4.2.1.1 Non-Greek Paleo-Balkan Vocabulary

There is a layer of vocabulary in various Balkan languages that is identifiable as very old but not Greek (the oldest well-attested language in the Balkans). Under this rubric, there are two types of words that deserve mention: (1) those shared by Albanian, Romanian, and other Balkan languages and (2) those shared only by Albanian and Romanian. We refer to them here as “non-Greek Paleo-Balkan” in an attempt to characterize them as neutrally as possible. They are ancient, but they cannot be dated. Some of them are definitely Indo-European, and some are undoubtedly from the language that is ancestral to Albanian (cf. Hamp 2007: 373–395), but not all can be definitively assigned to any specific ancient non-Greek Balkan language. Some words may be pre-Indo-European. These problems have not prevented speculations regarding specific ancient languages, but we eschew such issues, as they do not bear directly on our purposes here. These words are thus “Paleo-Balkan” and “non-Greek.” Taking them to be old has led them to be assigned to a so-called Balkan substratum, the existence of which is a reasonable assumption, but still it is a concept for which adequate linguistic details are lacking, other than it probably having an Indo-European component itself (see §1.2.1 for related discussion).

Much of the pan-Balkan old layer consists of words that are associated with pastoral life, animal husbandry, and various domestic items and activities (see also §1.2.3.1). The number of such words is around twenty, depending on the judgment of various linguists. (See Neroznak 1978, especially pp. 186–216, and sources therein; for the ancient Balkan languages, Katičić 1976 remains authoritative, though see also Woodard 2004; Hamp 2007 is also an important source. See also Sobolev 2003: 332–349 and Borescu 2018.) We note just an illustrative sampling of forms from various languages, leading with Albanian for purely alphabetical reasons:

1. (4.2) Alb balgë/bajgë/bagël ‘animal manure,’ BCMS balaga/balega ‘excrement,’ BRο baligă/balegă ‘droppings’, Mac (dial) balega ‘manure’

   Alb drugë, Aro drugă, Grk ντρούγα/δρούγα, BSl (dialectal) drug, BCMS druga ‘wooden bobbin, distaff’

   Alb shtrungë, Aro strungã, Rmn strungă, Mac straga, Blg străga/stărga ‘enclosure or narrow passage for milking sheep or goats, separating lambs/kids, etc.’; also Mac and WBlg strunga ‘idem’ (from Aro), Grk (Epirus and Sarakatsan) στρούγγα ‘dairy’(see Hamp 1977b)

   Alb vatër (def vatra, Geg votër/votra) ‘hearth, fireplace,’ BRο vatră ‘hearth, etc.,’ BSl (dialectal, esp. Mac and WBlg) vatra ‘hearth,’ BCMS vatra ‘fire,’ Grk (Sarakatsan) βάτρα ‘fire, flame, hearth’ (see Hamp 1976, 1981)

As with the next group, there is considerable controversy regarding the precise sources for these words, both within and outside the Balkans. Thus, for example, vatra occurs as ‘fire’ in Ukrainian, ‘hearth, fire, dying ashes’ in Polish (orthographic watra) and Czech (East Moravia), ‘camp fire’ in Slovak (also southern Poland and part of Czech), and ‘poker’ in Slovene (see Udler 2000 and Hamp 2007: 373–382, who argues that vatra derives from the ancestor of Albanian and spread via dialect chains). Regardless of the precise age and provenance of these loans, however, there is not much more to say about them here other than that they do point to ancient language contact.

The other group of words is thematically broader (although still arguably limited to a notional concept of basic vocabulary) but restricted to just Albanian and Balkan Romance,Footnote ¹⁵ and thus, as noted briefly in §1.2.1.4, they are taken to be old shared vocabulary that link the ancestor of Albanian, on the one hand, and the language whose speakers shifted to the Latin that became Balkan Romance, on the other. There are perhaps approximately seventy such words, although there is some disagreement concerning how many of these words belong here (see Polák 1958; Kalužskaja 1977; Ismajli 2015: 271–467, and sources cited therein). Some belong to pastoral vocabulary, thus overlapping semantically with the first group, but their restriction to these two languages is taken to be significant. Several of these have clear Indo-European sources, e.g., Alb sorrë – Rmn cioară ‘blackbird’ (from PIE *kwērsnā), and some IE words seem not to be directly inherited from an Italic genealogical predecessor.Footnote ¹⁶ For instance, Rmn druete ‘woods’ and Alb dru ‘wood’ clearly derive from the PIE *deru- ‘wood’ (most likely in a zero-grade form *dru-), seen in Eng tree, AGrk δρῦς ‘tree’ and δόρυ ‘spear’, etc., but forms of this word are absent from Latin or any other ancient Italic language, so that the appearance of a derivative of this PIE stem in Balkan Romance is unlikely to be the result of a direct inheritance from Latin; hence, it is judged as a substrate word. A sampling of others is given in (4.3):

1. (4.3)

   Romanian	Albanian
   bucurie ‘joy’	bukuri ‘beauty’
   buză ‘lip’	buzë ‘lip’
   ceafă ‘neck’	qafë ‘neck’
   ciump ‘end, snag’	thumb ‘tack, stinger’
   coacăză ‘currant’	kokë(z[ë]) ‘(little) head [blackhead, a poultry disease]’
   mal ‘riverbank’	mal ‘mountain’
   moş ‘old (man)’	moshë ‘age’
   mugur ‘bud’	mugull ‘bud’
   țap ‘billy goat’	c[j]ap ‘ billy goat’

   Footnote ¹⁷

As noted in §1.2.1.4, the exact nature of the prehistoric link that these indicate between the languages is extremely controversial;Footnote ¹⁸ see also §6.1.2.2.1.3 (Hamp 1982) and §7.9.2 for discussion of some possible morphosyntactic and syntactic matchings between Albanian and Romanian that might be old in the same way as these lexical matchings.

4.2.1.2 Latinity (The Roman Era)

Romans settled the Balkans definitively in the second century BCE with the conquest of the Illyrians and the Macedonian kingdom. In subsequent years, they spread their influence further in the general region. As noted in §1.2.3.3, there is an important historio-geographic construct in the Balkans that has a key linguistic correlate that helps to define aspects of the Roman era. This is the Jireček line (or Jireček-Skok line), running west-east from the Adriatic to the Black Sea across modern central Albania, northern Macedonia, and central Bulgaria then north along the coast to Dobrudja, which demarcates the respective extent of Roman and of Greek influence by reference to the predominant language of inscriptions: north of the line it is mostly Latin and south of the line mostly Greek, with an area of bilingualism between Jireček’s and Skok’s demarcations (see §1.2.3.3). This is not to say that Latin was unknown in the southern Balkans, or that Greek was unknown in the more northerly regions, but it gives an idea of the administrative reach of Latin in the Balkans in the early Christian period.

Not surprisingly, there is a large Latin lexical presence in the entire Balkans. To get an idea of the size of this presence, consider these numbers compiled by Mihăescu 1978: 30ff. in his discussion of words from Latin in the Balkan languages. He notes, for instance, that there are some 3,000 terms of Latin origin in Byzantine (Greek) literature, of which 207 survive into the modern language. When viewed by semantic category, these numbers break down as in Table 4.2.

These items are most concerned with dimensions of public life under the control of Roman governance. The penetration of these words into Balkan languages took place over a period of almost a millennium, and it was particularly intense in the fourth through sixth centuries CE. Many of these words are found as well in Albanian, as loanwords, and in Balkan Romance, as inherited items or via secondary spread, and since the influence lasted into the time of the entry of the Slavs into the area, Latin words are found as well in Balkan Slavic.Footnote ¹⁹

A few illustrative examples (4.4) provide instances of different types of words of Latin origin in the Balkans. They are presented here merely as representative; readers are referred to sources such as Mihăescu 1978: 30ff., Skok 1928, and Sobolev 2003: 270–289 for more examples:Footnote ²⁰

1. (4.4)

   Lat acetum ‘vinegar’: BSl ocet (OCS ocьtъ), Alb uthull (cf. oftull in Pulevski 1875: 93) Rmn oțet (< BSl)

   Lat būbalus (VLat *būvalu) ‘water buffalo’: BSl bivol ‘idem᾽ from BSl into Rom bivol (but Aro buval) cf. Grk βούβαλος, βούβαλις, BER I: s.v.)

   Lat camisia ‘shirt’: MedGrk καμίσι, ModGrk πουκάμισο (with που- from υπο- ‘under’) ‘shirt,’ Alb këmishë ‘shirt,’ Rmn cămaşă ‘shirt’

   VLat coctorium ‘oven’: Rmn cuptor ‘oven, furnace, kiln,’ Blg kuptor (from Rmn), Alb koftor ‘pot-bellied heating stove’

   Lat centum ‘100’: Alb qind ‘100’

   Lat fossatum ‘military trench’: MedGrk φουσάτο ‘army,’ Alb fshat ‘village’ (originally‘fortified settlement’), Rmn sat ‘village’ (ditto)

   Lat furca ‘fork’: Rmn furcă ‘pitchfork,’ BSl furka ‘spindle,’ Alb furkë ‘pitchfork, spindle,’ MedGrk φούρκα ‘gallows’

   VLat *furnu ‘oven’: Med/ModGrk φούρνος, Aro furnu, BSl furna, Alb furrë, Trk furun

   Lat hospitium: Med/ModGrk σπίτι ‘house,’ StAlb shtëpi (Geg shpi) ‘house’

   Lat imperator: Alb mbret ‘king’

   Lat lucta ‘struggle, fight,’ Alb luftë ‘war,’ Rmn luptă ‘war’

   Lat paganus ‘peasant (later ‘pagan’)’: OCS poganin ‘pagan, evildoer’ (Mac paganin ‘pagan’ Blg pogan ‘unclean’), Alb pëgërë ‘unclean, dirty,’ pagan ‘pagan,’ Rmn păgîn ‘pagan,’ Aro pîngîn ‘pagan’ (see Duridanov 1999: s.v. for details)

   Lat pomum ‘apple’: Alb pemë ‘tree,’ Rmn pom ‘tree’

   Lat rosalija ‘early summer festival when graves were decorated with roses’: OCSrusalija ‘Pentecost’

   Lat sagitta ‘arrow’: MedGrk σαΐτα ‘dart,’ Alb shëgjetë ‘arrow,’ Rmn săgeată ‘arrow’

And, as discussed in greater detail below in §4.3.1.8, late Latin is the ultimate source of two terms that are quite outside of these lexical domains, in an entirely different semantic sphere, namely that of the family: the wide-ranging cluster of related forms exemplified by ModGrk νονός ‘godfather,’ Mac nunka ‘godmother,’ BSl kum ‘godfather, best man etc.,’ Alb kumbarë ‘godfather,’ ModGrk κουμπάρος ‘best man.’

4.2.1.3 Greek in the Balkans

Greek words that must be of ancient provenance are to be found in some of the Balkan languages. In particular, Albanian has, for instance, drapër ‘sickle’ (Geg drapën) from Ancient Greek δρέπανον, lakër ‘cabbage’ (Geg lakën) from λάχανον, mokërë ‘millstone’ (Geg mokënë) from (Doric) μᾱχανᾱ́, and tarogzë ‘helmet’ from θωρᾱ́κιον ‘breastplate, armor,’ where, e.g., the t- of this last form points to its great antiquity, from at least before the Hellenistic Greek shift of ancient < θ > from [t^h] to [θ] (see Horrocks 2010: 170–171; Jokl 1984). And there are later loans that are still somewhat old, such as Albanian fnazë ‘light fall of snow’ (Newmark 1998: 231) from νιφάδιον ‘snowflake,’ where a post-Classical date is suggested by the f- for ancient < φ >.

There are numerous loans from Greek into Old Church Slavonic that fall into many of the same classes as Latin loans discussed in §4.2.1.2; Vasmer 1907 shows that the categories of Greek loans include names of plants, animals, minerals, humans, body parts, nature, and home-related items, and that they fall into three distinct chronological phases: (1) early borrowings into Common Slavic, e.g., BSl koliba, ‘hut, cabin’ (whence Rmn colibă, Trk koliba, Alb kolibë, cf. Aro cãlivã), Grk καλύβα, AGrk καλύβη (Vasmer 1907: 243; BER II: s.v.), where the realization of AGrk /a/ as CoSl /o/ in the first syllable points to a period before the reinterpretation of quantity as quality; (2) borrowings before the conversion of the South Slavs to Christianity, e.g., OCS kǫponi, Blg kăponi, Mac kapan ‘scales [for weight]’ from MedGrk καμπάνα (Vasmer 1907: 251; SSl kambana ‘bell’ is a later loan from the same source); and (3) those from the Christian era (see items in (4.5)). The emergence of Eastern Orthodox Christianity in the first millennium CE, with Greek as its liturgical language, together with the Christianization of the South Slavs in the ninth century and the subsequent spread of Orthodox Christianity in the linguistic Balkans, was in many ways a watershed period for the influence of Greek, as it led to the introduction of Greek ecclesiastical terms into various languages of the region, as seen in (4.5) (cf. Sandfeld 1930: 20–21; Sobolev 2003: 204–269, as well as Budziszewska 1969 on Greek loans in Bulgarian):Footnote ²¹

1. (4.5)

   Grk ἁγίασμα ‘sanctification’: ChSl agiazma, Blg agiazma/ajazma, Mac ajazma ‘holy water’ Alb ajazmë, Rmn aghiazmă, Aro (a)yeasmó ‘holy water’

   Grk ἀναφορά ‘blessed bread’: OCS (a)nafora, BSl nafora ‘holy or toasted bread’ Alb naforë, BRo (a)naforă

   Grk ἀνάθεμα ‘curse, excommunication’: BSl anatema (also Mac natema go ‘damn him,’ etc.), BRo anatemă, Alb anatemëFootnote 22

   Grk εἰκόνα ‘icon’: OCS ikona, BSl ikona, Alb ikonë, BRo icoană

   Grk καλόγηρος ‘monk’: OCS kalogerъ, Blg kaluger, Alb kallogjër, BRo călugăr

   Grk ἡγούμενος ‘abbot’: OCS igumenъ, Blg igumen, Mac egumen, Alb (i)gumen, BRo egumen (igumen)

There are also some borrowings from Greek of a more grammatical, nature, such as: Alb anamesa, Aro anamasa ‘in the middle’ from Grk ἀνάμεσα, Aro anda ‘when’ from Grk ὄντα, Alb andis ‘instead of’ from Grk ἀντίς, BSl oti ‘that’ from Grk ὅτι; see §§4.3.3.2, 4.3.3.4 for more details on such loans. Moreover, although many loans from Greek into Balkan Romance, especially Romanian, passed through Slavic (see §4.2.1.4), there are some that are found in all of Balkan Romance without occurring in Slavic, suggesting an early point of entry into Vulgar Latin from Greek, most likely soon after Latin entered the Balkans; Sandfeld 1930: 30 notes, for instance, Rmn proaspăt, Megl proaspăt, Aro proaspit ‘fresh,’ from Grk πρόσφατος ‘recent’ (cf. also Nevaci 2015). Tzitzilis 2001b discusses loans from Medieval Greek into Romani, e.g., kurko ‘Sunday’ from MedGrk κυρικόν (ἧμαρ) ‘idem.’

4.2.1.4 Slavic

As Slavic speakers entered the Balkans in the sixth to seventh centuries, they began to exert lexical influence in the region (see Sobolev 2003: 324–331 for some examples). Svane 1992 and Ylli 1997–2000 documented extensively, for instance, the hundreds of Slavic loanwords of various types and in various domains to be found in Albanian, including farming terms (e.g., plug ‘plough,’ lopatë ‘shovel,’ oborr ‘yard’), foods (e.g., kastravec ‘cucumber’), clothing items (e.g., opingë ‘sandal’), flora and fauna (e.g., sokol ‘falcon,’ ljubiçice ‘violet’), items pertaining to social order (e.g., rob ‘slave’), and other cultural loans (e.g., pusullë ‘note’). Based on the evidence of sound changes in the respective languages that the loans show, or fail to show, it appears that while some seem to be relatively early (c.700–1000CE), e.g., porosit ‘order; request’ (cf. Common Slavic *porõčiti ‘idem; entrust’) and some rather late (post-1500CE), e.g., banak ‘counter’ (cf. Srb banak (stem: bank-) ‘shelf,’ most seem to have entered between 1000 and 1500.Footnote ²³

With regard to Greek, apart from Slavic place names (Weigand 1928; Vasmer 1941), only a relatively small number of Slavic loanwords can be identified that are in general use in the standard language or are generally recognizable today (Andriotis 1983: s.vv.; Babiniotis 1998, LKN), e.g., ρούχα ‘clothes’ (Slv ruho ‘rag’), ντόμπρος ‘honorable; noble’ (Slv dobro ‘good, well’), τσαντίλα ‘sack for straining cheese’ (Slv cedilo ‘strainer’), and τσάσκα ‘cup’ (Slv čaška). See, however Filipova-Bajrova 1970 for a number of other examples. Still others occur that are regionally more restricted in their distribution; Weigand 1928: 33 mentions τσέλιγκας ‘shepherd,’ found in the Heptanesia and Acarnania, from Slv čelnik ‘leader of a clan; lead shepherd,’ and Budziszewska 1991 has identified several hundred words of Slavic origin that are reported for various locales, mostly, but not exclusively, in northern parts of Greece, e.g., nouns like ζακόν ‘custom’ (Flórina, Kastoria, Grevena, etc.), from BSl zakon, and numerous words for flora and fauna, e.g., κλένος ᾽maple,’ from BSl klen, γουστέρα ‘large lizard’ (Larissa, Lamia), from BSl gušter(a), and κναβ (= κουνάβι, with northern high vowel loss) ‘marten’ (Thessaly, Thrace, etc.) from BSl kuna.

