Volume 42, Issue 3

The development of Modern Rumanian in the nineteenth century was connected with different efforts for language reforms. In these activities the linguistic consciousness played a significant part. The principal characteristics of this linguistic consciousness were the orientations towards the Latin regarded as the ‘mother’ of the Rumanian and towards the Romance languages, specially the French and the Italian, considered as modern models of the same linguistic stock. Concerning the necessary enrichment of the lexical resources of Rumanian this linguistic consciousness proved to be a pivot. It. was mainly borne by the intelligentsia who contributed also decisively to modern languages or terminologies for specific purposes. Taking into consideration the mutual exchange and interaction between specific vocabulary and general vocabulary it results clearly from the historical facts that these social strata guided by a distinctly marked linguistic consciousness had a strong influence upon the development of the Modern Rumanian.

This short description of the developping consciousness for the necessity of creating solid foundations for balkanlinguistics allows only a rather sketchy outline of the theoretical positions in this field from Kopitar up to our days. The beginnings are marked by the collection of mainly empirical materials without any corresponding explicit theoretical base for it. Trubetzkoy made with his definition of the Sprachbund an important step forward to consolidate the foundations of our discipline. Meanwhile the theoretical base has been enlarged by the contributions of other disciplines, e.g. by the models of convergence, of social networks etc. Borrowing them will not signify the end of balkanlinguistics, which on the contrary shows an openness for new questions.

The present paper deals with a particular type of sentence structure without subject, which from the semantic point of view represents a special kind of the so-called existential sentences. The corresponding syntactic constructions consist of the immediate constituents predicate and direct object; optionally they can be completed with a local adverbial and/or a temporal adverbial. The author points out several common characteristics of Balkan languages, appearing in concrete representations of this type. Among these the most striking conformity is the lexical realization of the predicate with equivalents to the verb ‘to have’, only impersonally used in the given syntactic context. This parallel is evident in seven Balkanic languages reap, dialects, representatives of four branches of the Indo-european language family: Albanian; Modern Greek; Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbo-Croatian ; Aromanian, Meglenitian. A comparison with older stages of the contemporary Balkan languages shows, that the way of construction with ‘to have’-equivalents seems to bo an innovation. The author regards this kind of expression as an appearance of convergence, resulting from processes of interference between the Balkan languages, and considers it as Balkanism. The same way of expression occurs also in languages outside the Balkan, for example in other Slavic and Romanic ones, but the relevant areas mostly are formed from languages with genealogic relationship, whereas the relatively closed area at the Balkan, shown with regard to the investigated phenomenon, above all is founded upon geographic neighbourhood.

The present work represents a historical-typological investigation of the constructional type ime motër/cecmpa Mu/soră-mea, named “the kinship type”, especially including the relations of the type to the superior type motra ime/Moama cccmpa/sora mea: The phonetical, morphosyntactial, lexical and sentential characteristic features of this subtype in the Balkan languages Albanian, Bulgarian, and Rumanian together with Italian are discussed. The Albanian construction e motra is explicated as a typological parallel to a certain type of ezafe construction in Iranian, and a theory is advanced on the preposing of the Albanian copulative article (which is interpreted us a marker of relativisation on par with the ezafe article) under an ellipsis of presupposition.

Résumé Der Beitrag bringt eine vergleichende Darstellung über den Gebrauch des Substantivs mit bestimmtem Artikel oder ohne Artikel nach Akkusativpräpositionen im Rumänischen und Albanischen. In Anbetracht der das Rumänische betreffenden Forschungsergebnisse wird auch für das Albanische eine mögliche Systematisierung im Gebrauch der Substantivformen mit oder ohne Artikel nach vorangehender Präposition vorgeschlagen. Unter Rücksichtnahme auf den weiteren Kontext der präpositionalen Wortgruppe wird auf folgende Elemente eingegangen : die syntaktische Funktion des präpositionalen Syntagmas, der allgemeine oder absolute Wert des Substantivs, der Sinn des durch das präpositionale Syntagma bestimmten Elements.

Romani (Gypsy) differs from other languages in that it has a very restricted vocabulary of inherited words (about 1000 items) and well integrated loans. Therefore, the speakers of Romani are constantly forced to borrow from other languages lexical material to such an extent that we may say, Romani is a lexically deficient language which functions as a means of communication only in combination with other languages. Interestingly, there is a very strong tendency to keep the inherited and the borrowed vocabulary apart by applying to them different forms of inflection, word formation etc. Although many foreign words have been adopted centuries ago they nevertheless continue to follow their own grammatical patterns. This second peculiarity of Romani is hardly found in any other language. Beyond that interference has been and is considerably strong in the sphere of grammatical categories and of syntactic rules. Since various dialects of Romani have been exposed to the influence of rather different languages Romani constitutes an excellent field for the study of all kinds of interference. It can be shown that many'linguistic categories are borrowed by imitating foreign structures in a rather indirect way-a possibility that has been questioned in recent times.

Резюме Дакорумыпекан языковая территория на двух своих полюсах, на северном и южном, сталкивается со славянскими языками. Румынско-болгарский языковой контакт на юге был особенно сильным. Древность и прочность славянских заимствований на отой терри­тории припили к тому, что заимствованные славянские слова уже как румынизмм прони­кали в северно-славянские языки и диалекты, главным образом посредством украинского языка. Этим путем вошли они и в польские диалекты карнатского района. ʙ статье анализируются слова hyrtyp, kila/kiela, klaka, lanc/lаnс, maslina, pomana, saraku, stупа, droźdźe, которые посредством румынского языка попали н региональный польский язык на Буконине и Восточных Карпатах ʙ 18-20 веках.

Roger Lass (1980) holds that at present there are no intellectually satisfying concepts for explaining linguistic change. In this article Lass’ hypothesis and his arguments are discussed and a type of explanation for language change is outlined t hat meets the requirements for a satisfying theory and that is not invalidated by Lass’ arguments against explanations of linguistic change: the ‘invisible hand’ model. As an example the disappearance of German englisch in the sense of angelic is analysed in terms of the invisible hand model and it. is shown (i) that this is an explanation in the strict sense of “explanation”, (ii) that language change is not predictable in a strict sense, and (iii) that nevertheless this is no contradiction to Lass’ correct statement that explanation implies prediction.