THE BALKAN LANGUAGE WORLDVIEW AND THE ROLE OF HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS IN THE STUDIES OF BALKAN LANGUAGES
Sonja NOVOTNI, Mihailo MARKOVIC
Abstract
The Balkan Linguistic Union (BLU) is a term used to emphasize the common features in grammar, syntax, terminology, and phonetics of some languages spoken in the Balkans despite the fact that they belong to different language groups of the Indo-European language family. This includes Macedonian, Greek, Bulgarian, Romanian (including Aromanian), and Albanian. To an even lesser extent, the BLU also includes Serbian, especially its southern dialects. Despite the fact that the total terminology of the mentioned languages is little represented, there are characteristic common features in their grammar, such as: movement towards analytism, postpositive article, elimination of the infinitive, syntactic and phraseological common features, etc.
The first scientist who noticed the common features (Balkanisms) in some Balkan languages from different language groups was the Slovenian Jernej Kopitar in 1829, but it was not until the first decades of the 20th century that the general idea for their in-depth research was formed. An essential feature that characterizes the developmental processes in modern literary languages, including Macedonian, is the dynamics in its relationship to stability. The manifestation of the two tendencies, stability and dynamics, is an expression of the peculiarities that exist in the language, conditioned in different ways by intralinguistic and extralinguistic factors.
While dynamics are primarily associated with ongoing changes in social life, realized by the speakers of the language, stability is maintained through systemic relationships and connections built in the language. The subject of our work in this paper is the Balkan linguistic worldview in the study of the Balkan linguistic union as a significant natural linguistic phenomenon, but also the role of historical linguistics in Balkan studies
Pages: 132 - 139