alexandru_mg3 wrote:
> Alb. rr < rn is well present in the Latin loans (see Alb. kërrutë) ->
> so this transformation is for sure more recent then je/ja (in fact
> ie,je,ja could have different waves based on the alternance of ie and
> je in Alb. words)
If /-rn-/ was missing from Roman-time Proto-Albanian, its speakers might
have found it impossible to pronounce in loans and so substituted their
emphatic (trilled) /rr/ for it. To cite a comparable case, English words
with sp-, st- or sk-, when pronounced by not-very-fluent Spanish
speakers, typically receive a prothetic e- ("estreet", "esquare",
"Espain"). This is not because the prothesis is an ongoing phonetic
process in Spanish, but because Spanish phonotactic rules still prohibit
sC- clusters. The treatment of inherited Albanian words, and especially
numerous verbs with *-rn-, where <je> is the norm, shows that the
reduction of the cluster must be old.
Piotr