In the case of Balkan Romance, Slavic had a tremendous direct influence and also served as a conduit for many Greek words entering Romanian, especially those associated with Eastern Orthodoxy. Among the nonreligious terms that passed from Greek to Slavic to Romanian are ieftin ‘cheap’ (ChSl jevtin, Blg evtin [eftin], MedGrk εὐθηνός (ModGrk φθηνός), and a mirosi ‘smell’ (ChSl mirosati, Grk μυρόω, with aorist stem μυρωσ-).Footnote ²⁴ Religious terms include those cited in §4.2.1.3, such as Rmn icoană ‘icon’ (cf. Grk εἰκόνα, OCS ikona, Blg ikona), or Rmn călugăr ‘monk’ (Grk καλόγηρος, ChSl kalogerъ, Blg kaluger). Church Slavonic was the language of literacy in Romania into the modern period, and the process of its being replaced by Romanian begins in documents of the sixteenth century. It took until 1863, however, for the Romanian Orthodox Church to officially change the liturgical language; this was around the same time that the Latin alphabet officially replaced Cyrillic, although the use of Cyrillic continued in Romania until the 1920s. Thus lexical influence from Slavic in the domain of religious terminology continued for longer than in other domains.

4.2.1.5 Romance and the Crusades

The later Middle Ages, covering roughly the period from 1100–1453 in some reckonings (e.g., that of Browning 1983: 69ff.) and also beyond that into the early modern era, saw the Balkans and the languages of the Balkans come into contact with Western Europeans of the day as a result of the Crusades and subsequent events. The Fourth Crusade especially had linguistic consequences, as Constantinople was captured and sacked in 1204, and what is commonly referred to as a Latin Empire was in parts of former Byzantium. Writing about Greek, Browning 1983: 70–71 notes that “the effects of the Latin conquest were complex [as] Latin loanwords flooded into the language.” He considers it important to clarify that “in this context ‘Latin’ refers not to the classical language of Rome, but to the Romance vernaculars spoken in the Mediterranean area.” Thus “Latin” influence on the Balkan lexicon at this stage is actually Romance influence, though due to the somewhat diglossic relationship between medieval Latin and vernacular Romance in this era, the written language continued to exert some influence on the spoken. As the Romance varieties became more clearly distinct languages, it is possible to speak of influence from particular languages as one moves into early modern times, i.e., the sixteenth century and beyond, although specific Romance dialects can sometimes be identified as sources during earlier periods.

The most direct Romance influence was on those parts of the Balkans that came under the dominion of various Romance rulers. Thus, in addition to Western European control of Constantinople, by the end of the thirteenth century the Franks controlled much of the Peloponnesos, and other parts of Greece, including strategic harbors on the Peloponnesos, and the islands of Euboea, Crete, and some of the Cyclades came under the dominion of Italian states, primarily Venice but also in some instances Genoa.Footnote ²⁵ There was also Venetian and central Italian control and influence along the coast of the Adriatic Sea and the Ionian Sea, thus affecting Albanian, and, even though it is a language area generally outside of the purview of this book, also along the Dalmatian coast, affecting BCMS. Some lexical influence on other languages can be seen, but it is indirect, mediated via Greek, Albanian, or BCMS. Moreover, a considerable amount of maritime and nautical terminology spread from Italian and Venetian all over the Mediterranean, and thus throughout the Balkan languages, including Turkish.

Among such “Romance Latinisms” are (Middle) Greek ἐξόμπλιον ‘example’ (cf. Frn exemple), μισἰρ ‘sir’ (cf. Frn monsieur), τσάμπρα ‘room’ (cf. Frn chambre), ῥόη ῥόι ‘king’ (cf. Frn roi), among many others.Footnote ²⁶ Venetian influence, distinguishable by characteristic lexis and phonology, is seen in Grk βελούδο ‘velvet’ (Vtn veludo, vs. Itl velluto), τζογος ‘gambling, card-playing’ (Vtn zogo, vs. Itl giuoco), αϊδάρω ‘help’ (Vtn aidar, vs. Itl aiutare), and κουζίνα ‘kitchen’ (Vtn cusina, vs. Itl cucina). For Albanian, one can note rrugë ‘road’ (Itl/Vtn ruga), kanal ‘canal’ (Vtn canal), kasellë ‘storage chest’ (Itl cassella), and frat ‘brother in a monastic order, friar’ (Itl frate), inter alia. Some of the Albanian forms are now nonstandard, and Italian forms especially entered Geg, since the historically Catholic population there was in direct contact with Italian Catholics, and northern Geg coastal regions were ruled by Venice. In some instances, phonological differences pointing to differential time of borrowing – and thus differential language source – can be observed; for example, beside the early Albanian borrowing lter ‘altar’ (Newmark 1998: 466) from (Late) Latin altare, there is also altar ‘altar’ from Itl altare.

Examples of the indirect influence, showing spread of Latinate/Romance loans from one of the directly affected languages into another language, also occur. For instance, Blg pogáča, Mac pógača ‘round white loaf’ are from BCMS pògača/pogȁča, but there are also Rmn pogáce (dialectal bogáce), Aro pugace, puγace, Alb pogaçë (dialectal pugaçë) ‘pogacha,’ MedGrk μπογάτσα/μπουγάτσα (late MedGrk πογάτσα) ‘a kind of dairy pie,’ Trk poğaça, dialectal boğaça ‘small round roll,’ as well as Hung pogacsa and dialectal Grm Pogatsche, all ultimately from OItl focācea = focaccia ‘cake’ (Lat focacius ‘[bread cooked in the] fire/hearth’); see BER V: 421–422 for discussion of various possible routes. It is generally accepted that BCMS is the source for BSl, which in turn is suggested for Aro and Alb; the Romanian could be from BCMS or Bulgarian or even Hungarian, whereas the Greek is thought to be from Turkish. Similarly, Aro γăzetă ‘change in coins’ and Megl gazetă ‘counterfeit coins’ derive ultimately from Venetian gaz(z)eta ‘two-cent coin,’ via Grk γαζετα ‘change’ (Banfi 1985: 99; Papahagi 1974: 617) and/or BCMS gazeta ‘two-cent Venetian coin.’

In some instances, Romance, especially Venetian, lexical items entered the Balkans via Turkish, e.g., BSl mandža ‘a type of main course made with a sauce of peppers, tomatoes, and/or potatoes’ < Trk manca ‘food, usually for pets’ < Vtn prisoner’s slang mangia ‘mucus’ < NItl mangia ‘fodder’ (BER III: 645).

As for Italianate/Venetian nautical vocabulary, among the general terms found in the Balkans are Alb barkë, Sln, BCMS (esp. Dalmatia), Blg, Trk barka, Grk βάρκα, Blg varka ‘boat, dinghy,’ from Vtn/Itl barca (see Skok 1971: 113); Alb rem ‘oar,’ from Vtn/Itl remo; and Alb shërok, Grk σιρόκος ‘southeast wind,’ from Vtn sirocco. More on this terminology, with additional examples, is to be found in §4.4.3, discussed from the point of view of occupational jargon.

4.2.1.6 Turkisms and Islam

The role of Turkish in shaping the Balkan lexicon was huge. There are dictionaries of Turkisms in BSCM and Bulgarian that contain 6,878 and 7,427 headwords, respectively (Šklajić 1966; Grannes et al. 2002).Footnote ²⁷ While dictionaries of Turkisms for the other Balkan languages (see §4.2.1) are not as voluminous, in some cases owing, perhaps, to the lesser abundance of literary sources or limitations on the sources considered, they nonetheless attest to a profound lexical impact. In fact, it was the presence of this Turkish loan vocabulary that was considered one of the most striking features of the Balkan languages – a key component in Trubetzkoy’s 1930 Kulturwörter. In the various subsections of §4.3 and §4.4, this influence is treated in more detail, focusing on the ERIC domains and issues of style and register, respectively. Here, a brief overview of some of the non-ERIC vocabulary is both useful and revealing.Footnote ²⁸

All those words that entered the various Balkan languages via Turkish can be considered as Turkisms. Thus, for example, although Turkish efendi ‘sir’ (archaic) is itself from Greek αὐθέντης ‘perpetrator’ (see footnote 274), its presence in various Balkan languages is counted as a Turkism and not as a Hellenism, since Turkish was clearly the immediate source. The same can be said of Arabic and Persian words that entered via Turkish, e.g., BSl, BCMS, and archaic and dialectal Albanian (mutatis mutandis; Hamp 1973) džiger ‘liver etc.,’ which is ultimately from Persian (cf. also mandža cited in §4.2.1.4 above). There are also ambiguous cases where it is difficult to determine whether or not a word entered various Balkan languages via a Turkish intermediary, e.g., if Turkish has borrowed from Greek or Romance but the phonology of the item is such that the source of the word in other Balkan languages may be uncertain (cf. Boretzky 1975: 135–169). Thus, for example, Ancient Greek μάνδαλος ‘bolt’ is the ultimate source of Med/ModGrk μάνταλος, Trk mandal, Alb mandal, mandall, BCMS màndal, BSl mandalo, etc. The precise route by which this word entered the various modern Balkan languages, however, is moot.

Given that the Ottomans exerted control for periods ranging from one to more than five centuries over all of the Balkan peninsula except some parts of today’s Slovenia and Croatia, it is not surprising to find Turkisms in all areas of Balkan vocabulary (see Friedman 2003a and references therein). Thus, just as the influence of Latin was felt strongly on Byzantine Greek as detailed by the list in §4.2.1.2, so too did Turkish influence all these areas in all the Balkan languages. For administrative terminology, Ottoman terms (mutatis mutandis with respect to orthographies and regional variants) such as vilayet ‘province’ and kaymakam ‘governor’ are found in all the Balkan languages to refer to Ottoman institutions, and kaymakam is still used in Turkish today for approximately the same rank, although vilayet is now strictly historical. Terms such as aga ‘[Turkish] lord’ (StTrk ağa) are likewise found in all the Balkan languages – Grk αγάς, all others aga – and remain current, but have a specifically Turkish referent.Footnote ²⁹ Similarly, asker ‘soldier’ (Grk ασκέρι, Rmi askeri, Rmn ascher) is now archaic or historical and refers to Turkish soldiers.Footnote ³⁰ Turkish barut remains the word for ‘gun powder’ in all the Balkan standard languages (Grk μπαρούτι, everywhere else spelled exactly as in Turkish).Footnote ³¹

In urban commercial life, derivatives of dukkân, e.g., Mac dukjan, Blg djukjan, Alb dyqan, still mean ‘shop,’ while sokak ‘alley, street’ (same spelling in Alb and BSl, BRο socac, Rmi sokako, ModGrk sokaki) means only the more marked, lower, ‘alley.’ This last shift illustrates Kazazis’ 1972 observation that many Turkisms that were not eliminated were pushed down stylistically, as also with BSl gjol, from Turkish göl ‘lake,’ for it is now archaic except in Bulgarian in the meaning ‘puddle’; cf. also Kazazis 1975 and Sejdiu-Rugova 2017, as well as §4.4.1, on register. Turkisms are still current in many words for everyday objects: çorap ‘stocking,’ giving e.g., Alb çorap, Grk τσουράπι, BSl, Jud čorap, BRo ciorap; tencere ‘pot; cooker,’ giving e.g., Alb tenxhere, BSl tendžere, Grk τεντζερές, Aro tengire, Rmn tingire, Jud tendjere; in names of foods: BSl, Rmi, Jud čorba, BRο ciorbă, Grk τσορβάς in features of the physical world, e.g., hendek ‘ditch,’ giving e.g., Blg hendek, Mac endek, Grk χαντάκι, Aro endec/hãndac, Rmn hindichi/hendechi/hândechi, Jud hendek.

Since Islam entered the Balkans via Turkish, like Latin and Greek it was also the vehicle of a new religious vocabulary (see §§4.2.1.2, 4.2.1.3, and 4.2.1.4), e.g., minare ‘minaret,’ cami ‘mosque,’ and imam ‘(Muslim) priest’ (e.g., Alb minare, xhami, imam, Grk μιναρές, τζαμί, ιμάμης, Mac minare, džamija, imam, Aro minare, ǧimie, imam). Further, some Turkisms associated with Islam, but not specific to it, were adopted into other languages. For instance, BRο işalá, Alb ishalla, Mac inšala, Blg inšalla ‘hopefully, may God grant it,’ from Trk inşallah ‘if it is God’s will,’ and Aro ilealá ‘God forbid’ (Papahagi 1974: 675), from Trk illâ allah, and Bunis 1999: 629, for instance, notes such phrases in use in Judezmo as Ala belani versin! ‘May God curse [you]!’ from Trk Allah belânı versin!, and Alah shukyur ‘Thank God!’ from Trk Allaha şükür!, the last element of which is the source of Mac and Rmi šukjur, Alb shyqur, Aro shucur, which all correspond fairly closely to English ‘thank goodness!’ or ‘finally/at last!’.

Turkish even penetrated the realm of Christian religious terminology, which, given the identification of Turkish with Islam, demonstrates that religions as well as languages can show contact-induced change.Footnote ³² Thus, as indicated in Footnote footnote 29, we find in nineteenth-century Balkan Slavic texts kurban ‘Eucharist’ (Trk kurban ‘sacrifice’), as well as kurtulija ‘the Savior’ (Trk kurtul- ‘save’), sajbija ‘the Lord’ (Trk sahib ‘master’); cf. Gołąb 1960; Jašar-Nasteva 1970; Miovski 1980; Koneski & Jašar-Nasteva 1989; Grannes 1996:9; Graham 2020.Footnote ³³ Of particular cultural significance is BSl (h)adži[ja], Grk χατζής, Alb haxhi, BRo hagi[u], and Jud hadji, all from Turkish hacı (WRT [h]aci) ‘pilgrim’ (ultimately from Arabic).Footnote ³⁴ While the hajj to Mecca is one of the five pillars of Islam, among Balkan Orthodox Christians, and also Ottoman Jews, the title was (and sometimes still is) used for those who make an analogous pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Izmirlieva 2012/2013, 2014 notes that the title was already in use in in the Balkans by the early sixteenth century. We can also note here that the celebration of a Muslim circumcision (Trk sünet, BSl and Rmi sunet, Alb synet), which, in the Balkans, involves a large celebration (as also in Turkey), is often referred to as a ‘wedding’ (BSl svadba, Rmi bijav, Alb dasmë), referring to the feasting and dancing. Such usage is a calque on Turkish usage, where düğün normally refers to wedding feast but can also refer to the feast associated with a circumcision.

4.2.1.7 Great Power Languages and Balkan Vocabulary (Late Eighteenth to Mid Twentieth Centuries)

Beginning with the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, successive and varied waves of lexical influence from non-Balkan European languages entered the Balkans via the dominant languages of the Great Powers.Footnote ³⁵ These influences are not directly relevant to the sprachbund since they entered after its formative period and in the context of general Western European and Russian imperial and colonial expansion. Moreover, in keeping with competing European expansive intensions aimed at Ottoman territory, the languages of different European powers dominated different regions of the peninsula and at different times.

Thus, for example, in the case of Albanian, Italian influence was stronger in what became the independent state of Albania while German influence was stronger in territories incorporated in Serbia, Montenegro, and (later) Yugoslavia owing to Austrian and German interests (and railroads) in the region and BCMS as an intermediary of innovation. Ideology and timing also played roles. Romanian was heavily influenced – especially in its lexicon and particularly in connection with standardization – by French and Italian in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (cf. Close 1974), as these languages were both politically prestigious and genealogically related. For similar reasons, Latin, too, was drawn upon. Aromanian and Meglenoromanian were not so influenced, a fact that correlates with a higher degree of core Balkan features in those latter languages than is found in contemporary Romanian, although the causality is connected with social, geographic, political, and ideological factors as well as lack or delay of standardization.Footnote ³⁶ Similarly, Russian was a source of lexical (and some grammatical) innovation in Bulgarian during this period. Owing to the fact that Russian itself turned to Church Slavonic for lexical and grammatical enrichment during the eighteenth century, a kind of Russianized South Slavic was re-imported into Bulgarian.Footnote ³⁷ In the case of Macedonian, owing to the later date and political circumstances of standardization, the influence came from BCMS rather than Russian. With regard to Modern Greek, Ancient Greek, largely via the high-style archaizing Katharevousa variety, has been the source of vocabulary. For Romani, attempts to use Sanskrit or Hindi have met with only limited success, and in parts of the Balkans, Turkisms have been promoted (see Friedman 1989b).

