Paralele între limbile balcanoromanice şi balcanoslave în flexiunea substantivului
Parallels between Balkan Romance and Balkan Slavic Languages in Noun Inflection

Summary/Abstract: This paper analyses the similarities between the Balkan Romance and Balkan Slavic noun declension. The diversity of the contemporary Balkan Romance and Balkan Slavic subsystems seems to reflect different stages of the evolution of an initial system whose structure was common to Balkan Romance and Balkan Slavic. This system contained two synthetic forms: the direct case (nominative accusative, initially two distinct cases in Balkan Slavic) and the indirect one (genitive dative). In contrast to Latin and Old Slavic, two sets of forms were distinguished: indefinite (with a prefixed article or no article) and definite (with a suffixed article). Romanian, Aromanian, Northern Istroromanian and isolated Bulgarian and Macedonian dialects preserved this initial system, while standard Bulgarian and Macedonian, Meglenoromanian, Southern Istroromanian and colloquial Romanian tend to simplify it and to create new analytic forms, especially for the dative case (with the preposition на in Balkan Slavic and la in Balkan Romance). The old system, related to the Albanian one, was probably adopted by Balkan Romance from the Paleo Balkan substratum and transferred to Balkan Slavic. The new analytic tendencies, however, are likely to be of Greek origin, both in Balkan Romance and in Balkan Slavic (cf Greek dative with the preposition σε that corresponds semantically to the Slavic на and the Romance la). Bulgarian or Macedonian could have served, alternatively, as a link between Greek to Meglenoromanian.

• Details
• Contents