Re: [tied] Re: Albanian as a satem langauge

From: P&G
Message: 37611
Date: 2005-05-05

> "Albanian
> adjectives and ordinals come after the stressed nouns unlike any other
> European tongue.
> The law formulated in 1892 ...
> makes Albanian the oldest living Indo European language."

This is just daft.
Firstly all living Indo-European languages are by definition of identical
age. One cannot be older than another.
If you mean that Albanian separated off from all the other IE languages at
an earlier stage, then it's quite a startling statement, and few linguists
could agree with you. Or none.
Secondly, French also puts adjectives after nouns (mostly). But we know
that this pattern became fixed later than Latin. But we don't know enough
about Albanian to know when its sentence structure patterns became fixed.
They could be a survival from IE (perhaps!), or an early innovation, or an
innovation later even than French!

I appreciate your desire to make Albanian special. I think it is. But not
for the reasons you suggest.

Peter