4 ms·

Albanian is a Paleo-Balkanic language which descends from a language closely related to the ancient Illyrian language(s) as Albanians descend from a mountainous

Albanian is a Paleo-Balkanic language which descends from a language closely related to the ancient Illyrian language(s) as Albanians descend from a mountainous pastoralist people with contact to Daco-Thracians and their romanized descendants - the early Romanians. There is no certain way to say (with a straight face or without being biased yourself) that Dacians words are not present in the Romanian language.

OfSanguineFire 3y ago
Again, what you are saying represents a view that is decades superseded now and only hangs on in out-of-date references. The old idea that Albanian is closely related to ancient Illyrian has been criticized due to the fact that Illyrian evidence shows markedly different reflexes for some Indo-European phonemes than Albanian (see Matzinger’s 2008 paper “Die Albaner als Nachkommen der Illyrer aus der Sicht der historischen Sprachwissenschaft”). The same has been shown for Thracian with regard to Albanian and so “Daco-Thracian” is not a substantiated relative. The ancient Balkans were a place large enough for multiple Indo-European languages. I work in the field of historical linguistics myself (albeit not in Balkan linguistics but an adjacent set of languages, but I keep up with that literature too and I am acquainted with the main scholars currently working therein), so what I am posting is informed and, were there interest, I could cite further publications.
- adrian_b 3y ago
  What is known for sure is only that Albanian and Romanian share many words of unknown origin and that those words have been borrowed between the ancestors of the two languages at an early stage, e.g. before rhotacism has changed them. However in most cases it is impossible to determine which was the direction of borrowing and there is no evidence to relate them with any of the languages named by ancient historians, because too little has been preserved of those. Also, there is very little evidence, perhaps none, that the Thracian language and the Dacian were closely related languages. The toponyms that are assumed to come from these two languages are not similar. The supposition that they are closely related is based almost only on the claim of Herodotus that the latter were a tribe belonging to the former, but that claim might have been based only on similarities in clothes and weapons, even without related languages.
  - OfSanguineFire 3y ago
    Again, recent work has established the direction of borrowing for many items as Albanian > Romanian due to secure Indo-European etymologies for some of the Albanian material. And for certain other items, recently it has been proposed that the direction is dialectal Latin > Albanian, undercutting any claim to Dacian origins. You are right that little is preserved of certain ancient Balkans languages, but there is enough preserved in toponymy and onomastics in order to establish affiliations based on the reflexes of the PIE velar series and the vocalism. That is what, in the last 30 years or so of scholarship, has excluded Illyrian and Thracian from playing any role in the Albanian–Romanian lexical isoglosses.
    - adrian_b 3y ago
      Matzinger himself provides a single example of a word for which there is no doubt that the direction of borrowing was from Proto-Albanian to Romanian ("thark"). For other examples, he sends the reader to a work published by Stefan Schumacher in 2009, which I neither have nor can find online. Perhaps you know the title or some link toward any of the recent work that you have mentioned, about these words shared by Albanian and Romanian. While for the shared words of non-Latin origin it may be that most have been borrowed from Proto-Albanian to Proto-Romanian, the shared words of Latin origin may have been very well borrowed from Proto-Romanian to Proto-Albanian. We cannot know if there has been any descendence relationship between the speakers of Latin from whom the speakers of Proto-Albanian have borrowed words and the current speakers of Romanian, but we also cannot know whether the contrary is true.
