Re: [tied] PAlb a:>o ended before Latins arrival in Balkans but 'is

george knysh wrote:

> *****GK: In the first place, we don't really know
> whether the linguistic process you refer to must be
> exclusive to the postulated Dacian (?) foundation of
> Albanian and Romanian, or whether it also existed in
> other Palaeo-Balkan languages now extinct which were
> mentioned by various authors at the turn to the CE.
> And in the second place, it can hardly be denied that
> there was a strong "local" (Balkan) component in the
> ethnogenesis of the Romanian people, which could well
> have left some small traces in the parlance,
> influencing the "colonizing" component. This would in
> no sense deny that Romanian is fundamentally a
> Latin-based language. Two cents worth from a
> non-linguist.*****

the matter is of another nature George. The big problem here is to find out
how to differenciate the pre-roman words from the Latin words. Why is this a
problem? This is a problem because unlike Albanian, in Romanian the
pre-Roman words are hardly to be differnciated from Latin words due the
archaismus of the vocalism in Rom. language. The fundamentally here is that,
unlike any other Romance languages, you can build sentences in Romanian with
no Latin word and without any Slavic word (to consider just the two big
languages from which Romanians borrowed a huge amount of lexical material).
Apparently it was more easier to consider the ancient idiom was abbandoned
and to postulate "specific" BalkanLatin words for explaining some Romanian
words. The rigurous comparation with Albanian and the establishing of the
time line of the phonetical changes seems to be the only way which can help
to clear out such aspects.


Alex