Re: [tied] Re: Loans, Slavs, Church (it was : Walachians are placed

willemvermeer wrote:

>
> 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;

concretly said, words which is not to find in any other neighbouring
language or in Latin & Greek.

>
> (b) certain details of the phonological development;

yes

>
> (c) certain quite sweeping morphosyntactic details falling under the
> heading of "balkanisms";

not quiet but for simplyfing the aspect, we can consider it "balkanisms"
even if in this case, only Alb. and Rom. share them together.

>
> (d) certain features having to do with the dialect map.

here I am afraid I am not very sure what you mean here. Is this point not
the same with "b"?
Assuming "d" and "b" are not the same point, one has to go onto your
rationament. An explantion for differenciating "d" from "b" should be
necesarry.

> 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.

Which is present in Greek and Bulgarian as well but the way how this is
used, is specific only to Albanian and Romanian. The usage of the definite
article is different from Greek and Bulgarian and its usage is almost same
in Alb. and Rom.

>
> 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.

Making a paralel to the DR and AR, the shcolars assume the developments
which are identic in AR with DR are not because of a "prolonged symbiosis"
but they are independent developments. Why should be one way preferable to
another way appears to me now as being more a matter of taste as based on
some good reasons. I will like to see why in the case of Alb-Rom one should
speak about "prolonged symbiosis" and why in the case of DR-AR one has to
speak about independent developments. If we don't have a solid argumentation
for one or another alternative, the solution we take appears to remain a
matter of taste and this shouldn't be too convincing, regardless which
alternative one prefers or considers to be "obvious".

>
>
> (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.

The shcolars consider CommonRomanian as dating until X century or until VI
century. So we have the time of coabitation until VI or until X century. The
treatment of the Slavic loans in Alb. and Rom. will speak about an upper
time of coabitation being the VI century and not the X century.

>
> 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.

that is the 25.000 $ question. Which is the period of time and which is the
place:-)

>
> 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.)

I am afraid this "evidence" should be explained. I do know thge large scale
military operations begun already with the Goths South of Danube and it
begun already with the Carps & Marcomans north of Danube. Which is this
evidence you mean?

> 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.

On the contrary, the terminology for pastoralisms appears to be dominated by
words considered to belong to substratum, not to Latin.

> 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.

well, that should be somewhere outside of Bizantine Empire since they are
not recorded at all until XI century within it. Should they have been inside
of Bulgarian Empire?

> 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.

I am afraid a such scenario can be made just when one does not know how is
the life in the mountains. One cannot survive in big number there. The
mountains are good to resists so long the food is enough but they are not
the place to live for centuries. One needs the valleys, the control of the
streets. This is my opinion as one who knows how is to live in mountains but
this opinion can be very subiective. The idea of "people becoming a lot in
the mountains and comming down into valleys" appears not very convincing to
me, less one has a such Geographic situation as in Transilvania. But that is
an another story.

> 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.

so, we have: recent shift to Slavic, not very numerous. That will speak more
for recent imigrants as in Polen, Slovakia, Ukraine, people who got quick
(assimilated by the big mass of Slavs they lived with (2-3 centuries ?)

>
>
> 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.

I don't have any trouble with this aspect since it is clear the Hungarians
are late commers. The main issue is to find out the place where the Vlachs
have been until X century, before they got mentioned first time as comming
from NorthWest of the Bizantine Empire.

>
>
> ---
>
>
>> 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?

See please the text here:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/balkanika/message/17

>
> [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.

Apud Rosetti, his ILR, page 300:
"the OCS has been a Bulgar dialect spooken in the IX century in the region
of Salonic...."
Further he quotes:
-Sc^epkin: "OCS is one of the dialects of Bulgarian language"
-Mladenov: "actualy Bulgarian language was formed out of a Bulgarian
dialect, an another as OCS"

> Willem

Alex




--
No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG Anti-Virus.
Version: 7.0.298 / Virus Database: 265.6.6 - Release Date: 28.12.2004