--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "alex" <alxmoeller@...> wrote:
> The phonetic changes are very attractive to be studied since even
> Rosetti in
> his ILR III makes some affirmations which appears very interesting.
> I will
> pick just some of ideas of him here:
> 1)-Rom. lang is made up out off autochtoneus main elements (
thracian and
> illyrian ), Latin and Slavic (pg. 285)
No quarrel with that in principle, although I would be inclined to
put it in a way that gets rid of the notion of mixed language (which
I don't understand), as follows: Rumanian is a descendant of Latin
which has incorporated a certain amount of material from
autochthonous languages (Thracian and Illyrian) and has undergone
strong influence from Slavic. What is problematic about this
formulation is the fact that it is not specific enough as to the non-
Latin compoinents. Albanian should somehow be mentioned by name and
instead of "Slavic" it is better just to say "Bulgarian"
(or "Bulgarian-Macedonian"), because that is what it is most of the
time. On the other hand mention of Illyrian or Thracian should
probably be dropped because it is impossible to tell which
autochthonous language(s) provided the material.
> 2)-The Slavs have learned Romanian because this was a prestigious
language
> since it was belonging to the Roman culture and because of the
economic
> power of the Romanic population ( p. 291)
That is anachronistic. By the time speakers of Slavic appeared, Latin
was no longer a prestige language, not to speak of Rumanian. The
early speakers of Slavic never experienced Roman administration,
military service, colonization, or other factors that conferred
societal prestige on Latin and made it a language useful to shift to.
Nor did they read Cicero or Augustine.
It is one of the strange quirks of Rumanian historical linguistics as
(sometimes) practiced in Rumania that they believe that Rumanian
somehow carried the sociolinguistic prestige of the Roman Empire for
centuries after the societal factors making for that prestige were a
thing of the past. By putting in sociolinguistic factors that cannot
conceivably have been present on any scenario, they throw a
smokescreen on the sociolinguistic processes that were really going
on during the dark ages. From the point of view of the status in the
debate of the Rumanian Urheimat this practice is comparable with two
other quirks we have come across during earlier phases of this
debate:
(1) The (implicit) assumption that a migration from the Ohrid area to
Transylvania is totally impracticable whereas a migration from
Transylvania to the Ohrid area is too trivial to even mention.
(2) The idea that a transdanubian presence of DR in the tenth century
or thereabouts constitutes evidence for a transdanubian location of
Common Rumanian.
> 3) he quotes Jokl which says "In Albanian the pastoral Albanians
> assimilated the agricultural Slavs" ( p. 292)
No sane person can have any doubts about that.
> 4) the oldes loans into Romanian have Bulgarian character, but a
different
> characted as these spoken in _South_ of Bulgaria, namely these
phonetic
> charcter are to find in the _North-East_ of Bulgaria. (p. 298)
OK, but that becomes significant only after the rise of those local
differences has received a chronology.
> 5) there are some Hungarian loans which can be explained
phoneticaly just
> via Bulgarian ( p. 299)
If that can be substantiated it is fascinating.
> 6) if the Slavic words are present in DR and AR then they are
previous to
> the X century ( p. 308)
I agree.
> 7) the Slavic influence on Albanian, Hungarian and Greek should
have happen
> after the nasal vocals "o~, e~" dissapered in the South Slavic. On
the
> contrary, these loans in Romanian, they present the nasals there.
That reflects a misunderstanding. Nasality appears to have been lost
pretty soon (10th century?) in the Slavic dialects underlying Serbian
and Croatian, but pre-Slovene was later (and has retained the nasal
vowels in the extreme north) and so was Bulgarian-Macedonian, which
has retained nasality in the extreme south. Unless I have missed
something a precise history of the loss of nasality in Bulgarian-
Macedonian still has to be written. The presence of nasality in the
overwhelming majority of Slavic loans into Rumanian should be
recognized for what it is: a local Bulgarian feature.
> I consider these aspects interesting enough since they bild an
image which
> can tell us what was wrong there. Apparently the contact between
Slavs and
> Romanians, did happened somewhere in the North-East of the Slavic
controlead
> area, the Hungarian loans which are comming via Bulgarian appears
to be in
> concordance with the extending of the Bulgar Empire in Panonia
before
> Hungarians ( confirmed by historical facts); more the contact
between
> Hungarians and Romanians should have happened later since
apparently the
> Hungarians first have had other direction as South-East from
Panonia (
> things confirmed by historical facts). From these aspects we are
somehow
> obliged to place the DacoRomanians North of Bulgars and East of
Hungarians.
> A suplimentary aspect should be seen from the Cumanic loans into
Romanian
> since the phonetic aspect of the words do not apply to these of
Turkish, but
> to these of the Cumans. This aspect force us to put the DR too more
North,
> namely north of Danuber, and East of Carpathian.
I've no quarrel with this (barring one or two details that were
mentioned above) as far as DR is concerned, but Arumanian has been
lost from sight again and we're talking about relations that took
place in the ninth century at the earliest but probably later, in
other words, about relations that have no conceivable bearing on the
problem of the Rumanian Urheimat, in the sense of the area where
Common Rumanian arose. As far as the Urheimat is concerned it is a
smokescreen comparable with the PVL evidence, though admittedly much
more interesting and real. Sorry for repeating the point, but you
can't prove that the Vojvodina was Serbian-speaking in the
seventeenth century by showing that it is predominantly Serbian-
speaking now.
> Complicated this puzzle, isn't it?:-))
Perhaps, but I'm learning a lot from this discussion!
Willem