      - OfSanguineFire 3y ago
        For Indo-European etymologies of some other Albanian words shared with Romanian, look to the work of Eric Hamp: off the top of my head I can list his IE etymologies for the Albanian counterparts of Romanian vatră, strungă, and bunget that seem generally accepted. Getting up to speed with Hamp’s work will likely require some travel on your part, because Hamp tended to publish squibs in some fairly obscure collections and Festschriften that are only held by a handful of libraries and are not online. Orel’s IE etymology for the Albanian counterpart of Ro. zară is, I believe, the current consensus. > The shared words of Latin origin may have been very well borrowed from Proto-Romanian to Proto-Albanian. Yes, certainly. But if those Proto-Romanian words can be shown to represent dialectal Latin features that came to the Balkans from outside, then there is no case for a Dacian origin for them. Dan Ungureanu has argued this recently for a number of items, and a few of my colleagues working with these languages think this represents a great contribution.
- VitruviusBen 3y ago
  > Again, what you are saying represents a view that is decades superseded now and only hangs on in out-of-date references. A paper / theory being recent doesn't magically make it true or generally accepted. > I work in the field of historical linguistics myself (...) so what I am posting is informed This is a clear "appeal to authority fallacy". But in all Matzinger's work he doesn't actually claim that Dacian words aren't to be found in Romanian language, is it? Without proofs of what an extinct language actually sounded like, saying that there isn't any trace of it in any other language, and backing this up by making an appeal to authority is a biased view from my pov.
  - OfSanguineFire 3y ago
    > This is a clear "appeal to authority fallacy". On HN people usually defer to experts in the sciences, as it is about taking the word of someone with the required training in the field and familiarity with the literature. As I said, I would be happy to cite lots of publications, but on a general forum like this it’s not clear that other posters have the time and interest in reading it all, plus the necessary background for it – this field usually involves 6–10 years of initial university study, after all. > But in all Matzinger's work he doesn't actually claim that Dacian words aren't to be found in Romanian language, is it? Matzinger’s view (which generally represents the consensus now inside the field) is indeed that that layer of the Romanian vocabulary can be explained through Albanian without any need to conjecture about Dacian influence. > Without proofs of what an extinct language actually sounded like The respective phoneme inventories of Proto-Albanian, Vulgar Latin, and Thracian and Illyrian are well established. Why did you think that proof was lacking?
    - adrian_b 3y ago
      Dacian and its phoneme inventory are much less known than any of those languages. I doubt that it has any relationship with any of the old Albanian or Romanian words, but its relationships are mostly unknown, so nothing certain can be said about it. There has been a theory that Dacian might have been more closely related to the Baltic languages, which could have been possible based on its position in space and time. There is not enough evidence to determine if there is any truth in this hypothesis, but as an unscientific impression there is a certain resemblance between the few known Dacian toponyms and personal names with Baltic names.

