Balkan Sprachbund Research Articles

The Xenology of the Powder Keg of Europe: the Reflection of the Peculiarities of the Friend Oo Foe Dichotomy intThe Balkan Model of the World in the Xenopejorative Vocabulary of the Languages of The Balkan Sprachbund. Articulation of Issue

This article discusses the reflection of the features of the “friend or foe” dichotomy in the Balkan model of the world in the xenologic pejorative vocabulary of the Balkan sprachbund languages: Albanian, Aromanian, Bulgarian, Modern Greek, Macedonian, Romanian and Serbo-Croatian. The author gives a brief review of the historical, cultural and geopolitical specifics of the Balkan-Carpathian region, which influenced the local peoples’ ideas about strangers; some traditional mythological beliefs of the Balkan peoples related to the conceptual field of otherness are also presented. Based on the analysis of the internal history of the word, an attempt is made to define the main models for constructing derogatory names for strangers in order to compare the data for various Balkan languages and, to the extent possible, build an integral image of the concept of alien in the Balkan conceptual worldview. According to the results of the study, the xenopejorative vocabulary of languages of the Balkan sprachbund shows significant similarities both in terms of form and content. Pejoratives with undifferentiated evaluativity predominate, which could account for the richness of the Balkan derivational morphology and a large number of lexical borrowings in each of the languages; pejoratives with an indication of appearance, features of language and peculiarities of behaviour are also widely represented; however, the first are referentially limited, while the second and the third are universal, from which it is concluded that the prototypical Balkan alien is someone who speaks differently and behaves different-y. At the same time, the most common target for pejorative vocabulary in the Balkan languages among all strangers is the Romani people, which is due both to a number of stereotypical ideas about the physical and behavioural features of this ethnic group, and to the historical isolation caused by the nomadic way of life and the closedness of the Romani community from outsiders.

Kilka uwag o fonetyce ligi bałkańskiej

The focus of this article is the origins of (1) reduced vowels in languages of the Balkan Sprachbund, (2) lenition of soft stops, (3) its (pre)nasalization, (4) the change of ninto rin the Tosk dialect of Albanian and a similar process in Old Romanian as well as the Istro Romanian, Maramuresh and Oltenian dialects of this language, a parallel change of Latin linto rin common Romanian and certain Italian dialects.

The issue of the postpositional article in Balkan sprachbund and the case of Istro-Romanian

This paper aims to investigate the origin, development, and usage of the postpositional articles in Istro-Romanian, one of the Romanian historical dialects, a likewise dislocated member of the Balkan sprachbund. First, based on the available literature, the evolution of the postpositional articles in the Romance languages will be demonstrated, followed by the evolution of the articles in Romanian and Istro-Romanian, and the languages of the Balkan sprachbund. Afterwards will follow a corpus-based analysis of the similarities and dissimilarities regarding the usage of the postpositional articles in Romanian and Istro-Romanian. It will be based on the parallel texts in Romanian and Istro-Romanian from the Densusianu’s and Pușcariu’s collections. To distinguish as accurately as possible the stages of Istro-Romanian articles, Greenberg’s methodology will be used. That is, his cycle of the grammaticalization of the articles will be applied. It is expected that the analysis will show that despite many centuries of foreign influence, the usage of the postpositional articles in Istro-Romanian is congruent to the usage of the postpositional articles in Romanian and other languages of the Balkan sprachbund.

Subjunctives in Romanian Languages: Micro-Parametric Variation in Complement CPs and the Periphrastic Future

This paper aims to (i) establish the micro-parametric variation in the development of the subjunctive CP in Romanian languages (Daco-Romanian/DR; Aromanian/AR; Megleno-Romanian/MR; Istro-Romanian/IR) and (ii) account for derivations in which the subjunctive is integrated into the formation of the periphrastic future in these languages. Briefly, the analysis points out that the subjunctive CP in Romanian languages can display a split Fin (unlike in other Balkan languages) and that the remerging of the split Fin finds itself at different stages: complete in DR, but incomplete at different degrees in AR, MR, and IR. The compatibility of the subjunctive morphology with the derivation of the periphrastic future follows from the semantic bleaching and grammaticization of the volitional ‘will’ and ‘have’ verbs, together with the Balkan Sprachbund subjunctive mood marking, which combine in a monoclausal construction via a serial verb derivation to compositionally check a Fin marked [+finite, modal].

