--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "alex" <alxmoeller@...> wrote:
> no educated person doubts abut the autochtony of Albanians in Balcan.
I'm sorry but I take issue with that on two counts. First, autochthony
is a relative concept and, second, we are not talking "Albanians" (i.e.
people in a biological sense) so much as the Albanian language. No
person can doubt either that the presence of Albanian on the Balkans,
like that of any other Indo-European language spoken there (or for that
matter in Central or Western Europe), is the outcome of some kind of
secondary migration which must have brought the Indo-European language
that was to evolve into Albanian to the area. And few people can doubt
that Albanian as attested involves at least one episode of language
shift. No Balkan language is autochthonous in any absolute sense. The
language of the Neolithic agriculturalists has been dead for a long
time and if it somehow continued the language that was carried to
Thessaly by colonists from Asia Minor (which may or may not be the
case) that language, too, was intrusive. On the other hand it is quite
likely that the present-day speakers of Albanian carry genes they
inherited from the speakers of that long-dead language.
Talk in terms of autochthony is always politically motivated,
particularly in education and particularly on the Balkans, where
demographic displacements have been so common and where so many areas
have been bi- or multilingual for so long.
This is a sad subject.
Willem