As indicated above, these are more internal issues in the development of particular standard languages, and they are therefore of only minimal concern here (see Friedman 1986b, 2004c on Balkan standardizations). Moreover, since our focus here is on the results of speaker-to-speaker interactions, standardization is less significant for demonstrating the effects of Balkan-internal language, i.e., speaker (see §§3.2 and 3.2.1), contact. An interesting and illustrative example of such differential influence relates to automobile part terminology. For instance, Albanian has kandelë ‘spark plug’ from Italian candela, whereas Greek μπουζί, Romanian bujie, and Turkish buji are from French bougie, with both Romance sources meaning ‘candle’;Footnote ³⁸ Macedonian šoferšajba ‘windshield’ is based in part on German Windschutzscheibe, whereas Romanian and Greek have parbriz and παρμπρίζ, respectively, from French pare-brise.Footnote ³⁹ BCMS, Macedonian, and Bulgarian all use auspuh (from German Auspuff) for ‘muffler,’ whereas the other Balkan languages (and Slovene) have native coinages, in some instances translational equivalents, or other borrowings, e.g., Greek σιγαστήρας (lit., ‘silencer’), though its source, silansié, from French, can also be used, or Albanian (in Albania) skapamento, from Italian (versus auspuh, ultimately from German but here via Macedonian/BCMS, in Albanian of former Yugoslavia). Albanian makinë from Italian macchina, versus Romanian maşină and BSl mašina from French machine, all meaning ‘car’ or ‘machine,’ is another example.Footnote ⁴⁰ The Romance borrowing lavazh ‘[car] wash’ is typical of Albanian in Albania, whereas in Kosovo the native larje is typical. Such loans speak more to economic ties in the period in question than to shared culture per se, except insofar as modern technology helps to define shared experiences on the part of members of many speech communties. In terms of the kind of shared culture to be discussed below (§4.3), we can note that mersi (from French merci; see Popescu 2020 on this word in Romanian, along with a few other Gallicisms) is a colloquial expression for ‘thank you’ in both Bulgarian and Turkish (as well as Persian and elsewhere). As the language of international diplomacy until World War Two, as well as the vehicle of education in schools sponsored by the Alliance Israélite Universelle, French had significant impact on the Balkans, and especially on Judezmo (Şaul 1983). As noted above, for Romanian, both Italian and French were important sources of vocabulary because of the genealogical and therefore ideological relationship. In the nineteenth century, the political prestige of French was especially important (Close 1974). Nonetheless, these phenomena, despite their common source, usually come from independent developments.

4.2.1.8 English Loans and “Internationalisms” in the Late Twentieth/Early Twenty-First Centuries

Words of wide diffusion that are associated with aspects of current modern culture are often referred to as internationalisms, and while the precise definition may be problematic, it is a useful heuristic term.Footnote ⁴¹ With regard to the Balkans, Friedman 2003a: 30 notes:

Thus, for example, the lexeme in Alb batari, BSl baterija, Grk μπαταρία, Rmn baterie, Trk batarya – all ultimately from English battery, cf. Frn batterie, Grm Batterie, Itl batteria – occurs in essentially this form in languages all over the globe, e.g., Hausa báatìr, Arabic baṭāriyyah, Hindi beṭri, Malay bateri, etc.Footnote ⁴² In a Balkan context, the fact that many such words have entered from English prompted Friedman’s 2011a: 6 observation that “English is the Turkish of the 21st century.” His point there, however, is that puristic anxieties about the supposedly pernicious influence of English are misplaced, a point to which we return in §4.4.4.Footnote ⁴³ Friedman 2003a: 6 also observes that more people in the Balkans now know English than know a neighboring or co-territorial language, which potentially adds a new dimension to the investigation of the Balkan sprachbund.Footnote ⁴⁴ In this context, it is interesting to note that at the ninth AIESEE (Association Internationale d’Études du Sud-Est Européen) Congress (Tirana, 2004), a large number of papers dealt with such words in the Balkan languages.Footnote ⁴⁵ By the time of the tenth AIESEE Congress (Paris, 2009), however, attention had returned to the investigation of the Balkans in their own context, the importance of which was Friedman’s 2011b point (see now, e.g., Niculescu-Gorpin & Vasileanu 2020 on developments with Anglicisms in Romanian). Despite more than a century of borders, Balkan language contact continues, and the Balkan sprachbund is an on-going phenomenon. At this point in time, global terminology adds little to our understanding of the structural and historical dimensions of the Balkans as a linguistic convergence area; its study is more concerned with the respective standard languages of this and other parts of the world, and while these terms have a bearing on issues such as language attitudes and purism, our observations in this section suffice for our purposes here.Footnote ⁴⁶

4.2.2.1 Latin

The Latin lexical influence discussed in §4.2.1.2 allowed also for the entry of various Latin derivational suffixes into the Balkans. In some instances, the spread is not from Latin directly but from Latin into one language and from that one into others. We mention here a few of the more widely represented ones.

Mihăescu 1978: 237–238 documents the widespread occurrence of the agentive/occupational noun suffix -arius throughout Balkan Latin of the earliest period, i.e., beginning in the second century BCE, based on inscriptional evidence. It continues in modern Balkan Romance in, for instance, Romanian and Aromanian, e.g., Rmn/Aro căşar ‘cheesemonger’ (Lat casearius), Aro cărbunar ‘coalman, coal-deliverer’ (Lat carbonarius), Rmn fierar / Aro hirar ‘smith’ (Lat ferrarius), among many others. Similarly, as Newmark et al. 1982: 164 show, Albanian has this suffix productively as -ar, and also an extended form -tar, e.g., lopar ‘cowherd’ (cf. lopë ‘cow’), qytetar ‘city dweller’ (cf. qytet ‘city’), kopshtar ‘gardener’ (cf. kopsht ‘garden’), luftëtar ‘warrior’ (cf. luftë ‘battle’), këngëtar ‘singer’ (cf. këngë ‘song’). Browning 1983: 38–39, gives -αριος as one of the “new suffixes first appearing in Postclassical Greek” that “extended [Greek] vocabulary” and that, in some instances, “became extremely productive,” being used with native Greek stems, e.g., μηχανάριος ‘engineer’ (cf. Grk μηχανή ‘machine; engine’). This suffix continues in Modern Greek in the form -αρης / -aris (by regular sound change), e.g., in περβολάρης ‘gardener’ (cf. περιβόλι ‘garden’), ογδοντάρης ‘octagenarian’ (cf. ογδόντα ‘eighty’). The related neuter suffix -arium, used in nouns of instrument, is found in Greek in a Hellenized form in nouns such as Middle Greek αλφαβητάριον ‘alphabet book’ and συναξάριον ‘catalogue of saints listed by anniversary.’ Some of these words entered Slavic from Greek, e.g., SSl sinaksar ‘synaxarion’ (from the Greek), OCS dinaŕь ‘dinar (coin)’ (Grk δηνάριον, from Latin denarium). The CoSl suffix *-aŕĭ is found throughout modern Slavic and is sometimes thought to have entered Slavic from Latin via a Gothic intermediary (Skok 1972: 49), but it is, in any case, especially productive in BSl and most of BCMS, e.g., BSl ribar ‘fisherman’ (cf. OCS ryba ‘fish’), ovčar ‘shepherd’ (cf. OCS ovьcь ‘sheep’), SoSl žen[s]kar ‘womanizer’ (cf. žena ‘woman,’ Sln ženskar, others ženkar), BCMS and Mac političar ‘politician’ (politika ‘politics,’ Sln and Blg politika > politik), etc. We can also note here a specific extension of Albanian use of -ar to SW Macedonian in the use of names of people from a given village, which is typical of Albanian but not Macedonian, e.g., Nestramár ‘person from Nestram’ (Vidoeski 1999a: 112 as cited in Friedman 2018a).

Weigand 1926, in discussing the wide range of suffixes in Balkan languages with the shape [-ul-] but with quite varying functions and origins, notes a few instances involving a Latin source, especially Alb -ull from Latin -ulus; in §4.3.8, there are examples of the related Latin diminutive suffix -ulla in Balkan languages.

4.2.2.2 Greek

Greek provides some affixal enrichment of its neighboring languages, but the most extensive involvement here comes in the more grammatically related derivation of various nominal and verbal stems. Thus, for example, the Greek aorist marker -σ- is productively attached to Turkish verbal borrowings, which use the 3SG DI-past as the base, e.g., Aro kurdisire, Rmn curdisi, Alb kurdis, Mac kurdisa, Blg kurdisvam, ‘wind up, set up, etc.’ all from Turkish kur- ‘idem’ with 3SG DI-past kurdu, WRT kurdi.Footnote ⁴⁸ Cf. Grk μπαϊλντίζω < Trk bayıldı (WRT bayıldi) ‘faint’ (see §6.2.2.2). The Greek verbal derivational mopheme -Vz-, apparent in the word for ‘faint,’ is borrowed into many Romani dialects as the loan-verb adaptor, with other dialects using -Vn- and/or -ev- which are also Greek verbal morphemes (-υ/αν-, -αιν-, cf. Matras 2002: 128). Another Greek affix in Romani is the masculine nominative singular marker -s, which Greek inherited from Indo-European, but which was borrowed into many Romani dialects, e.g., the Balkan II group, in loanwords, e.g., native čhavo ‘boy,’ but dajos ‘uncle (mother’s brother)’ from Trk dayı ‘idem.’ A further affix of Greek origin occurring widely in Romani is the noun-forming suffix -ima/-ema/-imos, etc. which competes with native -ibe[n]/-ipe[n] in deriving deverbal nouns (occasionally also deadjectival), e.g., native Skopje Arli ha- ‘eat,’ habe ‘food,’ šuži ‘pretty,’ šužipe ‘beauty,’ mar- ‘beat,’ maribe ‘beating, fight, war’ but Ágios Athanásios (Sechidou 2011: 35) marima ‘idem,’ Kalderaš (Boretzky 1994: 276) marimos ‘idem.’ In some dialects, the nominative uses the native marker and the oblique cases use the Greek affix before the native case inflection, e.g., xaben ‘food,’ dat. xamaske (Sechidou 2011: 26).

4.2.2.3 Slavic

The productive suffix -itsa/-ica is dealt with in §4.3.8, since the most common meaning is diminutive (Asenova 2002: 62). Here, however, we note that this suffix has other uses as well, e.g., in toponyms (often themselves of Slavic origin), e.g., Alb Goricë, Grk Kastánitsa, Rmn Dîmbovița. The suffix can also derive feminines from masculines, e.g., Alb gomar/gomaricë ‘donkey M/F,’ Rmn bucătar/bucătăriță ‘cook M/F.’ This latter usage also occurs in WRT (along with the Slavic suffix -ka), e.g., Gostivar Turkish dayo ‘maternal uncle’ → daytsa ‘aunt [dayo’s wife]’, Muzafer ‘Muzafer’ → Muzaferitsa ‘Muzafer’s wife,’ yalanci ‘liar’ → yalancitsa ‘female liar,’ arkadaş ‘friend’ → arkadaşka ‘female friend’ (Tufan 2007:104, cf. also Jašar-Nasteva 1970). This last phenomenon, while not importing grammatical gender in West Rumelian Turkish (WRT), does import a morphological real-world gender distinction that is otherwise absent from Turkish, which must use lexical ‘male’ and ‘female’ (or related items) when disambiguation is required, e.g., kardeş ‘sibling’ ~ erkek kardeş ‘brother,’ kız kardeş ‘sister’ (cf. also §6.1.3.1).

According to Asenova 2002: 63 there are more than twenty suffixes of varying productivity of Slavic origin in Albanian and Balkan Romance, e.g., -ьkъ, -ište, -okъ, -[j]an, -ъka, as in Alb çunak ‘little boy,’ baltishtë ‘muddy place,’ malok ‘hillbilly (pejorative),’ Shkodran ‘person from Shkodra,’ çupkë ‘little girl’; Romanian ciorac ‘little corvid,’ porumbişte ‘cornfield,’ bucureştean ‘person from Bucharest,’ româncă ‘Romanian woman.’

The Slavic suffix -nik, which forms agentive and other types of nouns, has entered productively into Albanian and Balkan Romance, which share the innovation of using the suffix for denominal adjectives (and, in Romanian, adverbs, albeit rarely) as well, e.g., Alb drithnik ‘granary,’ qullanik ‘corn pone,’ but also fisnik ‘noble, of good family,’ sojnik ‘of good family, pure-blood,’ prishanik ‘crazy, cracked, screwy,’ Rmn fățarnic ‘hypocrite/hypocritical,’ târzielnic ‘lazy[bones], slow[poke],’ puternic ‘strong,’ zilnic ‘daily.’ As Gălăbov 1966: 307–312 (cf. Asenova 2002: 63; Croitor 2019) points out, the productivity of these affixes attests to intimate contact that began with the arrival of Slavic speakers in the Balkans.

Another influence of Slavic on Albanian and Balkan Romance which in terms of borrowing is lexical but in terms of the receiving languages affects morphological classes is the tendency to assign loanverbs to a particular conjugational class. In Albanian, Slavic verbs tend to be adapted to the sigmatic conjugation, while in Aromanian they are added to the fourth conjugation, 1sg -escu (Nevaci 2003–2004), and in Romanian to the formerly productive class in -i (Nedelcu 2013a: 21), e.g., BSl čuka/čukne/čuknuva ~ čukva ‘hit, knock, etc.’ (3sg IPFV/PFV/derived IPFV [Mac~Blg]) > Alb çukit, Aro cicãnescu Rmn ciocăni.

A few Slavic prefixes have also entered Albanian and Balkan Romance, e.g., Alb po- in pomendore ‘monument’ (cf. mendor ‘mental, thinker’), Rmn prea- in preafrumos ‘exceedingly beautiful’ (Asenova 2002: 63). Slavic aspectual prefixes in languages such as Romani and Meglenoromanian are treated in §6.2.2.2.

Finally we can note that the Slavic suffix -av ‘-ish,’ has been borrowed into some Greek dialects in Epirus and Greek Macedonia as -αβους, e.g., πρασνούλιαβους ‘greenish’ < πράσινος ‘green’ + diminutive -ούλη- + -αβους, a calque + borrowing on Macedonian zelenikav ‘greenish,’ where -ik- is interpreted as a diminutive affix (Margariti-Ronga & Papadamou 2019a: 139 and sources cited therein). Citing Rempelis 1953: 251, Margariti-Ronga & Papadamou also give ασπρούλαβος ‘slightly white,’ κοκκινούλαβος ‘slightly red,’ μαυρούλαβος ‘slightly black,’ ξινούλαβος ‘slightly sour,’ and πικρούλαβος ‘slightly bitter’ for Konitsa in Epirus.

4.2.2.4 Turkish

By far the most important source language for derivational material in the early modern period was Turkish. There are seven suffixes with concrete lexical meanings that spread widely in the Balkans. Four of them became productive to varying degrees in at least some of the languages: occupational -CI, abstract -lIK, adjectival -lI, and locatival -(h)ane; the other three, the privative -sIz, the personal -man, and the agentive -kâr show interesting developments even though they are usually limited to stems of Turkish origin. We take each of these up in turn.Footnote ⁴⁹

Occupational or agentive -CI in Turkish is found in a range of meanings such as ‘one who does X’ or ‘one who is associated with X,’ and is often translatable as English -er, e.g., yolcu ‘traveler’ (cf. yol ‘road’), lokantacı ‘restaurant owner’ (cf. lokanta ‘restaurant’), and its meanings in neighboring languages are quite similar. Although the suffix takes high vowel harmony (i/ı/ü/u) in standard Turkish, the form in the Balkan languages is always front-unrounded (i). This represents the WRT situation, in which high vowels in final position are all neutralized to /i/. In Turkish, the alternation c ~ ç is determined by progressive assimilation of voicing, and this can also be reflected in the borrowing languages (as discussed in §5.6 and illustrated in Table 4.3). Some languages (Grk, BSl) also have distinct feminine forms based on inherited material (e.g., BSl kavgadžija/kavgadžika ‘quarelsome man/woman,’ with a Slavic feminine suffix -ka, and Grk καβγατζής / καβγατζού ‘idem,’ with a feminine suffix seen in ModGrk φωνακλού ‘loud, coarse woman’ or γλωσσού ‘gossip girl’). In the case of Balkan Slavic and Greek, there is also a terminal desinence that is added for morphological adaptation.