The Xenology of the Powder Keg of Europe: the Reflection of the Peculiarities of Own — Alien Dichotomy in the Balkan Model of the World in the Xenopejorative Vocabulary of the Languages of the Balkan Sprachbund — Articulation of Issue

The article discusses the reflection of the features of the own — alien dichotomy in the Balkan model of the world in the xenologic pejorative vocabulary of the Balkan sprachbund languages: Albanian, Aromanian, Bulgarian, Modern Greek, Macedonian, Romanian and Serbo-Croatian. The author gives a brief review of the historical, cultural and geopolitical specifics of the Balkan-Carpathian region, which influenced the local peoples’ ideas about strangers; some traditional mythological beliefs of the Balkanians related to the conceptual field of otherness are also presented. Based on the analysis of the internal history of the word, an attempt is made to define the main models for constructing derogatory names for strangers in order to compare the data for various Balkan languages and, to the extent possible, build an integral image of the concept of alien in the Balkan conceptual worldview. According to the results of the study, the xenopejorative vocabulary of languages of the Balkan sprachbund shows significant similarities both in terms of form and content. Pejoratives with undifferentiated evaluativity absolutely predominate, which could account for the richness of the Balkan derivational morphology and a large number of lexical borrowings in each of the languages; pejoratives with an indication of appearance, features of language and peculiarities of behavior are also widely represented, however, the first are referentially limited, while the second and the third are universal, from which it is concluded that the prototypical Balkan alien is someone who speaks differently and behaves differently. At the same time, the most common target for pejorative vocabulary in the Balkan languages among all strangers is Roma people, which is bound both to a number of stereotyped ideas about the physical and behavioral distinctive features of this ethnic group, and to the historical isolation caused by the nomadic way of life and the closedness of the Roma community from outsiders.

Some Tendencies in the Morphosyntax of the Migrational Shtokavian Dialects in Albania (Shijak and Myzeqe) and Slavic-Albanian Language Contact

This article puts into academic circulation the materials of the little-described migrational Shtokavian dialects in the Shijak (Durrës) and Myzeqe (Fier, the villages of Rreth Libofsha, Hamil, etc.) areas collected during a linguistic expedition in July and August 2021. The Sandžak region (Novi Pazar, Tutin and Sjenica, modern Republic of Serbia), where the Shtokavian Novi Pazar-Sjenica dialects have been traditionally spoken, is considered a homeland for the descendants of the Myzeqe Muslim Slavs. The Muslim Slavs from the Shijak region (Borake and Koxhas villages) migrated to Albania from the vicinity of Mostar (modern Bosnia and Herzegovina). Their linguistic origin is from Central Herzegovinian dialects (mostly to the east of the Neretva River) between the younger Ikavian and Eastern Bosnian dialects. The generations-long contact with the Albanian language intensified as a result of increased social mobility resulting from socio-political changes in Albania in 1990. These changes led to a number of quantitative and, to a lesser extent, qualitative changes in the migrational dialects at different language levels. Since the Albanian language is a part of the Balkan sprachbund, some of the changes support balkanizing processes in the structure of the dialects. Our material shows some signs of analytisation in the morphosyntactic / syntactic system (the prevalence of prepositional phrases over bare cases, infi nitive reduction, clitic doubling, etc.), which are associated with Albanian contact infl uence. The article also describes the principles we adhered to when collecting linguistic data, as well as the topics of ethnolinguistic questionnaires. Examples of dialect recordings are included in the appendix.

