--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, willemvermeer had written:
> > You can't talk about the early medieval past of Romanian without
> > bringing in Albanian or the language of which Albanian is the
> > descendant, and without bringing in Albanian dialectology. >
>
Then Alex wrote:
> What are the reference points which will
> lead one to put the eraly medieval times in connection with Alb.
and Rom? I
> suppose these can be just linguistic arguments and I will like to
see them.
I'll see how far I can get:
It is not controversial that there are at least four types of
elements Albanian and Romanian share:
(a) a certain amount of lexical material from an otherwise unknown
source;
(b) certain details of the phonological development;
(c) certain quite sweeping morphosyntactic details falling under the
heading of "balkanisms";
(d) certain features having to do with the dialect map.
For the sake of the argument I'll grant that (a) and (b) do not
necessarily presuppose immediate geographical contact. As for (a),
the source of the shared lexical material is unknown, so that it is
almost impossible to avoid unconstrained speculation. As for (b), the
shared phonological developments may be aren't very specific, at
least as far as I can see (I may have missed a lot here, though).
But (c) and (d) are different.
(c)
It is almost a clichee of the study of the balkanisms that Albanian
and Romanian go very closely together, notably with respect to the
development of a suffixed definite article and associated changes
affecting the structure of nominal syntagms.
There is a venerable tradition of talking about the balkanisms in
terms of formulations like "prolonged symbiosis". True as that may be
as far as it goes, it doesn't go far enough because it is thin on
specifics and does not explain geographical patterns. Now we can
assume either that Albanian and Romanian were contiguous or
coterritorial at the stage where these structures arose, or that they
were not and that they [the structures, Ed.] developed independently.
It is obvious that the former assumption is preferable.
(d)
Similarly it is almost a clichee of the study of Albanian and
Romanian that it is possible to draw a joint Albanian-Romanian
dialect map. Romanian as a whole is just a shade closer to Tosk
(North Albanian) than to Geg (South Albanian). But within Romanian,
the North (IR&DR) is in turn just a shade more Tosk than the South
(MR&AR). The simplest explanation is that Albanian and Romanian were
still contiguous or coterritorial as the earliest dialectal
differences were arising in both languages, with Romanian staying in
contact longer with the Albanian south than with the north, and with
the Romanian north staying in contact longer with Albanian (Tosk)
than the Romanian south.
Put differently: Romanian just cannot be understood properly without
assuming a period of non-trivial Albanian-Romanian interaction. Such
a period must have a place and a time.
As for the place, several candidates are available, such as
Transylvania, Bosnia, or the general area where Albanian is spoken
nowadays. Although (as I've said several times in earlier postings)
no area has been conclusively refuted as yet, in my view the latter
area offers a plausible scenario, which could be briefly sketched as
follows:
During the period of large-scale military operations and invasions by
Huns and Avars/Slavs (roughly 440-630), Byzantine authority is known
to have disappeared gradually from all rural areas, and also from all
towns except those on the coast, which could be provided from the
see. There is evidence of large numbers of refugees moving south. (By
the way, it is likely that the influx of refugees caused the
Jirecek/Skok/Gerov line to break down.) Coastal towns apart, the only
populations likely to survive such conditions are mountain
pastoralists, who can most easily stay out of harm's way and are
generally much too poor to be attractive to raiders. And that is
exactly what we find afterwards: on the one hand there is Albanian,
on the other we find that Latin survived only as the language of
mountain pastoralists. (It makes no sense, I think, to deny the
connection of Romanian with pastoralism, which was maintained for
centuries afterward.)
Given the enormous loss of linguistic and demographic information
caused by the Hun-Avar/Slav onslaught, there is much room for
speculation about what went before and it is very difficult to get
beyond the most general lines. Albanian has often been compared with
Brittonic: it was obviously spoken within the Roman empire and thus
massively exposed to Latin for a considerable time, but equally
obviously it was spoken too far from the highway to have been given
up entirely by the time Roman structures broke down. So it lived on.