Besides its wide use in Turkish-derived vocabulary, such as Alb bojaxhi ‘painter, dyer,’ Grk μπογιατζής ‘painter,’ BSl bojadžija, Rmn boiangiu/boiengiu, Aro boiagi, Jud boyadji (cf. Trk boya ‘paint,’ boyacı ‘painter’), Alb jabanxhi ‘stranger,’ BSl jabandžija ‘foreigner,’ BRo iabangi[u], Jud yabandji (Trk yabancı), this suffix has passed over into more general productivity in all of the languages. This productivity is shown by several details of its use: it combines with native roots, e.g., Balkan Slavic lov- ‘hunt,’ the basis for BSl lovdžija ‘hunter’; Rmn drâmbagiu ‘Jew’s harp-player’;Footnote ⁵⁰ Aro ghelagi ‘inn-keeper’ with ghela ~ njela ‘lamb,’ whence ‘one who prepares lamb [for guests]’ (Polenakovikj 2007: 54); Bugurdži Rmi asjav ‘mill,’ the basis for asjavdžis ‘miller’ (Boretzky 1993), Sepeči Rmi mindžardžis ‘womanizer’ from mindž ‘vagina,’ xoxamdžis ‘cheater’ from xoxavel ‘cheat,’ Sofija Erli Rmi vurdondžis ‘cart-driver’ from vurdon ‘cart’ (ROMLEX);Footnote ⁵¹ Jud palavra ‘word’ gives palavradji ‘chatterbox.’Footnote ⁵² It also occurs with recent loans, neologisms, and in phrasal and slang formations, e.g., Alb partiakçi ‘party hack,’ Grk ταξιτζής ‘taxicab driver,’ Mac fudbaldžija ‘inept soccer player,’ Rmn duelgiu ‘someone crazy about dueling’; the Greek acronymic base ΠΑΣΟΚ (Πανελλήνιο Σοσιαλιστικό Κίνημα ‘the Panhellenic Socialist Movement’) gives ΠΑΣΟΚτσής ‘an adherent of PASOK,’ Albanian thashethemëxhi ‘gossip-monger’ (< thashë ‘I said’ + e ‘and’ + them ‘I say’), Mac drkadžija ‘jack-off’ (person < drka ‘to jerk off’). Even in Judezmo, which was not subject to the standardizing ideologies of most Balkan languages, Turkish suffixes could be used as a form of lowering, e.g., sedakero ‘charity donor’ (Heb ṣ[e]daqa ‘charity’ + Sp -ero) but sedakadji ‘beggar’ (Bunis 1999: 81).

The Turkish abstract noun formative -lIK is the source of Alb -llëk, Aro -lãke/-lik, Blg -lăk, Grk -(ι)λίκι, Jud -lik, Mac -lak, and Rmn -lîc/-lâc, all with the same function. As with -CI, this suffix takes high vowel harmony in standard Turkish. In WRT, however, the front/back opposition is neutralized in favor of the back vowel in final closed syllables if the vowel is unrounded, i.e., i > ı.Footnote ⁵³ The suffix occurs in words of Turkish origin, e.g., Alb pashallëk, Aro pashalãke, Blg pašalăk, Grk πασαλίκι, Jud pašalik, Mac pašalak, Rmn paşalâk ‘the quality of being a pasha, the territory ruled by a pasha, the high life.’ The formative also combines with native and old non-Turkish stems, e.g., Alb njerëzillëk, Jud benadamlik ‘humaneness’ (Alb njerëz ‘people,’ Heb ben adam ‘son of man’), Grk προεδριλίκι ‘presidency’ (cf. πρόεδρος ‘president’), Mac lošotilak ‘nastiness’ (cf. loš ‘bad’), Blg vojniklăk / Mac vojniklak ‘military service [colloq.],’ Jud. hanukalik ‘Hanukkah present’ (Heb Ḥanukah ‘the Feast of Lights’), Rmn varvarlîc / Aro varvarlike ‘barbarism,’ Megl sotsluk ‘friendship’ (Asenova 2002: 62), and they combine with recent loans, e.g., Alb avokatllëk, Rmn advocatlâc ‘advocacy (ironic; regardless of the actual merits of the case),’ Mac asistentlak ‘assistantship’ (ironic), Blg doktorlăk ‘doctorship’ (ironic). Many of these forms have a marked stylistic value, at a lower level than the Turkish sources (see §4.4.1).

The adjectival -lI forms adjectives from nouns and has the general meaning, as described by Göksel & Kerslake 2005: 194, of “‘possessing’, ‘characterized by’, or ‘provided with’ whatever is expressed by the stem.” It is of more limited productivity in general. In Alb -li/-lli is restricted mainly to words of Turkish origin, e.g., borxhli ‘debtor’ (cf. borxh ‘debt,’ Trk borç ‘debt’). The chief exception appears to be words that denote inhabitants of certain towns, e.g., skraparlli ‘person from Skrapar,’ prishtina-li/lli ‘person from Prishtina,’ and even hyperforms such as shkupjanali ‘person from Skopje,’ dibranali ‘person from Debar’ (StAlb Shkup/shkupjan ‘Skopje/person from Skopje,’ Dibër/dibran person from Debar). There are also substantives of origin in -λη- in Greek, e.g., Βαρνα-λή-ς ‘(person) from Varna.’ Macedonian -lija and Greek -λη- show the hallmarks of productivity, occurring with native roots, e.g., Mac vošlija ‘lousy’ (voš ‘louse’), Grk μουστακα-λής ‘mustachioed’ (cf. μουστάκι ‘mustache,’ ultimately from AGrk μύσταξ ‘mustache’), and with non-Turkish loanwords, e.g., Mac pubertetlija ‘teenager’ (ironic), Grk μπεσαλής ‘one who keeps his word’ (based on μπέσα, a borrowing from Albanian besa ‘faith; honor,’ itself a loanword in all the Balkan languages in direct contact with Albanian). In Modern Bulgarian, kuražlija ‘having courage/strength’ appears to be the only non-Turkism with the affix (Andrejčin 1975). Turkish-origin words also occur in Grk σεβνταλής ‘lustful; passionate’ (cf. Trk sevda ‘love, passion’), Mac kasmetlija, Blg kăsmetlija ‘lucky’ (cf. Trk kısmetli), Jud (u)gurli ‘auspicious,’ kokuli/kokulu ‘perfumed,’ Salonikli ‘Thessalonian (note that Trk Selânikli often implies ‘Sabbatean’ (Trk Dönme)), Rmn tabietliu, Blg tabietlija ‘persnickety, pedantic’ (Trk tabiat ‘nature, habit’), Aro hairli, Mac airlija, etc. ‘lucky, blessed with good fortune’ (Trk hayır ‘good, auspicious’).

The most restricted of these suffixes is -(h)ane, which forms nouns of location in Turkish, e.g., kütüphane ‘library’ (cf. kütüb, learned plural of kitab ‘book’). It is not at all productive in most Balkan languages, occurring in words with Turkish sources like kafehane, now archaic in Albanian except in the meaning ‘dirty, rundown coffee house’ (whereas kafene is ordinary colloquial for pub or coffeehouse) or mejhane ‘tavern’ (Mac meana, Blg mehana; also, pejoratively, ‘noisy smoke-filled saloon’). It seems not to occur in Greek. It is productive, however, in Macedonian, in the form -ána, being found in words of Turkish origin, e.g., kafana ‘pub’ (ordinary colloquial), meana ‘tavern’ (archaic), with native words, e.g., pilana ‘sawmill,’ and with recent loanwords, e.g., energana ‘heating plant.’

Other Turkish suffixes occur on a more limited basis, at least in current usage, but deserve special mention here nonetheless.Footnote ⁵⁴ The privative suffix -sIz ‘without, -less’ occurs only with words of Turkish origin, but is found in all the Balkan languages. Macedonian, for instance, currently has such forms as arsaz ‘crook,’ teklifsiz ‘unceremoniously,’ and ugursuz ‘no-goodnik’ (Trk hırsız ‘thief,’ teklifsiz ‘without ceremony,’ uğursuz ‘inauspicious; rascal’), and Grannes et al. 2002: 540–541 give nearly fifty forms in Bulgarian with -siz/-suz/-săz, many of which, however, are now obsolete, dialectal, or highly colloquial, such as hărsăz(in) ‘soundrel, useless’ (Trk hırsız), kapasăz(in) ‘good-for-nothing’ (Trk kapısız ‘gateless; unemployed’), kitapsăz(in) ‘illiterate’ (Trk kitapsız ‘without a book’), hairsăz(in) ‘scoundrel, good-for-nothing’ (Trk hayırsız ‘useless, good-for-nothing’). For contemporary Albanian, Snoj 1994: 474 lists only four words with -sëz, all with exact sources in Turkish: sojsëz ‘(person) of poor stock,’ apansëz ‘unexpectedly,’ edepsëz ‘shameless,’ and nursëz ‘sad, lightless’ (Trk soysuz, apansız, edepsiz, nursuz). Judezmo has apansiz, edepsiz, and soysuz ‘of bad lineage’ (as well as soyli ‘of good lineage’ based on Trk soy ‘lineage’). Greek has this suffix in just in a few words, most notably γρουσούζης / γουρσούζης ‘ill-fated; bringing bad luck’ (Trk uğursuz), where -sIz ends up as an isolated piece with no real value that merely adds to the phonological “bulk” of the word (like some of the etymological inflections discussed in §4.2.2.6.2). According to ILB 1957, Romanian has only [h]ursuz (< Trk uğursuz cited above). Given the ideology of excluding Turkisms in all the Balkan standard languages, it is not unreasonable to assume that the suffix was considerably more widespread prior to the twentieth century (cf. Grannes 1969 regarding Bulgarian).

Further elements to mention here are -man and -kâr. In fact, -man is not even a suffix in the strict sense in Turkish, but it occurs in a number of words mainly for individuals, such as duşman ‘enemy’ (from Persian), kahraman ‘hero’ (from Persian), Müslüman ‘a Muslim’ (from Persian), peşiman/pişman ‘penitent’ (from Persian), and tercüman ‘interpreter’ (from Arabic). This individual-marking usage is taken up in some of the Balkan languages in whole-word borrowings from Turkish, e.g., Blg kahraman and terdžuman, Alb mysliman and pishman, Rmn duşman, Mac dušman, pišman, and Muslimán. Significantly, it is even extended in Macedonian and Albanian, combining like a suffix with some native bases, e.g., Mac lažoman ‘liar’ (cf. laga ‘а lie,’ laže ‘(he) lies’), grkoman ‘Hellenizer,’ and Alb gjataman ‘tall, lanky person’ (cf. gjatë ‘long’), pordhaman ‘person who farts a lot; full of hot air’ (cf. pordhë ‘loud fart,’ pordh- aorist stem of pjerdh- ‘fart’). Also, Mac has one word, utman ‘dullard’ that is either a Mac creation based on (dialectal) Albanian ut (StAlb hut) ‘owl; dullard’ or borrowed as a whole from dialectal Albanian. There may be some secondary influence in each language from the Greek-based suffix -mán ‘-maniac’ that occurs in each in, e.g., Mac and Alb kleptomán ‘kleptomaniac’ and megalomán ‘megalomaniac,’ since these words designate individuals too. The Macedonian use of -man with names of nationalities, e.g., grkoman ‘Hellenizer’ (also Alb grekoman ‘idem’), srboman ‘Serbianizer,’ may also belong here. Thus -man appears to have a mixed origin in the Balkans, but there has been some Turkish involvement. (For more details, see Friedman 2003a.)

The Turkish suffix -kâr, a borrowing from Persian, is agentive, e.g., hizmetkâr ‘servant’ (hizmet ‘service,’ cf. BSl izmekjar). It appears to be productive only in Albanian, which combines it with some native or old loan roots, e.g., mundqar ‘hard worker’ (mund ‘effort’), grabitqar ‘predator’ (grabit ‘capture, pillage’), ziliqar ‘envious person’ (zili ‘envy’) (cf. Boretzky 1975: 265–269).

We can also mention here the suffix -lAmA, in which the -lA- is used to derive verbal stems from nonverbs and the -mA forms deverbal nouns, as in Turkish temiz ‘clean, adj.,’ temizle- ‘clean (verb),’ temizleme ‘cleaning (noun).’ In Macedonian (and, mutatis mutandis, elsewhere in Balkan Slavic), the noun zavrzlama ‘tangle, plot, meddling, etc.,’ from zavrze ‘bind, twist, knot,’ is still in common usage, albeit strictly colloquial. Cf. also nineteenth-century Macedonian daskalaisa ‘teach’ (< /daskal-la-isa/), ugursuzlaisa ‘behave badly,’ etc. (Markovikj 1996), which combine Turkish -la- with Greek aoristic -(ι)σ- (cf. §4.2.2.2). Similarly, čuvadar ‘guardian’ combines čuva ‘protect, keep’ with -dar, a Turkism of Persian origin used to form agentive nouns. Unlike zavrzlama, however, čuvadar is archaic.

4.2.2.5 Western European Affixes

Continuing in the contemporary period a trend begun in the twentieth century, Western European languages have come to be more widely known in the Balkans, and as a result, lexical borrowings have occurred, in some lexical fields massively. This in turn has led to derivational material associated with some of these borrowings becoming available in the recipient languages and taking on new life in their new linguistic environment. We mention just a few here by way of illustrating this relatively recent trend in the Balkans. It should be noted that some of these could be considered internationalisms (see §4.2.1.8) of an affixal nature.

One English suffix that is itself of relatively recent origin in English that shows up in some Balkan languages is -gate referring to a public scandal of some sort, often involving politicians.Footnote ⁵⁵ This suffix has gained currency in English and it has spread to other languages, being found, for instance, in Hungarian (Kontra 1992) and in contemporary Russian, e.g., Putingejt, referring to President Vladimir Putin’s suppression of anti-establishment journalists and the suspiciously timed murders and poisonings of his political opponents.Footnote ⁵⁶ As far as the Balkans are concerned, Joseph 1992b documents it for Greek in 1987 in the forms Τόμπρα-γκεητ and ΠΑΣΌΚ-γκεητ, referring to a scandal involving the then-head of the national telephone system, a Mr. Τόμπρας, who had been appointed by the then-ruling party ΠΑΣΟΚ (see §4.2.2.4); he also cites an example from the Serbian press, Agrogejt for a financial scandal involving the agricultural conglomerate Agrokomerc, and more examples can be found in the Bulgarian press, e.g., from 2012, both SRS-gejt and Tanovgejt, both referring to a scandal involving bugs (“SRS,” i.e., ‘special intelligence devices’) and a Mr. Tanov, then-Chief Executive of Customs.Footnote ⁵⁷ In both the Greek and the Bulgarian examples, there are multiple labels for the scandal in question, suggesting a degree of productivity for the suffix in a way different from what the mere coining of novel instances reveals. Macedonian shows what may mark the beginnings of the entry of this suffix, since an American situation involving espionage and shopping carts is referred to in an online articleFootnote ⁵⁸ as “količkata-gejt,” translating ‘shopping cart’ with the definite količkata but leaving gejt untranslated, presumably because it carried some meaning as such.

Another modern Western European suffix with some extension through the Balkans is the Italian suffix -ese in nouns and adjectives of ethnic or geographic origin, e.g., Francese ‘French,’ ultimately from Latin -ē(n)sis. A suffix with roughly this form, though consistently with a voiced [z] suggesting perhaps Venetian mediation, is found in Albanian, e.g., senegalez ‘Senegalese,’ jordanez ‘Jordanian,’ eskimez ‘Eskimo,’ and nepalez ‘Nepali,’ among numerous others, and in Greek, e.g., Κινέζος ‘Chinese,’ Φιλιπινέζος ‘Philippine,’ and Σκωτσέζος/Σκοτσέζος ‘Scottish,’ among many others. Cf. also Mac Kinez ‘Chinese [person],’ as in BCMS but Blg Kitaec ‘idem,’ which is from Russian. Romanian, too, shows -ez in abundance, especially for more “exotic” ethnica, e.g., japonez ‘Japanese,’ chinez ‘Chinese,’ somalez ‘Somali,’ and finlandez ‘Finnish,’ inter alia, but deriving it directly from Latin -ē(n)sis is difficult, so that some Italian, Venetian, or even French or possibly learnèd Latin influence in its development and spread is likely.Footnote ⁵⁹ It may have entered with specifically Italianate nouns, e.g., Calabrese ‘Calabrian,’ and spread from there in each language. Moreover, there are sufficient numbers of other such forms in each language to suggest a good degree of productivity for the suffix; Snoj 1994, for instance, lists more than thirty for Albanian.

As noted in §4.2.1.8 about internationalisms at the word level, none of these suffixes has any relevance to the sprachbund per se, but rather they speak to modern developments with the standard languages.

4.2.2.6 Miscellaneous

Besides the derivational material discussed so far that can be categorized insightfully by source and thus use, there are some borrowed elements that come to serve derivational functions but do not fit into neat categories overall; thus, their treatment may have a more scattered feel but they are no less important and no less interesting.

4.3.1.1 ‘Mother’ (and ‘Grandmother’)

The sememe ‘mother’ in the Balkans appears to be somewhat more stable than ‘father,’ in the sense that it shows less evidence of borrowing.Footnote ⁹⁶ There are some forms for which borrowing is plausible, but, as with ‘father,’ there are etymological puzzles also with ‘mother’ involving teasing apart nursery origins from loanword origins.

