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Post by todhrimencuri on Apr 23, 2009 0:58:33 GMT -5
books.google.com/books?id=yfZZX1qjpvkC&printsec=frontcover#PPA95,M1 This is taken from a wordlist study of Indo-European languages where a date of the language's 'birth'(separation) from Indo-European is assessed. The results for Albanian vary greatly. The 100-word list dates the separation of Albanian from about 6600B.C. HOWEVER, the 200-wordlist dates Albanian to about 3800BC alongside Greek... a difference of nearly 3000 years. I cant see many of the other pages regarding Albanian though... I want to get the book now..
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Post by insomniac on Apr 23, 2009 1:13:54 GMT -5
Didn't Indo-European split in modern-day Bulgaria into two: Centum & Satem. Or is that just a theory...
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Post by todhrimencuri on Apr 23, 2009 1:40:45 GMT -5
Centum/Satem relates mainly into the differentiation among IE groups between the hard velar K of Latin and Greek and softer velar S (as in Shqip) of Persian, Balto-Slavic, centum is how you say 100 in latin, while Satem in Avestan... the problem is that Albanian doesnt really fit completely in either. In fact in original PIE there was another velar, besides the later ones I showed. Its been argued that Albanian shares all three, meaning we have the centum in the language as well as the satem; and nor is the and nor does the dichotomy mean languages were principally in only those two groupings. That wouldnt explain why Greek, a centum languages, share so much with Armenian, a Satem... and why Albanian, Greek and Phrygian share so much in common... Check this here in the book Foundations of Latin: books.google.com/books?id=afsDrP9K3pQC&pg=PA38&dq=centum/satem#PPA116,M1
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Post by todhrimencuri on Apr 23, 2009 2:00:53 GMT -5
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Post by Arxileas on Apr 23, 2009 2:06:21 GMT -5
lol !
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Post by todhrimencuri on Apr 23, 2009 2:16:02 GMT -5
What do you find funny...
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donnie
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Post by donnie on Apr 23, 2009 2:50:42 GMT -5
Thanks for the links Todhri, great information. I also look forward to the other articles you said you'd post, but I cannot find the thread.
A 3,000 years of difference is very great ... I wonder if some additional studies can narrow it down further. Imagine if Albanian started developing 8600 years ago ... that's amazing. And even if the 3,800 BC is the correct date ... it's still an amazing 5,800 years ago.
Perhaps the early separation of Albanian is also the explanation to its intermediary position in the centum-satem divide? When did the schism approximately occur? It's also interesting to note the early separation of Hittite ... it's interesting that this extinct language developed a more simplified grammar compared to the highly inflected one of PIE, and this already in antiquity. Also consider the late separation/'birth' of Lithuanian. It might be the explanation as to why its grammar is so akin to that of the PIE, and why its vocabulary is so strondly Indoeuropean as opposed to Greek, where a considerable amount of the words are considered to be of some Mediterranean substratum.
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donnie
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Post by donnie on Apr 23, 2009 2:51:48 GMT -5
What do you find funny... Budallenjte qeshin kur s'kane gje per te shtuar.
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Post by ilirdardani on Apr 23, 2009 7:04:34 GMT -5
^ Exactly donnie.
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Kanaris
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Post by Kanaris on Apr 23, 2009 8:15:26 GMT -5
Thats good news... we all can get a glimpse of that elusive Illyrian language. Who writes this stuff?
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Post by todhrimencuri on Apr 23, 2009 12:32:25 GMT -5
I think the 3000 year difference shows the inheritent problem in the wordlist system than anything else and thats what I think the author is perhaps pointing to. Im not a linguistic major so i cant really understand the vocab they use (I can try and infer from knowing greek and latin, but the meanings are always so damn abstracted).
My personal view is that people speak of 'Albanian' breaking at that point when infact they should speak of another peleo-Balkan language breaking early from which modern Albanian is derived. Whether that be Illyrian or Thracian or a mixture of the two...
Philip Baldi's Foundations of Latin(second link I posted) understood the few existing Illyrian inscriptions through Albanian but he says the correlation is 'uneasy'... meaning Albanian has changed significantly since the early period.
The same has occurred with Berber, where, although we have the modern language, the 7000 year old inscriptions that exist cannot be deciphered because the language has changed so much.
