From: willemvermeer
Message: 35599
Date: 2004-12-23
--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "alex" <alxmoeller@...> wrote:
[On the subject of Dacian in southern Serbia:]
> in southern Serbia? In fact so far I know, the Dacian "intrusion"
in south
> of Danube is beside the Timoc region, merly on the actualy "border"
between
> Bulgaria and Serbia, isn-t it?
I would say that is enough to rob Dacian evidence of much of its
force (of course to the extent that there is any credible Dacian
evidence).
In that connection you mention an important point:
> Coraborated with the information that between
> Serbian & Bulgarian has been "something" which made these languages
to
> become different languages from Common Slavic, that appears again
> interesting..
Yes, it is more or less commonly accepted that Serbian on the one
hand and Macedonian/Bulgarian on the other were geographically
isolated from each other for centuries beginning in the Common Slavic
period. The gap was closed by a southward expansion of Serbian which
may have been as late as the southward expansion of the Serbian
state. Anyhow the dialect that resulted from the expansion lost most
of the inherited case system, the infinitive and such phonetic stuff
as vowel quantity, pointing to contact with a local language with
some of the canonical Balkan features. (Speakers from such towns as
Nis^, Pirot and Vranje are the traditional victims of jokes about
their poor handling of the cases.) It is to the lasting credit of the
Serbian historical dialectologists (notably Pavle Ivic in his work
from the late fifties) that this very interesting episode in the
history of Serbian has not been converted into yet another national
tabu, which could easily have happened. The best candidate for the
language that was replaced with Serbian is probably Rumanian, but I'm
not sure the matter has ever been seriously investigated.
Willem