a perfect match for <tërsirë> on all counts. I'm
grateful to Abdullah for this beautiful example, because it shows no
fewer than three features of a very old loan: absence of metathesis, /s/
for *c^, and rhotacism.

Piotr