Re: [tied] Albanian as a satem langauge

alexandru_mg3 wrote:

> 1. I agree here: Romania is an ordinary Romance language.
>
> But with some "difference" regarding your last appreciation:
>
> 1.a This "little local color" represented in Proto-Romanain
> Vocabulary (500-600AC) around 24% from the total Proto-Romanian
> vocabulary (and I talked here only about the 'preserved'
> vocabulary).
> I counted word by word Latin and Substratual words -> and I took
> into account only words with an Albanian counter-part.
> A quarter of the total vocabulary is not a "little local color".

I don't know if your count and the method of counting are correct (I
have my doubts, but since you don't specify any details, I can't argue),
but assuming, for the sake of the argument, that they are, even such a
high proportion of loans would not be a big deal. Just consider the
number of French loans in English; Germanic loans in French, Finish or
Polish; Slavic words in Romanian; Arabic words in Persian; Latin and
Greek words in any language of Europe, etc. Even massive borrowing
doesn't make the receptor language extraordinary in any way.

> 1.b It deeply affect the structure of the phrase too.

Perhaps, but just how deeply? There are some obvious "Balkan Sprachbund"
features in Romanian, but how do you know which of them go back to
Proto-Albanian and/or its relatives? Do you know anything about the
substratal syntax? In a historical perspective, syntactic patterns are
among the least stable parts of any language.

Piotr