OfSanguineFire 3y ago

Again, what you are saying represents a view that is decades superseded now and only hangs on in out-of-date references. The old idea that Albanian is closely related to ancient Illyrian has been criticized due to the fact that Illyrian evidence shows markedly different reflexes for some Indo-European phonemes than Albanian (see Matzinger’s 2008 paper “Die Albaner als Nachkommen der Illyrer aus der Sicht der historischen Sprachwissenschaft”). The same has been shown for Thracian with regard to Albanian and so “Daco-Thracian” is not a substantiated relative. The ancient Balkans were a place large enough for multiple Indo-European languages. I work in the field of historical linguistics myself (albeit not in Balkan linguistics but an adjacent set of languages, but I keep up with that literature too and I am acquainted with the main scholars currently working therein), so what I am posting is informed and, were there interest, I could cite further publications.

adrian_b 3y ago
What is known for sure is only that Albanian and Romanian share many words of unknown origin and that those words have been borrowed between the ancestors of the two languages at an early stage, e.g. before rhotacism has changed them. However in most cases it is impossible to determine which was the direction of borrowing and there is no evidence to relate them with any of the languages named by ancient historians, because too little has been preserved of those. Also, there is very little evidence, perhaps none, that the Thracian language and the Dacian were closely related languages. The toponyms that are assumed to come from these two languages are not similar. The supposition that they are closely related is based almost only on the claim of Herodotus that the latter were a tribe belonging to the former, but that claim might have been based only on similarities in clothes and weapons, even without related languages.
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago
  Again, recent work has established the direction of borrowing for many items as Albanian > Romanian due to secure Indo-European etymologies for some of the Albanian material. And for certain other items, recently it has been proposed that the direction is dialectal Latin > Albanian, undercutting any claim to Dacian origins. You are right that little is preserved of certain ancient Balkans languages, but there is enough preserved in toponymy and onomastics in order to establish affiliations based on the reflexes of the PIE velar series and the vocalism. That is what, in the last 30 years or so of scholarship, has excluded Illyrian and Thracian from playing any role in the Albanian–Romanian lexical isoglosses.
  - adrian_b 3y ago
    Matzinger himself provides a single example of a word for which there is no doubt that the direction of borrowing was from Proto-Albanian to Romanian ("thark"). For other examples, he sends the reader to a work published by Stefan Schumacher in 2009, which I neither have nor can find online. Perhaps you know the title or some link toward any of the recent work that you have mentioned, about these words shared by Albanian and Romanian. While for the shared words of non-Latin origin it may be that most have been borrowed from Proto-Albanian to Proto-Romanian, the shared words of Latin origin may have been very well borrowed from Proto-Romanian to Proto-Albanian. We cannot know if there has been any descendence relationship between the speakers of Latin from whom the speakers of Proto-Albanian have borrowed words and the current speakers of Romanian, but we also cannot know whether the contrary is true.
    - OfSanguineFire 3y ago
      For Indo-European etymologies of some other Albanian words shared with Romanian, look to the work of Eric Hamp: off the top of my head I can list his IE etymologies for the Albanian counterparts of Romanian vatră, strungă, and bunget that seem generally accepted. Getting up to speed with Hamp’s work will likely require some travel on your part, because Hamp tended to publish squibs in some fairly obscure collections and Festschriften that are only held by a handful of libraries and are not online. Orel’s IE etymology for the Albanian counterpart of Ro. zară is, I believe, the current consensus. > The shared words of Latin origin may have been very well borrowed from Proto-Romanian to Proto-Albanian. Yes, certainly. But if those Proto-Romanian words can be shown to represent dialectal Latin features that came to the Balkans from outside, then there is no case for a Dacian origin for them. Dan Ungureanu has argued this recently for a number of items, and a few of my colleagues working with these languages think this represents a great contribution.
VitruviusBen 3y ago
> Again, what you are saying represents a view that is decades superseded now and only hangs on in out-of-date references. A paper / theory being recent doesn't magically make it true or generally accepted. > I work in the field of historical linguistics myself (...) so what I am posting is informed This is a clear "appeal to authority fallacy". But in all Matzinger's work he doesn't actually claim that Dacian words aren't to be found in Romanian language, is it? Without proofs of what an extinct language actually sounded like, saying that there isn't any trace of it in any other language, and backing this up by making an appeal to authority is a biased view from my pov.
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago
  > This is a clear "appeal to authority fallacy". On HN people usually defer to experts in the sciences, as it is about taking the word of someone with the required training in the field and familiarity with the literature. As I said, I would be happy to cite lots of publications, but on a general forum like this it’s not clear that other posters have the time and interest in reading it all, plus the necessary background for it – this field usually involves 6–10 years of initial university study, after all. > But in all Matzinger's work he doesn't actually claim that Dacian words aren't to be found in Romanian language, is it? Matzinger’s view (which generally represents the consensus now inside the field) is indeed that that layer of the Romanian vocabulary can be explained through Albanian without any need to conjecture about Dacian influence. > Without proofs of what an extinct language actually sounded like The respective phoneme inventories of Proto-Albanian, Vulgar Latin, and Thracian and Illyrian are well established. Why did you think that proof was lacking?
  - adrian_b 3y ago
    Dacian and its phoneme inventory are much less known than any of those languages. I doubt that it has any relationship with any of the old Albanian or Romanian words, but its relationships are mostly unknown, so nothing certain can be said about it. There has been a theory that Dacian might have been more closely related to the Baltic languages, which could have been possible based on its position in space and time. There is not enough evidence to determine if there is any truth in this hypothesis, but as an unscientific impression there is a certain resemblance between the few known Dacian toponyms and personal names with Baltic names.