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Post by insomniac on Apr 23, 2009 12:44:25 GMT -5
Thanks for the links Todhri, great information. I also look forward to the other articles you said you'd post, but I cannot find the thread. A 3,000 years of difference is very great ... I wonder if some additional studies can narrow it down further. Imagine if Albanian started developing 8600 years ago ... that's amazing. And even if the 3,800 BC is the correct date ... it's still an amazing 5,800 years ago. Perhaps the early separation of Albanian is also the explanation to its intermediary position in the centum-satem divide? When did the schism approximately occur? It's also interesting to note the early separation of Hittite ... it's interesting that this extinct language developed a more simplified grammar compared to the highly inflected one of PIE, and this already in antiquity. Also consider the late separation/'birth' of Lithuanian. It might be the explanation as to why its grammar is so akin to that of the PIE, and why its vocabulary is so strondly Indoeuropean as opposed to Greek, where a considerable amount of the words are considered to be of some Mediterranean substratum. I think Lithuanian and Latvian is very close to Slavic. When the schism of centum/satem happen i think they went their own ways, originally North of Caspian sea then, migrated to the Baltics thereafter.
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Post by insomniac on Apr 23, 2009 12:50:07 GMT -5
Here is a map of the divide
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Post by insomniac on Apr 23, 2009 12:54:33 GMT -5
The Spread of Indo-Europeans www.kortlandt.nl/publications/art111e.pdfStarting from the linguistic evidence and trying to fit the pieces into a coherent whole, we arrive at the following picture. The best candidate for the original Indo- European homeland is the territory of the Sredny Stog culture in the eastern Ukraine. The attested languages reflect a number of waves of migration to the east, north of the Caspian Sea (Tocharian, Indo-Iranian), to the south, west of the Black Sea (Anatolian, Greek, Armenian, Albanian), and to the west, south of the Baltic Sea (Italo-Celtic, Germanic). As Mallory notes, there may have been a fourth, abortive wave of migration to the southeast, west of the Caspian Sea, which is not reflected in the linguistic records, perhaps because the Indo- Europeans were assimilated to the local population at an early stage. The earlier migrations yielded the peripheral languages (Tocharian, Anatolian, Italo-Celtic), which did not take part in the late Indo-European innovations of the central dialects (Indo-Iranian, Greek, Germanic, Balto-Slavic, etc.). Some innovations affected only a part of the central dialects, such as the assibilation of the palatovelars (which did not reach Greek and Germanic) or the loss of aspiration in the voiced stops (which did not reach Greek and Indic). Other developments had a more local character. An interconsonantal laryngeal voiced the following stop in North Iranian (Avestan, Sogdian) dugdar- ‘daughter’, but not in its Persian and Indic cognates. This must have been a very early development. It appears that Phrygian was rather closely related to Greek (cf. now Lubotsky 1988), Thracian to Armenian (cf. Kortlandt 1988), and Venetic to Italic. The position of Illyrian remains unclear. The Indo-Europeans who remained after the migrations became speakers of Balto-Slavic.
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donnie
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Post by donnie on Apr 24, 2009 7:28:10 GMT -5
Well, that's true, but then again since we know so little of the issue we might just as well call it Albanian, just as Greek is called Greek even though the difference between Greek as spoken then and now are as radically different as in our case.
Do you know examples used by linguists to argue in favour of the satem nature of Albanian, words that is?
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Patrinos
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Post by Patrinos on Apr 24, 2009 7:38:01 GMT -5
Well, that's true, but then again since we know so little of the issue we might just as well call it Albanian, just as Greek is called Greek even though the difference between Greek as spoken then and now are as radically different as in our case. Have you personally found any "ancient albanian" text that make you able to make this comparison.... ? Guys,return to Earth...!
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donnie
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Post by donnie on Apr 24, 2009 8:01:41 GMT -5
You don't have to. Albanian being classified as its own branch within the IE language tree suffices to conclude the continuity of this language since antiquity and beyond.
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Patrinos
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Post by Patrinos on Apr 24, 2009 8:15:45 GMT -5
You don't have to. Albanian being classified as its own branch within the IE language tree suffices to conclude the continuity of this language since antiquity and beyond. Of course there must have been an indepedent branch that can be called the ancestor of modern albanian but continiuty is a big word to say it that easily... You don't even know how a simple sentence ,of what you imagine as ancient albanian, was in lets say 5th century BC . A type of continuity we can see in the Vlach language in relation with Latin, but we can't tell precisely that they are one and the same language.
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donnie
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Post by donnie on Apr 24, 2009 8:38:22 GMT -5
Of course there is a direct continuity between Albanian and proto-Albanian (whether it be Illyrian or Thracian), otherwise we wouldn't be our own branch. Of course there have been alterations, just as there has been in Greek, but there's still a continuity.
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Post by todhrimencuri on Apr 24, 2009 10:30:56 GMT -5
Well, that's true, but then again since we know so little of the issue we might just as well call it Albanian, just as Greek is called Greek even though the difference between Greek as spoken then and now are as radically different as in our case. Have you personally found any "ancient albanian" text that make you able to make this comparison.... ? Guys,return to Earth...! You should actually rea what I posted if you want a better explanation... And Donnie is right, our language is continuously spoken.
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