For instance, StAlb nënë (Geg nânë) could in principle be a nursery word in origin or a borrowing from Turkish nene ‘grandmother,’ a variant of nine ‘idem’; the etymological dictionaries that mention this word (Çabej 2002; B. Demiraj 1997; Huld 1984) side with the nursery-word hypothesis,Footnote ⁹⁷ and this is certainly reasonable. Turkish is not even mentioned, presumably because of the meaning difference between nene/nine and nënë (and the nasality in Geg); however, there is an Ancient Greek form of nursery origin, μάμμη, that means both ‘mother’ and ‘grandmother,’ so that parallels do exist for generational shifts in meaning involving female parents (and see below regarding Albanian dadë).Footnote ⁹⁸ The situation is similar with dialectal Macedonian nana/nona/năna, which some see as a Turkism and others reckon as native Slavic (Stoevska-Denčova 2009: 37). In fact, however, given that the Macedonian dialectal forms are from the Debar region (Stoevska-Denčova 2009: 187), the obvious source is actually Albanian, where these various reflexes of Geg (and Common Albanian) â appear in the Albanian word for ‘mother.’ A similar ambiguity obtains for Mrkovići Montenegrin ne^ana, nana ‘mother’ (Morozova 2019). Relatedly, Greek has νενέ in the meaning ‘granny, grandmother,’ and this is best taken as a borrowing directly from Turkish, an account (endorsed by Andriotis 1983: s.v.) that explains the position of the stress. Similar considerations apply to the other Albanian words for ‘mother,’ ëmë (Geg amë) and mëmë, which are generally taken (so Çabej 2002; B. Demiraj 1997; and Meyer 1891) as nursery words, perhaps of considerable age, though interestingly there is at least one divergent opinion: Paşcu 1925: I, 823 takes ëmë/amë to be a borrowing from Latin amma ‘wetnurse.’

This ‘nurse’ connection may or may not be right for ëmë/amë,Footnote ⁹⁹ but it is interesting that the Aromanian word for ‘mommy,’ dádă, has parallel forms in neighboring languages with meanings that include ‘nurse (for a child)’: Trk/BSl/BCMS dada ‘older sister,’ Alb dadë ‘female servant,’ Trk dada/dadı ‘child’s nurse’ (said to be ultimately from Persian), and Grk νταντά ‘nanny.’ These surrounding forms may or may not be related to Aro dádă, though the range of meanings for Alb dadë (from Newmark 1998: s.v.) is suggestive since ‘mommy’ is included: ‘wetnurse; pet name in baby talk for the baby’s female caretaker; grandma, mommy, big sister.’ Still, sources that cite them are generally noncommittal; Papahagi, for instance, notes these forms without saying specifically that any are borrowings or donor forms.

Further, Turkish lâla, cited above in §4.2.1, figures indirectly in this sememe, in that there is a Greek form λαλά ‘grandmother’; given that the Turkish word refers to males, this Greek form is most likely a derivative within Greek from the attested masculine λαλάς ‘uncle, grandfather, mentor,’ which is directly from Turkish (Andriotis 1983: s.v.). The Greek pattern of masculines with a nominative in -Vs and a corresponding feminine in -V, e.g., αδερφός ‘brother’ ~ αδερφή ‘sister,’ δάσκαλος ‘(male) teacher’ ~ δασκάλα ‘(female) teacher,’ πατέρας ‘father’ ~ μητέρα ‘mother,’ is thus responsible for the feminine form here. The word for ‘grandmother’ itself can be borrowed: Slavic baba is probably the source of North Albanian babë (definite: baba) ‘grandmother, aunt, form of address to old women’ (Mann 1948: s.v.; cf. Curtis 2012: 79).

Finally, there is one interesting use for Alb ëmë/amë that does show borrowing, but from Albanian into Bulgarian. Çabej 1996: 118 reports that within Albanian, amë acquired an initial t- from a preposed particle of concord (të), possibly as an accusative, t(ë) amë, or via a resegmentation involving jot ‘your,’ where the -t is etymologically connected to the root for ‘you,’ and this new form tamë took on the meaning ‘fountainhead, source’ (i.e., presumably a metaphor, the ‘mother of the waters’). Further, Çabej continues, tamë has been incorporated into the secret language of Bulgarian-speaking bricklayers in the village of Smolsko in the Pirdop region of Bulgaria as tama ‘mother’(Kănčev 1956: 402).Footnote ¹⁰⁰

4.3.1.2 ‘Brother’

Turkish ağa ‘master, patron’ (older and dialectal aga, which is its shape in the Balkan languages) is also a provincialism meaning ‘older brother’ (StTrk ağabey) and was used colloquially in this meaning in Bulgarian (Grannes et al. 2002: s.v.).

The versatile and seemingly ubiquitous (in these sections at least) Albanian term lalë offers another case. For Albanian, Meyer 1891: 236 states that this word, which is a borrowing from Turkish lâla (see §4.3.1.1), has the meaning ‘elder brother’ in Kavaja and in Myzeqe in general; further, Arbëresh of the Bova region has leḍḍé for ‘brother’ (and a derivative from that, leḍḍá, for ‘sister’), which, according to Meyer, is from this word.

Aromanian baci is given in Vrabie 2000: 173 under the lemma for ‘brother,’ for which the regular term is fráte (from Latin frater). The word baci is labeled as a ‘term of respect for an elerly [sic] brother.’ It is thus not a primary kinship term, despite the fraternal meaning, but it is connected to kinship terminology. A similar word, bac[ë], is a Geg regionalism meaning ‘older brother, father, or father’s brother’ (Newmark 1998: s.v.). The term is used regularly for ‘older brother’ in Kosovo. The source is the identical bac in South Slavic (cf. BCMS bac, Mac bate, with an affective affrication of t to ts; cf. example (5.31b) in §5.7).Footnote ¹⁰¹

4.3.1.3 ‘Sister’/‘Daughter’

Aromanian dódă for ‘older sister,’ is given in Papahagi 1974: 497 as being of unknown etymology. This form means not just ‘older sister’ but also ‘aunt’ or ‘grandmother’ or ‘wet nurse.’ While it could well be merely an Aromanian-internally derived nursery form, it does show some formal and semantic connections with words in neighboring languages that should not be ignored; these include Trk/BSl/BCMS dada ‘older sister,’ Alb dadë ‘big sister; grandma’ (see §4.3.1.1). The polysemy of the Albanian word is striking when compared with the parallel polysemy of the Aromanian, making a borrowing hypothesis appealing, even if the direction of the borrowing cannot be definitively determined, and even if some internal influence, perhaps a nursery-related effect, was responsible for the vocalism of the initial syllable in dódă (which is also attested in Moldavian). Similarly, Romanian, based on Meyer 1891: 236, has lele in the meaning ‘older sister,’ seemingly connected with the Turkish lâla form cited above (as a feminine derivative of a presumed masculine borrowed form), but taken, more compellingly, by BER III: 357 as a loanword from Bulgarian lelja ‘aunt’ (on which see below, §4.3.1.5), despite the difference in meaning.

Further, along these same semantic lines, there are words that can mean ‘daughter’ – as well as ‘young girl,’ so that they are not necessarily primary kinship terms – that are common across several of the languages and for which a borrowing origin is generally accepted. Albanian has çupë in the meaning (from Newmark 1998: 148) ‘girl, lass; little girl, daughter; unmarried woman, maiden,’ and it is borrowed into southwestern Macedonian as čupa ‘girl’ and Aromanian čiup ‘small child’ (Papahagi 1974: 451) and the meaning of the related čiúpră ‘daughter,’ a word that appears to come from an Albanian collective in -r- *çup[ë]ra, cf. çupëri ‘girlhood; girls taken collectively, the world of girls’ (Newmark 1998: 148).Footnote ¹⁰² The Macedonian form can also be used for ‘daughter’ (as, however, can the Slavic-derived word for ‘girl’, devojka).Footnote ¹⁰³ Similarly, Greek shows both τσούπα and τσούπρα, in the meaning ‘young girl, daughter,’ also clear loanwords from Albanian (or via Macedonian), again with the occurrence of the Albanian collective marker -r- (here -ρ-) as a telltale sign of borrowing.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Turning to a different word with a similar meaning, Albanian bijë ‘daughter’ is the source of (dialectal) Macedonian, Kosovo Serbian, and Montenegrin bija.

4.3.1.4 ‘Uncle’

There are some borrowings to be noted among words for ‘uncle’ in the Balkan languages. First, the Turkish word dayı ‘maternal uncle; mother’s brother’ is clearly the source of Alb dajë, which has the same specific meaning the Turkish word has. This holds as well for Balkan Slavic, where Macedonian has derivatives (diminutives of endearment) dajče and dajko, and Bulgarian has daija and the derivative dajčo, occurring alongside the native Slavic vujko for ‘mother’s brother, maternal uncle.’Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Also, in some Bulgarian and Macedonian dialects, especially among Muslims, dajo occurs for ‘maternal uncle’ (BER I: 314).Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Greek has νταής ‘bully,’ cf. StTrk kabadayı ‘bully’ (StTrk kaba ‘rough, coarse, crude, vulgar’; cf. also BCMS da[h]ija ‘renegade janissary, tyrant’). Further, Meglenoromanian has daiã, Romani has dajos, and both Bulgarian and Macedonian show, dialectally (Stoevska-Denčova 2009: 94), kalèko and kal’eko/kăl’eko for ‘aunt’s husband,’ from Greek καλο- ‘good’ (quite likely from the vocative καλέ ‘(my) good (man)!’) with a diminutive suffix. Finally, Albanian (Geg) has bac[ë] ‘uncle, older brother, etc.,’ from Slavic (cf. Curtis 2012: 79).

The occurrence of diminutives with this word is not surprising, given that they can fall under the realm of intimate kin terms. Indeed, within Turkish, a diminutive suffix -ca seems to figure in the derivation of the widespread word for ‘father’s brother; paternal uncle,’ amca, composed of a word of learnèd usage from Arabic (so Redhouse 1968: 55–56) am (Arabic ‘amm) ‘paternal uncle,’ with a diminutivizing -ca (usually found on adjectives).Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Turkish amca is important in the Balkans as it is the source of Bulgarian amudža and the most likely source of the Albanian words for ‘paternal uncle,’ xhaxha and axhë, and of Macedonian adžo (found in Tetovo and elsewhere) for ‘father’s brother; older man,’ as well as BCMS adža, amidža, adžo (VOC), ‘idem,’ which occur alongside the native Slavic form striko.

Regarding the Albanian, only Meyer 1891: 79–80, among the various Albanian etymological resources, says anything about xhaxha, and he is noncommittal, citing only OCS dědъ ‘grandfather’ and Russ djadja ‘uncle,’ for which latter CoSl *dēdŭ is the etymon, but for which the reflex ja from *ē results from an East Slavic assimilation of a front nasal and is not related to anything West Balkan (cf. Vasmer 1986–1987: s.v.). Although Meyer writes that “the word may be present even in the Slavic Balkan languages,” the word in question woud have to be ded or djed. It is not straightforward to derive either xhaxha or axhë from amca, but the key may be the form xha, a “respectful title used in addressing an older man by his first name” (Newmark 1998: 946). This form conceivably was abstracted out of amca, which can also be used as a “term of address to an older man” (Redhouse 1968: 56), and then reduplicated within Albanian, perhaps as a nursery effect, to give xhaxha. Still, even under this account, contact with Turkish was involved in the derivation of xhaxha. Axhë and adžo, then, are either from amca via a phonetic reduction in the borrowing of the otherwise unusual cluster [mdž], or else abstracted out of xhaxha, as if it were segmented xh-axha.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The Macedonian form could thus be an Albanian loanword, though with the -o as the result of it being drawn into the morphology of hypocoristic kin terms (cf. striko, tetko).

The Turkish word çiçe ‘aunt’ seems to be the connected to Slavic čičo ‘uncle’ – thus with a now-familiar change of gender: BSl and BRo have čičo, čičko, čiča, čika (BCMS) / cică, cicio (regional), čiča, tsitsă, respectively, cf. also Alb çeço ‘daddy, eldest brother.’ These could in principle be independent, Slavic-based creations, and Stoevska-Denčova 2009: 86–87, though inclined towards the Turkish etymology, equivocates as to the source (Skok 1971 does not give a source, reflecting uncertainty in the relevant literature).

Albanian offers another case of a loanword for ‘uncle’ in the general term ungj, as this is a borrowing from Latin avunculus. The contraction of awu- to u shows a regular sound change of (post-)Roman-era Albanian, and the -ngj derives from the syncopated -ncl- with regular voicing induced by the nasal and the expected -gj- outcome of a -gl- sequence.

In Romanian, besides inherited unchi, also from Latin avunculus, the form nene and variant nea and diminutive neică all mean ‘uncle’ as a term of respect rather than kinship. The source is Slavic (cf. Skok 1972: s.v. naja, BER IV: s.vv. nena, nenjo, Vasmer 1986–1987: s.v. njanja). Aromanian, however, has lálă for ‘uncle’ (Vrabie 2000: s.v.), possibly a loanword although its origin is hardly certain. Papahagi suggests a connection with Latin lalla ‘lullaby’ (not attested as such in Latin but presumably based on the verb lallo ‘sing a lullaby’) but that seems rather far-fetched as a source for ‘uncle.’ A better starting point for the Aromanian is Albanian lalë ‘elder brother; (paternal) uncle; godfather,’ itself probably a borrowing from Turkish lâla ‘manservant assigned to the care of a child’ (ultimately from Persian). This Turkish word is also the likely source of a nineteenth-century Macedonian form lală for ‘uncle’ cited by Meyer 1891: 236 but not current through much of the twentieth century (see §§4.3.1, 4.3.1.1, and 4.3.1.2 for other ways that lâla has had an impact on Balkan kinship terminology).

4.3.1.5 ‘Aunt’

A word for ‘aunt’ has been discussed, in §4.3.1.3 above, with regard to Aromanian dódă, meaning ‘older sister’ but also ‘aunt’ (and ‘grandmother’); this word seems best taken to be a loanword from Albanian, although the Albanian source does not show the ‘aunt’ meaning.

There are, however, clear cases of loanwords for ‘aunt’ in the Balkans. Aromanian offers two other words for ‘aunt’ that are likely borrowings: tétă, taken by Papahagi 1974: 1176 to be from Bulgarian (or Balkan Slavic more generally) teta, and ţáţă, from Greek τσάτσα. The Greek may reflect a reduplication within Greek of a form based on θεία/θειά ‘aunt,’Footnote ¹⁰⁹ but it is hard to separate it from the Turkish slang term çaça ‘woman who keeps a brothel.’ Interestingly, though, çaça is said (Redhouse 1968: 235; Tietze 2002: s.v.) to be from the Greek τσατσά for ‘old woman’ (derived by an accent shift from τσάτσα ‘aunt(y)’), which can also have the ‘brothel’-related meaning of çaça;Footnote ¹¹⁰ thus the directionality of the borrowing may not be clear. For Bulgarian, Gerov 1895–1908: s.v. gives čičjá for ‘father’s brother,’ and číčja for ‘father’s brother’s wife.’ It is possible that Turkish çiçe ‘aunt’ played a role here, although the accentuation makes this hypothesis problematic.

Turkish itself distinguishes in its kinship terms between ‘maternal aunt (mother’s sister),’ teyze, and ‘paternal aunt (father’s sister),’ hala. These words – and the associated semantic distinctions – were borrowed into Albanian as teze and hallë, occurring alongside the more general terms emtë ‘aunt (paternal or maternal),’ itself a loanword from Latin amita ‘paternal aunt,’ and teto ‘aunt,’ a likely borrowing from Macedonian, though a nursery origin cannot be ruled out. Dialectally, Macedonian and BCMS have ala from Turkish hala (Stoevska-Denčova 2009: 178, citing Jašar-Nasteva 2001; Morozova 2019), while Kratovo and Tetovo Macedonian have teza, though not hala. For BCMS, Bjeletić (1995: 208–209), cited in Morozova 2019, notes that both ala and teza/teze mean simply ‘aunt’ in most BCMS dialects where they occur, and it is only in Mrkovići and the Catholic village Janjevo in Kosovo that father’s and mother’s side are distinguished. Similarly, Bulgarian has tejza, teze (dialectally tize), from Turkish, though these are now considered to be obsolete; interestingly, Bulgarian ale, hala are cited as ‘maternal (sic!) aunt’ in Morozova 2019, as are teza, teze.Footnote ¹¹¹ Many dialects of Romani in the Balkans have tetka, and Macedonian Arli and Kosovo Bugurdži also have teza in addition to tetka. Native Romani is bibi, a form also widely used in the Balkans.Footnote ¹¹²

Albanian is a source of words for ‘aunt’ in various Macedonian dialects, as documented in Stoevska-Denčova 2009: 90–91. In various villages in the Debar region, džidža and džedža occur, apparently borrowed from, or better, based somehow on, Albanian xhaxhkë ‘aunt.’ Similarly, in Slimnica (Grk Trílofos) in the Kostur (Grk Kastoria) region, Kunovo in the Gostivar region, and Suho in the area around Thessaloniki, nana, nane, and nača occur, respectively, based on Albanian nënë ‘mother.’

A familiar etymological puzzle also arises here. Bulgarian has a form lelja for ‘aunt’ that would seem to have something to do with Turkish lâla, perhaps involving a feminine derivative of a(n unattested) masculine form taken directly from the Turkish. However, Meyer 1891: 236, writing that lelja should be separated from the lâl-related forms, urges caution here, appropriately enough since, as BER III: 356–357 shows, forms related to lelja are to be found all over Slavic and Baltic as well, revealing it to be a Balto-Slavic lexeme of long standing.

