I have never claimed that, what I claimed is that Albanian has a long vernacular history, and bears better than any other European language the features of a vernacular primordial mother language.
What evidence do you have for that? I'm still under the impression that this is your forgone conclusion.
They are the languages of the same theocrats, used for liturgical, writing and administrative purposes on the first place. They are scholastized written languages developed and standartized ex-cathedra but using the lexicon from the local vernacular dialects and such they are taken/confused for the language of the people.
You keep using the word "theocrats". Why do you ignore that the Greek and Latin alphabets were in used for many centuries before the emergence of Christianity? Why do you ignore that neither the Roman Republic, nor the Hellenistic successor states to Alexander's empire, nor the city states of the archaic period were "theocracies". Likewise, what evidence do you have that the languages are "scholasticized" or "developed ex-cathedra" as you claim?
Comparative method for example:
h1eg’hs<<-----jashtë--(out)
h2eh1treh4<<-----vatër----(hearth)
brings you nowhere. It doesn't tell you nothing about the ethymology of the word, and instead of suggesting simpler structure for the mother primitive roots, it suggest a very complex ones, like in this ex:
kagh<-----ke----(have)
or
h3ok’w<----sy
How does the modern meaning in Albanian tell you more about it? See, you're making a foregone conclusion again if you assume that modern Albanian is somehow more representative and more "valuable" in terms of giving us more information about the original condition than other languages.
It's very clear that meanings of words change, and sometimes it's hard to discern the original meaning of the word, but to me it makes more sense to look at various languages across the board and try to discern what the various reflexes have in common rather than arbitrarily pick one modern language and attempt to "dismantle" words in other languages that are clearly no compound words. And I think it should give you a pause to realize that your method is utterly non-applicable for non-Indo-European languages (it really works only on Indo-European languages, and it works only on the premise that Albanian represents the original condition).
when our expectation are that for word of such a simple structure c-v type to have originated from a simpler or equal one.
Continues...
See, this is where you make a foregone conclusion: why do you have the premise that the ancestral language must have been more simple? Why is it our expectation that the ancestral language
must have had a more simple structure? I can offhand think of four living languages (all in the Caucasus) that have a phonology that is similarly complex or greater than standard reconstructed Proto-Indo-European, including Abkhaz, Chechen, Georgian and most notably Ubykh. If you want other parts of the world, I'd suggest Burushaski, or perhaps the Salish languages. Just because Albanian is relatively simple compared to other Indo-European languages doesn't automatically mean it's more representative of the original condition. In fact, there's a lot of reasons to assume that it isn't:
- Latvian and Lithuanian have both a considerably more complex grammar than Albanian (bear in mind that Albanian lacks an instrumental and locative case) and they are both languages that are attested only relatively late. In fact, both have the earliest literature
later than Albanian.
- Avestan and Sanskrit, the literature languages of ancient Persia and India have both a similar grammar (both have eight grammatical cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, ablative, vocative, locative) to the Baltic languages mentioned above.
- Likewise, for example, Russian has six cases (it's lacking the vocative and ablative).
- I might also mention Celtiberian and Gaulish, which (although rather fragmentarily attested) are also two ancient languages with a grammar more complex than Albanian: Gaulish had seven cases (lacking an ablative), Celtiberian had at least six (it may have lacked an instrumental and a vocative).
- In contrast, English is evidently a very simplified languages, both compared against other Germanic languages (German has four cases - nominative, dative, accusative, genitive while English has effectively made completely away with cases except what you might consider a vestigial genitive) and against other Indo-European languages (for comparison, German lacks ablative, instrumental, vocative and locative). We also have the attestation of the Anglo-Saxon language which shows us that English at a point had a considerably more complex morphology than today.
So, no matter how we turn it, we have both ancient and modern languages that are clearly more complex morphology than Albanian. By the authority of what evidence do you argue then that Albanian is more representative of the original condition?