Eastern and Western Romance in the Balkans – the Contrasting but Revealing Positions of the Danubian Romance Languages and Judezmo

Abstract The fate of two languages in the Balkans under conditions of language contact is discussed here. These languages, representing different branches of the Romance family, are the Ibero-Romance language Judezmo from the eastern branch and the South Danubian language Aromanian from the western branch. Both have been subject to intense contact with other languages in the Balkans but they show differential outcomes of this contact and thus differential degrees of involvement in the Balkan sprachbund. We document the similarities and differences in these outcomes, offer an explanation of their causes, and discuss the consequences they have for understanding the Balkan sprachbund.

Standardization in Balkan Slavic Diachronic Research

The present paper studies the problem of standardization of Bulgarian within the context of the emergence of the Balkan Sprachbund. Traditionally, standardization is considered to be a part of the nation-building process, understood as the codification of orthographic and other linguistic norms in authoritative documents. As they are legally binding within the national collective, the traditional view distinguishes texts from the era before standardization containing more dialectal phenomena and the standardized literature, where dialectal features are usually suppressed. This study presents the hypothesis that the codification of the Bulgarian language in the 19th century did not have such an impact on the later development of language norms. Rather, the codification merely led to changes in orthography. Other norms of the literary language gradually developed within the manuscript tradition of the so-called damaskini. This hypothesis is supported by a quantitative analysis of a sample of texts from various centuries and dialectal areas.

Language contact in the Balkan Sprachbund

Abstract This study investigates the meaning-form interface in the Balkan Sprachbund (BS), by researching five different languages: Italian, Russian, Bulgarian, Romanian, and Greek. I consider two models that account for recurring properties of the relevant languages in the Sprachbund: convergence and diglossia. If convergence is the cause behind shared features typical of the BS, that predicts that Bulgarian and Romanian would be more transparent than Russian and Italian. Under the diglossic analysis, Koine Greek is assumed to be the source of shared features, which predicts that the BS languages, Romanian, Bulgarian and Greek, would be similar. To compare the two models, I investigate twenty-four opacity features, divided into five categories: Redundancy (one-to-many), Fusion (many-to-one), Discontinuity (one meaning split in two or more forms), Form-based Form (forms with no semantic counterpart: zero-to-one), and a group of typical BS features. The results are consistent with the diglossia model: Romanian, Bulgarian and Greek manifest similar features, which points in the direction of diglossia as the underlying cause of language similarity.

Case Marking in Istro-Romanian

Case Marking in Istro-Romanian. This paper focuses on the key elements of case marking in Istro-Romanian (IR). Similar to Daco Romanian, IR has a four-case system (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative), added by the vocative (not to be dealt with specifically in this paper). As a member of the so called Balkan Sprachbund, IR nouns oppose nominative-accusative to genitive dative. Pronouns, on the other hand, show a full paradigm, with specific forms for each case (in line with all other Eastern Romance varieties). For the oblique, IR has both stressed/strong and non-stressed/clitic forms, however they have a different distribution than in standard and sub standard Daco-Romanian. Differential object marking is virtually unheard of (with minor cases in northern IR). Indirect object doubling is rare(r), with possibly different pragmatic values than in Daco Romanian.

Storytelling and retelling in Bulgarian: a contrastive perspective on the Bulgarian adaptation of MAIN

Bulgarian belongs to the South Slavic language group but exhibits specific linguistic features shared with the non-Slavic languages of the Balkan Sprachbund. In this paper, we discuss linguistic and cultural aspects relevant for the Bulgarian adaptation of the revisedEnglishversionof The Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN). We addresstypological properties of the verbal system pertaining to a differentiated aspectual system and to a paradigm of verbal forms for narratives grammaticalized as renarrative moodin Bulgarian. Further, we consider lexical, derivational and discourse cohesive means in contrast to the English markers of involvement and perspective takingin the MAIN stories.

