On Tue, 03 Feb 2004 01:35:45 +0000, alexandru_mg3 <
alexandru_mg3@...>
wrote:
> 2. Early Proto Romanians had some difficulties when they learned
>Latin (simply because they wasn't Latins), regarding how to
>pronounce Latin /di/ in some contexts. They cannot pronounced
>Latin /di/ correctly so they are using their OWN sounds: 3 /dz/ or
>3i /dzi/.
In fact, that proves that the "early Proto Romanians" were *not* the same a
the "early Proto Albanians". Albanians had no problem with the cluster
/dj/ (e.g. djeg "burn") or the sequence /di/ (e.g. dimër "winter"). In
Romanian, on the other hand, we have /dj/ > /3/ > /z/, /di/ > /3i/ > /zi/.
This is an extremely common development cross-linguistically, by the way
(Greek *dje:us > Zeus /dzeus/, Polish *d'ecko > dziecko, *dikU > dzik,
etc.), so it in no way depends on the prior existance of substratal /3/ in
order to work.
=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...