The lâl- word in Albanian, lalë, which otherwise has male meanings (‘young father; elder brother,’ etc.) does show a gender-shifted meaning to ‘aunt’ in Geg, according to Meyer ibid., where the form is jajë (marked as nonstandard by Newmark 1998: 334). The exact mechanism for this shift is not entirely clear but may involve an internal derivational process.Footnote ¹¹³ Meyer 1891: 91 notes that this form shows an interesting development in the Berat (Tosk) dialect, where the form is thjajë; Meyer accounts for the unusual form by appealing to influence from Greek θεία ([θjá]}, giving a form that is a phonological loanblend or hybrid.

Finally, Turkish has figured heavily in the borrowed kinship terminology documented in the preceding sections, but as the donor language in case after case. There are, of course, kin terms in the Balkans borrowed from donor languages other than Turkish, as shown by various examples throughout. Still, one such case deserves mention here involving Turkish as the recipient language. Turkish as spoken in North Macedonia has borrowed the Macedonian word tetko ‘aunty,’ for use as a vocative. Many dialects of Romani also have tetka/tetko. Thus donor and recipient language in the Balkans are not predetermined roles; rather they depend on the local social circumstances.

4.3.1.6 ‘In-Laws’

As with other kinship terms, words for various in-laws in the Balkans also yield instances of loanwords. For instance, Bulgarian and eastern Macedonian have baldəza (with a variant baldəzka, standard Mac baldaza); BCMS (in Muslim contexts) has balduza (Škaljić 1966: s.v.) or balgaza (Morozova 2019) for ‘wife’s sister,’ and Macedonian Arli Romani has baliska (Halwachs et al. 2007) thus a type of sister-in-law, a borrowing from Turkish baldız ‘sister-in-law, wife’s sister.’ Kratovo and Tetovo Macedonian gelin, Montenegrin and Shkodran Geg gjelinë, and Mrkovići Montenegrin đelina, as well as Pomak Bulgarian gelina (Morozova 2019: 333), all refer to both ‘bride’ and ‘daughter-in-law,’ from Turkish gelin ‘bride; daughter-in-law’ (absent from Škaljić 1966). Dialectal Macedonian nusa (in Gora, both nusa and nuse) from Albanian nuse ‘bride; daughter-in-law’ also occurs in parts of southern Montenegro (Morozova 2019). In Kratovo one finds jenga ‘sister-in-law,’ from Turkish yenge ‘(woman’s) sister-in-law; aunt-in-law’ (‘husband’s brother’s wife’); Škaljić 1966 gives the following forms for BCMS: [j]enđa, [j]enga (with both ȅ and é), [j]enđija, [j]engija (with è) with meanings varying from ‘husband’s brother’s wife’ to the equivalent of ‘maid of honor at a wedding’ (who is usually a female relative of the equivalent of best man kum, stari svat). For Bulgarian, Grannes et al. 2002: s.v. gives engé ‘father’s brother’s wife,’ and Jašar-Nasteva 2001: 88 notes jengja for ‘father’s brother’s wife’ in Kratovo Macedonian.

Dialectally in Macedonian forms such as kain and kaim (Trk kayın) occur for ‘wife’s brother’ and BCMS has ka[j]in (Škaljić 1966: s.v.) as well as diminutive kainče. In Bulgarian, there are the variants kaínče, kaínčo ‘idem’ and also kaína, kájna, and kaína, and kaínla (<? kayin abla = kayın + abla ‘sister’[?]) ‘husband’s brother’s wife’ (see below for more on ‘brother-in-law’).

Greek is involved here insofar as forms based on πεθερός ‘father-in-law’ occur dialectally in Macedonian (Stoevska-Denčova 2009: 115): p’efir in Negovan (Grk Ksilópoli), near Thessaloniki, with f for θ and an -i- that reflects the usual northern Greek pronunciation; pehjar in the Sérres region, with h for f; and peăr, also in the Sérres area, with (regular) loss of /h/.

Perhaps the most widely distributed Turkish kin term in the Balkans is the word for ‘husband of one’s wife’s sister; brother-in-law’ (and derivatives from it). The Turkish word is bacanak ‘brother-in-law (wife’s sister’s husband),’ and it has yielded Mac, Blg, and BCMS badžanak, Alb baxhanak, Aro baginac, bãginac, Megl baginac, bãgiãnac, and Grk μπατζανάκης (cf. Morozova 2019). The meaning in Albanian, Macedonian, and South Danubian Balkan Romance (SDBR) retains the specificity of the Turkish form, whereas in Bulgarian and Greek the meaning has been generalized (so BER I: s.v.) to cover ‘sister’s husband’ as well (thus competing, for Bulgarian, with the inherited Common Slavic term: OCS šurinъ, šurь, Mac šura, Blg šurej, Russ šurin, etc.). The standard Turkish form is as given above, but there is a variant form given in Redhouse 1968: 116 as bacınak that might explain more directly the SDBR forms with a medial high front vowel. Similarly, the variants with schwa in the first syllable, could represent vowel reduction or, perhaps, dialectal Turkish.

The “success” of the spread of this foreign word in some of the Balkan languages could be a consequence of there being no inherited Indo-European term for this particular relation; the Indo-European form continued in AGrk δαήρ, Lat levir, Mac/Blg dever, etc., meant ‘brother-in-law,’ but, based on the precise meaning for these cognate forms, it was ‘brother-in-law’ as ‘husband’s brother,’ and thus different from the Turkish form.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Balkan Slavic, however, already had a specific native term in place by the time of contact with Turkish. One can speculate, however, that during the Ottoman period this particular affinal relationship took hold in promoting networks of solidarity, a role that badžanak continues to have in North Macedonia to this day.Footnote ¹¹⁵

Finally, some Balkan terms for other in-laws are derivatives of these or reflect other borrowed kinship words. For instance, ‘sister-in-law’ in Aromanian is bãginacã, a feminine form derived from the masculine bãginac. And, in Bulgarian (Grannes 1996: 164) and dialectal Macedonian (Stoevska-Denčova 2009: 128), babalăk occurs for ‘father-in-law,’ taken directly from the Turkish babalık ‘fatherhood; stepfather; father-in-law; adoptive father’ (Redhouse 1968: 115).

4.3.1.7 Larger Kinship Units

The data in this section are taken from Sobolev 2006: 14 and are intended to be illustrative rather than exhaustive. In English, the term family can be nuclear, extended, or in reference to a larger group of kin. Terms such as clan and tribe tend to be ethnographic or informal, often with humorous connotations in the latter case, while lineage is a technical term. In the Balkans, as in most of the world, degrees of group familial relationship were, and in some places still are, denoted by specific terms. Thus, for example, Albanian fis is still a significant larger kinship unit in many regions. The Slavic equivalents are pleme and rod. Of interest here is the fact that in the Aromanian, Greek, and some of the Balkan Slavic dialects documented in Sobolev 2006: 14, Turkisms either coexist with or are the sole expressions of such larger family units. Thus in Turia (Grk Krania) Aromanian, in the Pindus region, the Turkism soy co-exists with rădătsină and riză (this last a Hellenism meaning root). Soy is also used in both the northern and southern Greek points (Erátyra and Kastélli, respectively), and the other term, damar/ndamari is likewise from Turkish. In northeastern and Rhodopian Bulgarian (Ravna and Gela, respectively), the Turkism džins (Trk cins) co-exists with native rod (although the Turkism is now archaic in Ravna).

One other Balkanism involving larger kinship units, based on Sobolev 2006: 14, is worthy of note here. The data for Albanian give only fis for the kinship unit equivalent to Slavic rod. In Albanian, vllazni (Geg), a collective derived from vlla ‘brother’ (StAlb vëlla), is a sub-unit of fis roughly translatable as ‘clan.’ The Slavic etymological equivalent of vllazni, however, bratstvo, is the term used for the larger descent group in Zavala (Montenegro), while rod is normally used for the bride’s family. Given that this usage occurs precisely in Montenegro, we can posit Albanian semantic influence.

4.3.1.8 Fictive Kinship

As K. Brown 2005: 45 writes: “Anthropologists working in [Serbia, Macedonia, Greece, Albania, and Bulgaria] have documented the importance of what they term fictive kinship, whereby people unrelated by blood [or marriage –VAF/BDJ] forge bonds that are enduring and sacred.” The example Brown cites is that which is termed kumstvo ‘godfatherhood’ in Balkan Slavic. The term kum can be translated ‘best man [at a wedding]’ but also as ‘godfather,’ as he takes on responsibiities for the children resulting from the wedding.

Late Latin (Balkan Latin?) compater and commater ‘co-father/co-mother’ seem to be the ultimate source of BSl kum/a, (whence Arli Rmi kum), Alb kumbar/ë, Grk κουμπάρ-ος/α (whence kirvo, etc. in many Romani dialects, Boretzky & Igla 1994: s.v.), Rmn cumar, and Aro cumbar/ă, in part through OCS kъmotrъ and in part through Venetian compare, though the specific paths of diffusion within the Balkans are probably lost to history.Footnote ¹¹⁶ The synonymous kalitata, found dialectally in Macedonian (Stoevska-Denčova 2009: 166), appears to derive from Greek καλή τάττα (lit., ‘good aunt’), probably influenced by Macedonian tate ‘daddy.’ The Albanian form kumbara has also been borrowed into the BCMS of Kosovo (Morozova 2019 and sources cited therein). Ultimately, Latin nonnus ‘monk,’ nonna ‘nun, childcarer’ (cf. Itl nonno ‘grandfather,’ nonna ‘grandmother’) is the source of Grk νουν(ν)ός, dialectal νούννος ‘best man and subsequently godparent of first child, one who holds a child at baptism, one who gives child first haircut, etc.’ (also νονός, νονά), also Alb nun ‘godfather, best man’ and nunë ‘godmother, mother of baby getting its first haircut from its godfather,’ and from one of these sources, Mac nun(ko)/nunka ‘godfather/mother,’ Blg (Svilengrad region) nunjo/nuna, Aro nun/nună ‘idem’ (BER IV: s.v.).

The abovementioned Latinate word complexes relate to life cycle events associated with marriage and birth (see §4.3.11), but another socially important fictive kinship relationship in the Balkans was that of blood-brotherhood or -sisterhood. Such fictive kin relations were an additional way to increase solidarity in interpersonal relations. In general, the various Balkan languages have terms of native origin for this culturally shared institution, e.g., for ‘blood-brotherhood’ SSl pobratimstvo, Grk αδελφοποιΐα, Aro fãrtãtsilje, fãrtãtliche (with Turkish -lik), Megl fărtățília, Rmn frăție de cruce (‘of the cross’), StAlb vëllami. It is therefore of interest to note the distribution of borrowed terms for this institution in Albanian: for ‘blood-brother’ (StAlb vëllam), the Slavic pobratim is used throughout Kosovo and Northern Albania as far south as the Mat River as well as in Zajaz (Kičevo/Kërçova), while most of Central and Southern Geg as well as scattered Tosk points as far south as Muzhakat (Grk Mouzakéïka) in Çamëri/Epirus use the Turkism byrazer/burazer/birazer (cf. StTrk birader; Gjinari 2008: Map 265).Footnote ¹¹⁷ We can also note here that the Macedonian dialect of Shulin (Lower Prespa region, Albania) has kušer for ‘cousin’ (Stoevska-Denčova 2009: 82), a clear borrowing from Albanian kushëri ‘idem’ (itself a borrowing from Latin), which, while denoting a genealogical rather than a fictive kin relationship, pertains to a similar social function of extending familial solidarity. Similarly, adžovci ‘paternal cousins’ (from the Turkism adžo ‘paternal uncle’ with Slavic suffixation) occurs among Muslim speakers of BCMS (Morozova 2019).

Another type of fictive kin relationship is seen in the shift of meaning from Grk παραμάνα ‘wetnurse’ as the source of the dialectal Macedonian hybrid form para-majka ‘stepmother’ (Stoevska-Denčova 2009: 142).Footnote ¹¹⁸ Here the cultural connection is that understood by the term milk-mother, a concept present in both Islam and Eastern Orthodox Christianity.

4.3.1.9 Miscellaneous

There are other Balkan instances of borrowing involving kinship-related terms, beyond what has been given. As they do not have a particular unifying theme, they are treated here just as the miscellaneous occurrences that they are.

For instance, there are some nonkinship-related Balkan formations that derive from Turkish kinship terms. The expression discussed above in §4.2.2.6.2 that is found in Greek as αναντάμ μπαμπαντάμ (also αναντάμ παπαντάμ), and in Albanian as denbabaden, meaning ‘in or since the distant past’ but built on ‘mother’ (ana/anne) and ‘father’ (baba), is one such case. Another is Bulgarian babanlăk, cited in Grannes 1996: 164 as meaning “passé éloigné” ‘distant past.’ Grannes derives it via assimilation from a putative Turkish babam-lık, which, like anadan babadan, does not occur in authoritative Turkish lexical sources (Redhouse 1968; Akalın & Toparlı 2005; Ayverdi & Topaloğlu 2006; TDK 1963–1977; TDK 1963–1982).Footnote ¹¹⁹ Here babam is ‘my father’ and -lık the Turkish abstract noun-forming suffix, so that the sense is originally “de temps de mon père” ‘from the time of my father.’ He notes, though, that baban occurs dialectally in Bulgarian (BER I: s.v.) in the meaning ‘papa,’ presumably from Turkish babam with final -m becoming -n; thus, babanlăk could be a Bulgarian creation, since the suffix -lIK was borrowed into Bulgarian and is quite productive (see §4.2.2 above). Still, as argued in §4.2.2.6.2, the absence of such expressions from contemporary Turkish lexical resources need not be decisive here since they may well be dialectal or colloquial phrases of a hundred or more years ago.Footnote ¹²⁰

Finally, as a somewhat secondary use of a term for a kin-determined relationship, we note Albanian bir ‘son’ occurs in Greek folk songs and folk poetry of the Greek communities in Southern Albania; in those works, bir refers specifically to the son of an aga ‘lord.’Footnote ¹²¹ The word in this case is borrowed but in a highly specialized context that is related to the kin use but removed from the immediacy of close kinship. A different, and less specialized, use of borrowed bir (from Albanian) occurs in dialectal Macedonian (Stoevska-Denčova 2009: 58), specifically Nestram (Grk Nestório), Kostur (Grk Kastoria) region), where it is used alongside of sin, the native word for ‘son.’ (See also §§4.3.4.2.2, 4.3.8.)

4.3.1.10 Summary Regarding Kinship Terms

The facts about these kinship terms are interesting in their own right. There is an intriguing versatility in semantics for some, especially the words related to Turkish lâla. Moreover, the fact that so many loanwords are detectable in this general semantic domain is striking, and the import of these kinship loans should be clear. Their occurrence is consistent with everything that is known about the intimate and intense contact situation in the Balkans, especially involving Turkish, coupled with widespread bi- and multilingualism.

Examples of borrowings involving kinship terms can be found even under circumstances that appear at first to be quite different from those in the Balkans. The entry of words like aunt, cousin, and uncle into English, from French,Footnote ¹²² provides a ready case in a familiar language, probably motivated, as Matras 2009: 170 puts it, by the fact that “the use of French words for family relations … [was] fashionable in Medieval English due to … an association with the terms used by the French-speaking social elite.” The social mixing between English and French speakers in the Middle English period might be characterized by some as sustained and intimate contact,Footnote ¹²³ but interestingly, as Matras emphasizes, “this fashion was not extended to closer kin”; this, he suggests, shows “a reluctance on the part of speakers to compromise certain familiar, intimate terms of everyday life,” indicating a difference with the more intimate and intense Balkan situation. The chiefly British English use of Latin mater and pater for ‘mother’ and ‘father’ respectively, especially by schoolboys and sometimes facetiously (as some dictionaries indicate; see also Footnote footnote 88 and note the Turkish Persianism peder ‘father’), may thus be a better example of the borrowing of kin terms in a context of nonintimate contact, but there the special relationship of Latin to upperclass British English speakers may have played a role (like that of Persian to Ottoman Turkish), in a Hockettian prestige-related way; alternatively, when used facetiously, we should recall the insight implicit in Weinreich 1968: passim about bilingualism extending a speaker’s expressive range.Footnote ¹²⁴

Still, when coupled with other indications of borrowing based on everyday conversational interactions, such as the stylistic lowering of the Turkish loans seen here, assigning these instances of borrowing in the Balkans to the ERIC loan class introduced and advocated here is reasonable.

4.3.2.1 Localized Numeral Borrowing

There are several different pairs of languages in the Balkans involved in localized borrowing of numerals, as outlined in the following sections.

4.3.2.2 Teens as ‘X-on-TEN’

As a final numeral-related parallel, we turn to one that has received considerable attention for more than a century. This is the convergence involving the formation of the numerals from eleven to nineteen, cited in Miklosich 1862, Sandfeld 1930, and virtually all of the subsequent Balkan linguistic handbooks.