История (не)существующего наклонения: да-конструкция в македонском и сербском языках (независимый тип)

The da-construction in Macedonian and Serbian languages combines the modal conjunctive particle da with the finite form of the verb to express a wide range of modal meanings. Being a Balkan Sprachbund novelty, the da-constructions in dependent clauses take on the functions of the infinitive in a complex predicate (in all cases in Macedonian, partly in Serbian). The da-construction in independent simple sentences has a complete conjugation paradigm with the imperative meaning and competes with the synthetic imperative forms in both languages, expressing also optative meanings. The article offers an analytical review on the status of these forms based on data gathered from Macedonian, Bulgarian (being closely related to Macedonian) and Serbian languages. There are two salient extremes in it: 1) the da-construction is not an analytical form of the verb and does not have an independent status in the verb system, instead it functions as a syntactic construction; 2) it is indeed an analytical form of the subjunctive mood, with da being a grammatical indicator of modality with the general non-factual meaning. The article concludes that the first view should be regarded as definitive in determining the status of the da- constructions in the Serbian language. To support this conclusion, we are putting forward the following arguments: a) the verb form is non-adjacent to the da particle in the form; b) there is a competition between the infinitive and the da- constructions as complex predicates as well as in some tenses (future tense: ja ću ići / ja ću da idem) and negative structures (nemoj ići / nemoj da ideš); c) The conjunctive particle da does not always have the non-factual meaning, and in most cases the following verb form can take on any tense or mood. In Macedonian the da-construction should be regarded as an analytical form of the subjunctive mood on account of the following characteristics: а) the da-construction has a syntactically fixed component order, which means that it is a semantically bound or fused chain of components which lost their individual meanings; b) the da-construction has a complete conjugation paradigm, one for da+praes and another for da+imperf, on which stems a wide range of modal meanings: imperative, optative and some others; c) the particle da has an invariant meaning of non-factuality, and it marks the verb form in this construction as non-indicative.

De deux structures méconnues des langues balkaniques (et micrasiatiques) – Essai de description sommaire

On two odd linguistic structures from the Balkans (and Asia Minor) – an attempt at a descriptive overview. This contribution is an attempt to present in broad lines two structures encountered in the Balkans and Asia Minor. Both areas are an integral constituent of the Balkan Sprachbund – although unnoticed by Sandfeld and most others (sporadic allusions are to be found only in the Romanian literature). This is probably because they are not part of learned or literary usage. The structures are:A) a speaker S, parent or relative of Y, addresses Y while using a term (a) which defines his own family position vis-a-vis Y (instead of the term referring to Y – Alb. babi ku je? “Father, where are you? – a father speaking to his;(daughter on the telephone).B) a speaker S uses a term which defines his own family position vis-a-vis Y as a subject of a first-person verb; this kind of construction cannot be rendered in English phrasing – for lack of morphological cases in English, but could be transposed into Latin as *mater te video or Russian as * мать вижутебя (here the speaker is the mother).The languages reviewed here are Albanian, Bulgarian, Greek, Macedonian, Romanian (incl. Moeso-Romanian), Romani, Serbian, Turkish. However, Aromanian, Goran, Judeo-Spanish, Kajnas (or Bobostin), Megleno-Romanian, Pomakian and Župan have not been investigated. It is neither ascertained nor excluded that these structures could be interrelatedThis contribution suggests that it is still possible to reveal widely shared, but so far overlooked, linguistic structures, even in a well explored area, such as the European continent. This leads us to observe that they are perceptible only by researchers who are native speakers of at least one of the languages at stake, and to question classical methods of investigation from the outside.

Tradition and innovation in the lexicon of nineteenth-century Balkan Slavic vernacular Gospels: terms rendering Kurios ‘Lord’ in the Kulakia Gospel

ABSTRACTThe article examines the historical origin and contextual distribution of terms for ‘Lord’ in sensu largo in the Kulakia Gospel, a nineteenth-century lectionary Gospel written with Greek script and composed in the local Slavic vernacular dialect of the Lower Vardar region of Aegean Macedonia. The paper contributes to the historical lexicology of the Balkan Sprachbund and the history of vernacular Gospel translation in Macedonian and Bulgarian.

Balkan bilingualism: Some notes on the margins

This article based on the field records of the bilingual conversations in the Albanian-Greek contact zones scrutinizes the processes of development of the Balkan Sprachbund. The author argues that bilingualism maintains comprehension and guarantees preservation of the idioms which serve as vivid markers of self-identification.

