--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "alexandru_mg3" <alexandru_mg3@...>
wrote:
>
> ... as I said once to Miguel the Proto-Romanian Phonetism
> was closer to Proto-Albanian one than to Latin.
>
> Probably a similar case with my today English phonetism: you can
> easy guess that my 'english' phonetism is closer to Romanian than
to
> English :).
Quite so, and this is a central point that needs to be taken into
account when reconstructing the past of languages. It is here that
language shift becomes indispensable as an explanatory tool. (And it
is here that essentialist thinking becomes a serious liability.) Take
the example of Albanian. The immense influx of Latin words can easily
be explained. The same happened with other languages that were spoken
in the Latin-speaking parts of the Roman Empire and survived, notably
the Celtic language that evolved into Welsh. On the other hand, to
explain the suspiciously Italian characteristics of Albanian
phonological development you need a sizeable body of speakers of late
Latin who switched to Albanian and transplanted their articulartory
habits to it. Such a switch was quite natural after the collapse of
Roman power structures on the Balkans.
One can't seriously investigate the past of languages without
addressing the issue of language shift.
> Isn't strange to detect such huge similarities between a Latin
> Language and Albanian? Only long contacts ?
You don't need long periods of time to get this type of effect, what
you need is language shift. As soon as I start speaking English, what
you get is a variety of English with Dutch phonetics and an
impressive series of semantic and syntactic phenomena that come
straight from Dutch. All of that was firmly in place the very first
time I spoke English, it needed no time at all. The effect is
particularly striking when speakers of Dutch are forced to speak
English in contexts where no natives of English are present to keep
up linguistic standards. What you get in such cases is a language one
might call DUP 'Dutch University Pidgin", or rather, to so justice to
th phonetics, something along the lines of "Dötch Unifersity Pichin".
If we transfer that to our children (and I've met people who spoke
DUP at home to enhance the future chances of their precious ones)
what you get is a new English dialect and potentially even a brand-
new language.
Willem