The basic facts are that in Albanian, Balkan Romance, and Balkan Slavic, the “teens” are expressed as DIGIT-‘on’-TEN, i.e., with a digit, followed by a form of the preposition for ‘on,’ followed by a form of the word for ‘ten,’ thus additively giving the ‘teen’ as ‘DIGIT on-top-of (i.e., beyond) ten.’ Examples for such a “locatival” pattern (as Reichenkron 1958 calls it) include the following, for ‘eleven’ and ‘sixteen,’ to take just two of the nine numerals so constructed (Table 4.5).Footnote ¹²⁸

This type of teen formation is not found in the other Balkan languages, thus neither in Turkish, nor in Romani, nor in Greek (generally speaking, but see below on the Postclassical period): Turkish shows simple concatenation of ‘ten,’ on, with a digit, e.g., onbir ‘11’ (cf. bir ‘one’), onaltı ‘16’ (cf. altı ‘six’), whereas the pattern in Romani is TEN-‘and’-DIGIT, e.g., deš-u-jekh ‘11,’ and the formations found in present-day Greek are concatenated DIGIT-TEN (δέκα) for ‘11’ and ‘12’ (έντεκα/δώδεκα) and TEN-DIGIT for ‘13’ through ‘19’ (e.g., δεκαέξι for ‘16’). Thus this pattern has the appearance of a concentrated lexical Balkanism restricted to a subset of the languages, specifically Balkan Slavic, Balkan Romance, and Albanian.

We say “lexical” here even though the pattern in these forms lies on the borderline between morphology, syntax, and the lexicon; in some ways it resembles the VERB-‘not’-VERB pattern discussed in §4.1. That is, these numerals, represented as DIGIT-‘on’-TEN, constitute both a coherent class of lexical items, albeit a small one, consisting of semantically related forms, and a set of derived combinations (historically, compounds), each with a compositional semantics of existing words. As such, these numerals have a clear internal syntax, but also, as historical compounds, they are lexical items. Given the enriched view of the lexicon advocated in §4.1, such a situation is not problematic, and it points to a need for flexibility in classifying phenomena (sometimes arbitrarily) regarding which domain of grammar they fall into.Footnote ¹³¹

These facts have been widely discussed, in both handbooks and specialized studies, e.g., Reichenkron 1958. Their potential Balkanological interest stems from the comparison between these facts and the patterns for ‘teen’-numeral formation in related languages outside the Balkans and/or at different stages in the development of the languages in the Balkans.

In particular, the formation of teen numerals via ‘DIGIT-on-TEN’ is pan-Slavic; compare the following, from East Slavic and West Slavic, in Table 4.6:Footnote ¹³²

And, this pattern occurs in Balkan Romance but not the rest of Romance, as in Table 4.7, which are simply ‘one-ten,’ ‘six-ten,’ ‘one-ten,’ and ‘ten-six’ respectively, reflecting Latin numerals somewhat faithfully, e.g., undecim ‘11,’ se(x)decim ‘16,’ though with the order of elements reversed in the latter Spanish form. What these mean is that the Balkan Romance numerals represent an innovation away from the Latin situation.Footnote ¹³³

Greek too shows innovation in some of the teens, away from Ancient Greek, but, significantly, not in direction of other Balkan languages. For ‘13’ through ‘19’ in Ancient Greek, the pattern was ‘DIGIT-and-TEN’, e.g., τρεῖς καὶ δέκα for ‘13’ (καί = ‘and’). The modern asyndetic concatenation, e.g., δεκατρείς ‘13’ (‘ten-three’), is thus innovative within Greek. Moreover, it is the same as in Turkish, e.g., onüç ‘idem,’ suggesting that Greek was perhaps influenced by Turkish.

These facts have led most scholars to consider that what is found in Albanian and in Balkan Romance to be the result of Slavic influence on these languages, influence which did not extend to Greek or affect Romani after it entered the Balkans. There are however additional facts to consider that are relevant for evaluating this parallel, giving some reason to doubt its validity as a Balkanism per se.

First, as some have pointed out (e.g., Schaller 1975), Hungarian has a locatival pattern for the teens, with a locative case ending on ‘ten’ but with the digit following, e.g., tizenegy ‘11’ (cf. tíz ‘ten,’ -en ‘LOC’, egy ‘one’). Thus the order of elements differs from the Balkan pattern but the same elements are involved. The Hungarian pattern, however, is more extensive than the Balkan one; as Petrucci 1999: 133, Footnote footnote 30 states: “Hungarian also uses the locative pattern for ‘21’ through ‘29’: husz-on-egy ‘21,’ husz-on-ketto ‘22,’ etc. (Reichenkron 1958:162),” where -on is the back-harmonic allomorph of -en. Interestingly, the language that Hungarian replaced in its region was Slavic, so that this Slavic-type construction in Hungarian could well be a substratum effect in Hungarian (see also Footnote Chapter 6, footnote 5), as Slavic speakers shifted to the new language; the extension of the pattern to the twenties is understandable in language-internal terms as an analogical spread.Footnote ¹³⁴ In the end, though, Hungarian is irrelevant for assessing the Balkan situation, albeit possibly as another instance of the borrowing, or contact-related spread, of numeral formations; moreover, even if an indigenous Hungarian pattern, all it shows is that a language can have such a pattern independently, raising the question of independent origin for the Albanian and Balkan Romance situations.

Second, Greek shows some evidence of a Balkan-style locatival pattern before Slavic speakers entered the Balkans. Hinrichs 1999b: 440–441, for instance, mentions Greek examples from the fifth century CE like τῆς τρίτης ἐπὶ δέκα ‘(of) the third upon ten’ for ‘(of) thirteen,’ and says they are “nach dem balkanischen Muster” (‘according to the Balkan pattern’). And, Mihăescu 1977 mentions the sporadic occurrence of ‘DIGIT-on-TEN’ numerals in Postclassical Greek, such as τρεῖς ἐπὶ δέκα ‘three upon ten’ for ‘thirteen’ from the fourth century and δύο ἐπὶ δέκα ‘two upon ten’ for ‘twelve’ from the fifth century. A conclusion to draw here is that this pattern can arise independently without contact, since the dating of these formations is too early for Slavic influence.Footnote ¹³⁵

Even so, these facts do not seriously alter the picture concerning the grouping of all of Slavic, Albanian, and Balkan Romance. However the final additional consideration does undermine the assessment of this feature as a shared contact-induced trait within these languages during the period when they were in contact in the Balkans. Hamp 1992b has pointed out that the words for ‘twenty’ in Balkan Slavic and Balkan Romance and for ‘thirty’ in Albanian show that the numeral ‘ten’ is treated as masculine in Slavic but feminine in Albanian and Balkan Romance. The following facts show that Slavic, Balkan Romance, and Albanian have gender in the numerals ‘two’ or ‘three’ (for Slavic, the question of neuter gender assignment is irrelevant here) (see Table 4.8).

These forms figure in the multiples of ‘ten’ and show gendered forms, thus revealing a key difference in detail between the Slavic formation and the Balkan Romance and Albanian formations (see Table 4.9).Footnote ¹³⁶

To fully appreciate the significance of this Albanian/Romanian gender mismatch vis-à-vis Slavic, the Baltic numeral facts become important. Baltic offers a mixed picture: Latvian has the Slavic-type formation (cf. vienpadsmit ‘11,’ sešpadsmit ‘16’), whereas Lithuanian does not (cf. vienuolika ‘11,’ šešiolika ‘16,’ with an element –lika, from *leikw- ‘leave,’ not a form of ‘10’ (dešimt), generalized from the pattern seen in Germanic with ‘11’ and ‘12’ (‘one-left (over),’ ‘two-left (over),’ respectively, as if counting on one’s fingers but working with a base-twelve system). Unfortunately, no teens are attested for Old Prussian. Thus Lithuanian sides with Germanic while Latvian sides with Slavic, pairings that make sense in terms of geography, assuming the present-day geographical relationship matches an earlier one, even if not in just the same locale.

Following Hamp 1992b, the interpretation of all of these facts for the Balkans is that Albanian only superficially has the Slavic (-Latvian) pattern, because it also has a different gender for ‘ten’ (although OCS ‘10’ can also show feminine agreement, albeit not in the ordinal numeral). Hamp proposes that there was a period in which the variety of Indo-European which was to become Albanian (Albanoid) was part of a northwest Indo-European grouping in which Germanic and Balto-Slavic and Albanoid were in contact. Albanoid, along with Latvian, and Early Common Slavic, got the DIGIT-‘on’-TEN pattern (presumably as an innovation in one group that diffused into the others) at this time, but altered it somewhat when it moved down into the Balkans and encountered the variety of Latin to which some speakers shifted, yielding Balkan Romance. In this way, Hamp accounts for the similarities between Albanian and Slavic (and Latvian), and the differences between Latvian and Lithuanian, while still allowing for the specific form of the Albanian-Balkan Romance parallel to emerge. And, it is supported in part by other features that link Albanian at a deep level with Balto-Slavic, especially the Winter’s Law lengthening of vowels before the original voiced plain stops (see §1.2.3.1).

The occurrence of the DIGIT-‘on’-TEN locatival pattern for the teen numerals in Balkan Slavic therefore has a different history from the pattern in Albanian and especially Balkan Romance. There is convergence, but it dates from a pre-Balkan period, and moreover, there is an important divergence to consider as well. More specifically, and more importantly for the evaluation of this parallel, this pattern cannot be a Slavic one that has been imposed on other languages of Balkans after their migration thereto, and in that sense it is not a (true) Balkanism.

4.3.3.1 Pronouns

Pronouns seem to occupy a special place in contact situations. While many instances are known of borrowing of indefinite pronouns and, less so, of interrogative pronouns (see Matras 2009: 198–199), the wholesale importation of personal pronouns across languages, while documented (see Thomason & Everett 2001 and Matras 2009: 203–208), seems a much rarer event. Matras attributes this to the function of pronominals and to the fact that many nominal forms are often pressed into service in pronominal functions, especially to indicate complex social relations (e.g., honorifics) rather than simple referentiality per se. All of the examples cited by Matras involve close and fairly intense contact, as with the Molise Romani borrowing of the 3PL pronoun lor from Italian, though in the case of Pirahã apparently borrowing personal pronouns from Tupi-Guarani, there was not necessarily any bilingualism, only the near absence of pronominal use by the Pirahã, “suggesting that borrowing may have served a distinct referential purpose” (Matras 2009: 204). Nonetheless, it is fair to say that pronouns generally rank rather low on scales of borrowability, and pronoun borrowing would not be expected in casual contact situations. If pronouns are to move across language boundaries at all, intense and sustained contact would appear to be a suitable precondition.Footnote ¹³⁸

There are various Balkan loan phenomena that center on pronominals. They are discussed in the sections that follow.

4.3.3.2 AdpositionsFootnote ¹⁴⁶

Adpositions are relational elements that pull pieces of an utterance together by marking how they relate to each other. They constitute a closed class of adverbials that mark specific grammatical functions, in some cases, syntactic arguments, but also, more usually, syntactic adjuncts. As such, they are part of the tightly knit combinations that serve grammatical purposes, thus fitting the profile of less easily borrowed items. And this resistance has been recognized.

Three adverbial notions often expressed by adpositions, especially in the Balkans, namely ‘at,’ ‘in,’ and ‘with,’ appear on the 207-word Swadesh list. Moreover, among the meanings ranked by Tadmor et al. 2010: 235 as showing little historical evidence of being borrowed in their forty-one-language sample, ‘up’ is ranked highest and ‘behind’ is twenty-fourth, and in their composite list of 100 vocabulary meanings that are “basic” by various measures (pp. 238–241), the adverbial notion ‘in’ occurs as number ninety-seven. All of this testimony, taken together, is consistent with the intuition that adpositions, especially those expressing local relations, are less likely targets for borrowing.

Nonetheless, as far as second language acquisition is concerned, Matras 2009: 29 considers “the choice of prepositions modifying objects” to be among the “vulnerable categories” in a bilingual’s codeswitching, and, perhaps relatedly, examples of the borrowing of prepositions do occur, including in the Balkans. Matras 2009: 200 claims this may be so especially for “expressions of more peripheral and more complex local relations,” and in his listing of examples from various parts of the world, notes a few Balkan cases: Greek χωρίς ‘without,’ εκτός ‘except for,’ Romanian în loc de ‘instead,’ and various Slavic prepositions such as bez ‘without’ or vmesto (as in Bulgarian) or namesto (as in Macedonian) ‘instead of’ all occur in, mutatis mutandis, Romani.

To those examples, other Balkan cases can be added, e.g., colloquial Macedonian and older Bulgarian use of the Greek distributive preposition κατά ‘x by x’ with temporal expressions meaning ‘every,’ e.g., Mac katadneven ‘daily,’ katagodišen ‘yearly,’ katautro ‘every morning,’ etc. (cf. Sandfeld 1930: 21–22 and Gerov 1895–1908: s.v.).Footnote ¹⁴⁷ There is also Alb anámesa, Aro anámisa ‘(in) between’ from Greek ανάμεσα ‘idem,’Footnote ¹⁴⁸ and Alb andis ‘instead’ from earlier or dialectal Greek αντίς (now more usually αντί). Moreover, Sasse 1991: 320ff. gives instances of Greek prepositions in Arvanitika, including ανάμεσα and αντίς, as well as εκτός ‘except,’ εναντίον ‘opposite,’ μέχρι ‘until,’ and μεταξύ ‘between.’

And these examples can be multiplied, with some interesting syntactic effects. Bulgarian has gibi ‘like’ from Turkish, as did Ottoman-era Edirne Greek (Ronzevalle 1911: 89). Macedonian and Bulgarian both have karši ‘opposite’ from Trk karşı, as does Albanian (karshi) and Aromanian (carshí), and so did Edirne Greek during Ottoman times (Ronzevalle 1911: 411). For the most part, the Turkish postpositions have become prepositions – as expected since the languages are primarily prepositional – so that the shift is in keeping with the general typological cut of each language. Still, there are exceptions: in Edirne Greek, the postpositional use of gibi is documented (e.g., in Ronzevalle 1911:89), and in Aromanian (Papahagi 1974:371), carshí is postposed (doĭ oamenĭ carshí ‘opposite two men’). Moreover, mene karši ‘opposite my place’ occurs in Macedonian as a marked word order with the focus on mene (VAF field notes 2017). The final –i in all these forms for ‘opposite’ may well reflect a direct borrowing from a local (Balkan) Turkish form karşi (as opposed to being an adaptation of a form like standard Turkish karşı) since Aromanian copied the syntax of the Turkish and Edirne Greek seems in general not to have nativized the Turkish words it borrowed; nonetheless, in principle, in a given language, the word could have entered from a nativizing Balkan intermediary. A number of Romani dialects, e.g., Kaspičan, Sliven Nange, Kalburdži (RMS), and Futadži (Ivanov 2000), borrow a few Turkish postpositions as postpositions, and sometimes even extend this to native forms, e.g., Kaspičan xəzmečestar sora ‘after work’ (lit., ‘work.ABL after’), which borrows the Turkish postposition sonra ‘after’ and calques the ablative governance of Turkish, but also, e.g., Sliven Nange shtar zisendar palal ‘after four days’ (lit., ‘four days.ABL after’), where palal ‘after’ is native and the ablative on ‘days’ calques the Turkish case syntax. Gilliat-Smith (1915/1916: 87) records the use of the Turkish postposition beri ‘since’ as a postposition in various Romani dialects of Bulgaria, sometimes borrowed with the Turkish ablative case suffix that beri governs in Turkish, e.g., Kalajdži Rmi račjardan beri ‘since the night began’ (cf. Rmi rat ‘night’).

Matras 2009: 200 gives instances from Domari of the borrowing of “core prepositions” (from Arabic), and there may be such a case in the Balkans, involving ‘with’ in Greek and Albanian. The languages have identical forms, me in each, but the direction of influence, if any, is not clear. The relationship, if there is one, is complex, and so a more detailed treatment here demonstrates the difficulties in identifying historical relationships for some words.

First, the details of how με developed in Greek are not entirely clear. It is first attested in Medieval Greek (Hatzidakis 1905: 1.474; Bortone 2010: 221). The received wisdom (so Andriotis 1983: s.v., and all lexical compendia, e.g., Dangitsis 1978: s.v.; LKN: s.v.; Babiniotis 1998: s.v.; and Charalambakis 2014: s.v.), following Hatzdakis op. cit., is that it derives from Ancient Greek μετά by haplology and resegmentation operating on μετά with a neuter accusative plural nominal, either the demonstrative ταῦτα or a noun phrase introduced by the definite article τά; that is, μετὰ ταῦτα/μετὰ τά X … became μετ´ Ø X … (or μεØ τα X …) and was then analyzed as a new form με with τα as the article.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ While possible, this account looks ad hoc and is not entirely convincing.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Complicating the issue is the occurrence of an adverbial element με- in Ancient Greek, in composite forms like μέχρι ‘until, up to’ (ModGrk μέχρι) or μέσφα ‘till.’ This με- is surely an inherited element from Proto-Indo-European, as there are cognates elsewhere that parallel these Greek formations, e.g., Armenian merj ‘close, near,’ Gothic miþ ‘with.’ Conceivably, then, Modern Greek με could be an archaism, despite its late attestation, a relic of an independent use of με- not directly attested in Ancient Greek, or it could reflect the reanalysis of affixal adverbial με- to independent word status.Footnote ¹⁵¹

On the Albanian side, the occurrence of me could simply represent the Indo-European element directly, with expanded usage: me, presumably the same one as at issue here, serves to mark the Geg infinitive, occurring with a participle (e.g., me punue ‘to work’), and a preverb usage can be detected in the verb marr ‘take,’ past mora ‘took,’ analyzable as *me with the root found in AGrk ἄρνυμαι ‘win, gain,’ Arme aṙnum ‘take.’Footnote ¹⁵² Some etymological sources on Albanian are simply silent on me (B. Demiraj 1997); Meyer 1891: s.v. says that it is a borrowing from Greek while Çabej 2014: s.v. summarizes the various arguments and opinions, siding with Jokl 1940: 128–129.