An insight into the history of Balkan Slavic languages Macedonian perspective

The aim of this article is to point to the main processes that contributed to the linguistic evolution of the South-Eastern Slavic (i.e. Macedonian and Bulgarian language dialects as well as some of the dialects of the Southern Serbia) veering off the way in which the other, more conservative, of the Slavic dialectical complexes developed. In the case of the South-Eastern Slavic, the development has been to a considerable extent driven by the so called contact changes, i.e. by the interference between languages of different typological compositions in a multilingual administrative structures that impose on the individuals not fluent in their speakers’ language the need to communicate. In consequence, this type of development uncovers the right communicative hierarchy of the transferred information and leads to regularization (grammaticalization) of the exponents of the information that is the most crucial for the successful completion of a communication act. In a verbal system, the information is connected first and foremost with the semantic domain of assessing the truth-value of the discussed facts; in a nominal system, it is the information that enables the correct identification of the discussed events and their protagonists that counts the most. These issues are presented in the article from the perspective of the evolution mechanisms characteristic of the Macedonian language area, showing how the abovementioned semantic impulses transform the grammatical (morphological and syntactical) inheritance of Proto-Slavic. What draws our attention in this relation is the analogy between the direction and the final products of the evolution of the so called Balkan sprachbund and the processes that in the late Middle Ages brought about similar results in the development of the Romance languages of the Western Europe or of English.

On the history of radical-final palatalization in Romanian conjugation: the interaction of phonetic phenomena with non-phonetic

AbstractThis paper examines the reflexes in Romanian conjugation of Proto-Romance palatalization in radical-final position, i.e., the final consonant of lexical morphemes. It offers an explanation for instances of the absence of the expected reflex, which is relatively frequent in palatalization via the palatal glide as opposed to palatalization via front vowels. It considers both phonetic and non-phonetic factors, including, in its consideration of the present tense, the possibility of Slavic influence, arguing that contact within the Balkan Sprachbund provides an explanation, otherwise unavailable, of the distribution of radical-final palatalization in that paradigm. In view of the likelihood of such influence, it concludes with a general discussion of morphological interference in situations of language contact, a type of interference – as opposed to lexical, derivational, and syntactic interference – which some have questioned.

How "many" Maximizes in the Balkan Sprachbund

No abstract.

Manner/Path Typology of Bulgarian Motion Verbs

This study examines the Bulgarian motion verb system in terms of what information is typically conveyed by motion verbs in addition to motion itself. The theoretical framework is Talmy’s (1985) typological theory, which divides languages into low-manner verb-framed languages and high-manner satellite-framed languages according to what additional information is typically conflated with motion in a motion event. Bulgarian motion verbs emphasize path of motion to a greater extent than do most other (non-Balkan) Slavic languages. Non-Balkan Slavic languages more often use verbs of motion expressing manner in combination with (satellite) prefixes indicating path, while Bulgarian focuses on verbs which express the path of motion, some of which are Bulgarian innovations. These verbs are often prefixed, but the prefixes may be fused to the root to the extent that an unprefixed form of the verb does not occur, and prefixation here is no longer productive. Typical examples include the frequent use of the path verb izljaza ‘to exit, go out’ when speakers could also use izletja ‘to fly out’ or izmâkna ‘to sneak out’. This variation in the Bulgarian motion verb system brings Bulgarian closer to the other Balkan languages (especially Greek, with its parallel motion event conflation), and is viewed here as a possible instance of Balkan Sprachbund influence.

On dative causers in Hungarian

This paper aims at investigating a special, causative use of dative case in Hungarian that has not received much attention in the literature so far. I show that Hungarian dative causers differ from dative causers in the languages of the Balkan Sprachbund, German, or Spanish in important ways. What makes Hungarian dative causers different is that they are not licensed and interpreted via syntactic structure but are lexically determined to be causative given that dative case has a special, causative lexical entry in Hungarian.