Since Albanian is Indo-European and Romanian is Latin, their location
in mountainous areas is in both cases the outcome of secondary
developments, which as likely as not implied the linguistic
assimilation of one or more populations already living there. That
may be the ultimate source of most of the balkanisms. At least I'm
unwilling to believe that the balkanisms developed spontaneously as a
consequence of language contact. Unfortunately otherwise nothing is
known about those languages and we are reduced to speculaion.
Slavs are in evidence in southern Serbia in the fifties of the sixth
century. It is a well-known fact that some of the most important
toponyms of this area (Nis^, S^tip) were adopted by Slavic not by way
of Latin but by way of a language sharing important features with
Albanian (the point received som attention in earlier postings). This
would seem to imply the presence at the time of speakers of such a
language. It is important, though, to realize that this was a
transitional stage. In later centuries Albanian is no longer in
evidence here (at least until relatively recently) and southern
Serbia became Slavic-speaking only in the course of the middle ages
(the point has received attention in earlier postings). Those
demographic changes are more or less what one expects because the
most traumatic Avar/Slav incursions took place only after the middle
of the sixth century and it is those that may well have dealt
remaining local languages of southern Serbia and Macedonia the
deathblow.
Starting with the second half of the seventh century, conditions
gradually became more bearable. Two important reasons for that have
been mentioned in earlier postings: the Avar style of operating lost
its destructive edge and the First Bulgar State (681-1018) subdued
the Slavs of Bulgaria and Macedonia and reinstated the rudiments of
something resembling orderly administration.
As a consequence, enormous tracts of lands suitable for mountain
pastoralism became available and it is my contention that the
speakers of northern Romanian gradually filled the void during the
ensuing centuries.
All this gave rise to a vast bilingual area where agriculturalists
spoke Slavic and mountain pastoralists Romanian. The latter appear
generally to have been known als "Vlachs" and show up as such in
historical sources well before the end of the first millennium.
Sooner or later, one expects mutual assimilation and the
disappearance of the one or the other of the languages. In such cases
one expects the language of the agriculturalists to prevail, but that
is only a general tendency and local conditions can yield quite
different outcomes, e.g. where agriculturalists are scarce to begin
with, or where pastoralists move into the valleys on a massive scale
and take up agriculturalism themselves. That may have happened most
spectacularly in what is now Romania.
The linguistic outcomes differ accordingly. The Slavic element of
northern Romanian reflects centuries of life in bilingual conditions.
The balkanisms of Bulgarian-Macedonian reflect the structure of
Slavic as spoken by speakers of Romanian who had recently shifted to
Slavic. (The language of Cyril and Method was free of balkanisms and
fairly complete case systems have survived into this century in
remote areas.) In Bosnia and Montenegro, where onomastic evidence for
Romanian presence is convincingly present, the shift took place
without exerting strong influence on Slavic, suggesting that the
Romanian-speaking element, though present, was not very numerous by
the time they shifted to Slavic (or rather to SCr). Etcetera.
I'm not saying that this scenario is the only one that is possible,
but I'm convinced it accounts better for the observed facts than the
transdanubian hypothesis. Note in particular that it is quite
compatible with a comfortable presence of speakers of Romanian in
what is now Romania well before any Hungarian had ever been around
and with evidence for Vlachs in ninth- ot tenth-century narrative
sources.
---
> It happens the Chornic of Ragussa tells as about a migration in the
VIII
> century. From North to South. There have been Valachs comming to
Ragussa and
> they have had not only sheeps but a lot of big breed, catles and
cows.
This came up in earlier postings too, but do you have specifics?
---
[On the Church Slavonic tradition:]
> The OCS is not the language spoken by actual Bulgarians so far I
know. It
> should have been an "another" slavic dialect, actualy dead. I hope
I do not
> mistake too much here.
That is a misunderstanding. The general interpretation of Old Church
Slavonic is that it is a fairly direct reflection of early Bulgarian
as actually spoken and that it remained so for a time. Of course
eventually it turned into a dead language, but that definitely wasn't
the case during the early period.
Willem