However, there are uncertainties on the Greek side, and there are disagreements between Greek and Albanian as to the functions of the respective me’s. Greek με, for instance, is not used as a preverb, though adpositions and preverbs do correlate across Indo-European generally (cf. Greek κατά ‘down,’ πρός ‘toward,’ and even μετά, among others), and no use of με in Greek parallels the Geg use as an infinitival marker. Moreover, Albanian me is not used in adverbial composites of the type of Greek μέχρι.Footnote ¹⁵³

These functional mismatches might point to independent origins for the respective me’s, perhaps independent inheritance from Proto-Indo-European. If a borrowing, despite Meyer’s strong opinion, the directionality is not clear, and it could just as easily be that Greek borrowed from Albanian as vice versa. The fact that the prepositional use of με is not found in Ancient Greek is suggestive that this particular use represents a borrowing, especially since colloquial Medieval Greek was in contact with Albanian (Arvanitika) all over the Hellenic peninsula and the islands.

The semantic matching of the two me’s as prepositions is striking, in that each can mark means, accompaniment, and circumstance (and see also §4.3.10.2). Therefore the specifically prepositional uses may be borrowed, or at least modeled on one another, even if other functions do not match up directly. In the end, a definitive assessment of the history of this convergence cannot go beyond the speculations here, and we are left with a parallelism between Greek and Albanian that may or may not be contact-related.

The matching between Greek and Albanian in the semantics of με/me is instructive, as there is convergence all across the Balkans in preposition use and in the range of meanings for prepositions (cf. Asenova 2002: 97–104). With regard specifically to the semantics of Alb me, Grk με[τά], and BRo cu vis-à-vis BSl sъ, Asenova 2002: 101–102 observes that the Slavic preposition lost its ablative function quite early (it was taken over by Blg/Mac ot/od), thus bringing the BSl preposition in line with the other Balkan languages. The various functions that the respective languages’ prepositions currently have could have developed independently, but under the circumstances the parallels could only have been supported by language contact; see also §4.3.10.2 for more examples and discussion.

4.3.3.3 Negation

Negation clearly ranks among basic vocabulary material both in terms of its grammatical function and its discourse function. The meaning ‘not’ is on the Swadesh list, and, in Matras’s 2009: 208 estimation, negation falls into the “essential and salient semantic relations that are likely to have some kind of structural manifestation in every language.” He takes that as a reason why “not many examples of direct borrowing of word-form can be found” for this category. It is interesting, and telling, therefore, that Balkan languages show examples of the borrowing of negation.

There are several types of contact-induced developments involving negation-related items in the Balkans.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ The most significant for the view of ERIC loans developed here, in that it is the most grammatical and thus the least expected under other than intense contact conditions, is the borrowing of the Greek negation marker μη.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ This marker occurs in Greek with finite present tense verb forms, giving negative imperatives (prohibitives), e.g.: μη φύγεις ‘don’t (you.SG) leave!,’ μη φύγετε ‘don’t (you.Pl) leave!,’Footnote ¹⁵⁶ and it is found in Balkan Slavic and Balkan Romance. Topolińska 1995a: 310 notes the occurrence of mi in the Macedonian of Lagadina (Grk Langadas) and sporadically elsewhere in Aegean Macedonian, and Stojkov 1968: 86 identifies it as characteristic of the Bulgarian of Strandža, in Thrace. Stankiewicz 1986a: 210 mentions mi as one of the “dialectal equivalents” (along with nekaj, nemoj, and n’alaj) in “various areas of Bulgaria and in some dialects of Macedonian and Serbo-Croatian” that can occur with an old truncated infinitive in a prohibitive expression. Papahagi 1974: 796 documents its occurrence in Aromanian, e.g., mi γin’ĭ nculeá ‘Don’t (you) come here.’ The Modern Greek μη derives directly from Ancient Greek μή by regular sound changes (ē > i) and thus it has been part of Greek for millennia. There is nothing like it elsewhere in Slavic or Romance, so its occurrence in the Balkan varieties of these groups is best attributed to borrowing. While borrowing of negation in general may be unusual, the fact that it is prohibitive negation that is borrowed here finds motivation in the conversational and discourse basis of Balkan interaction that characterize ERIC loans, in that prohibitives can be expected to be particularly prevalent in conversational interactions.Footnote ¹⁵⁷

There is also a prohibitive expression that is parallel across several of the languages, in some instances, just in regional dialects. As demonstrated by Papadamou 2019a: 796–797, drawing also on Papadamou & Papanastassiou 2013, there is a prohibitive structure in northern dialects of Greek (of Grammochoria in the Kastoria regional administrative unit) that involves a fossilized 3sg verb form φτάν’ ‘it is enough’ (equivalent to StModGrk φτάνει ‘it reaches; it is enough’), with a following verb, as in φτάν’ κρέντς ‘you spoke enough, do not speak’ (2sg). She notes that this is “reminiscent of similar structures that carry the same function found in the local Slavic [i.e., Macedonian VAF/BDJ] dialects of the region, where, however, instead of φτάν,’ the adverb dosta ‘enough’ is used, e.g., dosta zborvi” ‘enough speaking, do not speak.’ Moreover, she adds that “similar structures are also found in the Aromanian dialects of the region, where duri/dure (Papahagi 1974) is used as a marker of negation, which stems from the Turk. dur ‘stop,’” e.g., duri zburets ‘stop speaking, do not speak.’ These parallels thus represent shared phraseology in the domain of negation that is somewhat grammatical in nature.

A second type of negation-related borrowing involves words that serve as a general statement of negation, an exclamatory utterance related to a discourse context that is equivalent in meaning to English no (and thus opposed to the grammatical not). There are two instances of such forms from Greek entering Southern Aromanian (Vrabie 2000: s.v. no): Greek όχι ‘no,’ giving Aromanian ohi (noted also much earlier by Récatas 1934Footnote ¹⁵⁸), competing with native nu, and Greek μπα, an interjection that means something like ‘ah well’ but also ‘unh unh; no way,’ functioning somewhat like όχι but more showing dismissiveness, giving Aromanian ba (also in Papahagi 1974: s.v.) in a similar meaning. Macedonian has the dismissive ba, while Romanian has ba as an exclamatory negator, as does Bulgarian (‘of course not! Certainly not!’ (Bojanova et al. 1998: s.v.)). Further, Agía Varvára Romani has hayır for ‘no,’ from Turkish (from the period before the speakers settled in a suburb of Athens). And, Manea 2013: 558 observes that neam, from (eastern) Bulgarian njama, occurs as “a Wallachian regionalism” in Romanian for ‘not at all.’ She further notes ba ‘no, nay,’ from Bulgarian ba, which, besides uses in combination with nu ‘no’ to express “the contradiction of an assertion,” can also, “in non-standard contemporary Romanian [serve] as an archaic and colloquial variant of nu ‘no’ … especially with interrogative disjunctive clauses,” e.g., Ai fost la şcoală au ba? ‘have-you been to school or not?’ (see §4.3.4.3.1 for more on ba, also found in Turkish and Judezmo).

Relevant here too is the noise-word, technically an ingressive voiceless dental affricate (alveolar click) – conventionally spelled tsk in English, cq in Albanian, ck in Macedonian and Bulgarian, τσουκ in Greek, țâț in Romanian, and cık (rarely çık) in Turkish, but all phonetically [ʇ] – which is the clucking noise that can accompany an upwards head-nod (downward in Balkan Slavic) for ‘no’ (on which see below). The ingressive velaric dental (dental click) negator occurs from India through the Middle East and northward into the Caucasus and northwestward into the Balkans and southern Italy and Sicily. Its northernmost extent in the Balkans appears to coincide with Ottoman boundaries, while in Italy it appears to coincide with the extent of Magna Graecia, and so is characteristic of southern Italy.

Another case like this is Turkish yok, which as a predicate means ‘there is/are not’ but is used also as a general emphatic negative exclamation meaning ‘no’ or ‘absolutely not.’ This has spread widely in the Balkans: note Balkan Romance ioc, Albanian and Balkan Slavic jok, Greek, as in Τουρκική η Κύπρος – γιοκ! ‘Cyprus Turkish – No way!’,Footnote ¹⁵⁹ and also the former Serbo-Croatian, e.g., in a joke in which a Serb tells a Macedonian that Macedonians use lots of Turkisms, a mi Srbi – jok! ‘but we Serbs, not at all!’.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ The emphatic negator jok also occurs in Croatian sources (SANU 1973: s.v.; Matica Hrvatska 1967: s.v.). Further, yok may be involved in two additional instances of influence, as to use and, in one case, form as well.

The Albanian of Tetovo has uses for its inherited grammatical negator nuk ‘not’ in a way analogous to yok. The inherited grammatical negator nuk (pronounced [nawk] due to a regular diphthongization process in much of East Central Geg) has both functions of yok: it can be used to mean “there isn’t any” and also as a one-word general negative utterance, roughly “no that isn’t the case.” While native nuk ka, (more frequently, s’ka in most of Albanian), with the existential use of the 3SG of ‘have’ (see §7.8.2.2.6), would mean ‘there is none’ and could in principle be reduced to simply nuk, the emphatic exclamatory use of nuk in Tetovo suggests Turkish influence. This is consistent with the status of Turkish as the urban Muslim home language in Tetovo prior to World War Two (Ellis 2003).

In addition, Joseph 2000c, 2001b, developing a suggestion made first by Landsman 1988–1989, argued that irregularities in the development of ModGrk όχι ‘no!’ from AGrk οὐχί ‘not’ can be explained by reference to influence from Trk yok. While όχι must derive in some way from οὐχί, the stress placement and the initial vocalism of όχι are unexpected, as is the functional shift from grammatical negation to a general exclamatory negative.Footnote ¹⁶¹ All three irregularities can be accounted for if yok, in its emphatic negative use, had an impact here, as the initial vowel and stress of όχι matches the stressed -o- of yok, and the functions match as well. Moreover, the chronology of the first appearances of όχι, in the sixteenth century, accords well with this hypothesis of Turkish influence. Greek όχι would thus be a loan hybrid phonologically speaking, with the vocalism and stress of the Turkish form and the consonantism of the Greek (much like Tsakonian ðon, as discussed in §3.2.1.4). Again, given the exclamatory nature of όχι and yok, conversational interaction must have been the medium for such influence. Rijksbaron 2012, however, has addressed each of these points, finding evidence from the pre-Turkish era in Greek showing that each irregularity can be documented for Greek before Turkish influence was possible; he concludes that at the most, Turkish served to enhance the selection from among existing variants already present in Greek. (See also §4.3.3.1.1 on the Turkish negator hiç ‘nothing, not at all.’)

Finally, a third Balkan development involving negation is gestural in nature, thus paralinguistic, but still contact-related. Matras 2009: 196 is inclined to see gestural borrowing as part of discourse-related borrowing, drawing on the observation in Salmons 1990 about “the wholesale adoption of English discourse markers in Texas German as part of the overall convergence of communication patterns, including gestures,” and we agree with this assessment.Footnote ¹⁶² Gestural borrowings in the Balkans are part of the conversationally based interactions associated with ERIC loans. Moreover, a gesture can only be borrowed if seen, so that gestural borrowing necessarily involves face-to-face interaction between speakers. The gesture in question here is the upwards nod of the head for ‘no’ – realized sometimes even as just the raising of the eyebrows – with an optional dental or alveolar click, as mentioned above. It is found in Greek, Balkan Romance, Albanian, Balkan Slavic (slightly modified in Bulgarian), and Turkish. The spread of this usage is thus clear, but the directionality is not. It occurs outside of the Balkans, e.g., in some Arabic speech communities (e.g., Lebanon), as well as Persian, and in India as well, suggesting it may have been imported into the Balkans through Turkish. At the same time, though, at least as far as Italy is concerned, it occurs in the south and in Sicily but not in the north, thus coinciding with the borders of ancient Magna Graecia, and therefore suggesting that it has been part of Greek for millennia (Morris et al. 1979). Nonetheless, whatever the source and direction of its spread, it clearly has diffused widely, and since it involves speakers interacting directly, face-to-face, it necessarily is tied to conversation, and is thus consistent with our ERIC loan rubric.Footnote ¹⁶³

4.3.3.4 Complementizers

Complementizers, or subordinating conjunctions, are part of what may be termed “clause-linking strategies,” and they serve as markers in the discourse of crucial relations between clauses and, ultimately, utterances. They are lexical items but have grammatical and discourse functions. As such, they can be borrowed but their borrowing is tied to their role in discourse.

Matras 2009: 194, 196 gives numerous examples of the borrowing of certain discourse “connectors” (see below in §4.3.4.1 on these) which for him include complementizers, and suggests that “some of the most frequently borrowed subordinating conjunctions express concessive relations, causal relations, purpose, and conditionality,” noting further that “factual complementisers appear to be more borrowing-prone than non-factual complementisers.”

In the Balkans, the borrowing of such elements is well documented, with instances to be found of borrowed causal, factual, conditional, concessive, and some temporal subordinators. For instance, Agía Varvára Romani has temporal molis ‘as soon as,’ from Greek (Igla 1996: s.v.). Bulgarian has causal zerem ‘because, since,’ either from Gagauz (Grannes 1996: 144) or Turkish (standard Turkish zira ‘because, since,’ Grannes et al. 2002: s.v.) and Macedonian zer, zere ‘idem’ is also from Trk zira (Jašar-Nasteva 2001: 231), also BSl čunki(m) and dialectal Albanian çynçi, çunçi, çimçi, qymqe from Turkish çünki ‘because’ (Grannes et al. 2002: s.v; Jašar-Nasteva 2001: 36, 213, 230; Boretzky 1976: 38, 111). Both Bulgarian and Macedonian have oti, in the causal sense ‘because, for that reason,’ from earlier (Classical up into Byzantine and Medieval) Greek ὅτι, in the meaning ‘for which/that reason.’Footnote ¹⁶⁴ The entry of this form into Balkan Slavic is relatively early, predating the Ottoman period, as it occurs in the thirteenth-century Baniško gospel (Dogramadžieva & Rajkov 1981), so that it may have actually been a learnèd borrowing, found also in OCS (Sadnik & Aitzetmüller 1955: s.v.). Moreover, the causal meaning of ὅτι is available even today in Modern Greek (LKN: s.v. ότι2, Charalambakis 2014: s.v. ότι²), so that the chronology of the borrowing cannot be determined with any precision.

Another sense of ὅτι, meaning simply ‘that’ as a factual subordinate clause introducer, thus as a simple complementizer, was also borrowed into Bulgarian and Macedonian. This factual subordinator use is found in the Romani of Greece, too (Igla 1996: s.v.), and other varieties of Balkan Romani also borrow a local factual subordinator. In each case, as Matras 2009: 196 describes it, “the original Romani factual complementiser kaj is often replaced, in the respective dialects, by Greek oti, by Bulgarian či [< če with vowel reduction – VAF/BDJ], by Romanian-derived ke” and so on. He notes further that “the non-factual complementiser (inherited te) is virtually never replaced.” This latter fact means that the Balkan distinction of factual versus nonfactual complementation (see §7.7.2.1.3.1), realized in Greek via ότι/πως vs. να, in Macedonian via deka vs. da, in Bulgarian via če vs. da, in Albanian via se/që vs. të, in Aromanian via cã vs. si, in Meglenoromanian cã vs. s,’ and in Romanian via că vs. să, was carried over into and established, or perhaps maintained in, Romani through these borrowings.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ We can also note here Gostivar WRT se ‘that, because’ borrowed from Albanian se ‘idem’ (Jašar-Nasteva 1970: 298). Here, Jašar-Nasteva makes the point that although the number of Albanian borrowings into Gostivar WRT is relatively small vis-à-vis Macedonian lexical items, such borrowings as exist tend to be function words.

In the area of concessives and conditionals, forms are borrowed that are based on the Greek word μακάρι, an old case form of Ancient Greek μάκαρ ‘blessed’ that in Postclassical Greek came to mean ‘God willing,’ and then took on grammatical use introducing wishes, in that way becoming complementizer-like. Judezmo of Istanbul (Varol Bornes 2008: 392) has makaré or makari with the imperfect subjunctive in the sense of ‘if only,’ e.g., makaré fuera ‘if only this had been … .’ Vlax Romani (Hancock 1995: 113) has màkar kẹ for ‘although,’ and màkar te for ‘even if,’ Macedonian, Bulgarian, and BCMS all have makar ‘at least,’ makar što/če/da for ‘even though,’ and makar i da for ‘even if; although,’ Aromanian has macar(im)Footnote ¹⁶⁶ as an adverb meaning ‘at least’ but also as a connective, co-occurring with the subordinator si, meaning ‘even if,’ and Meglenoromanian has măcar si ‘although’ as well as salde si ‘only if’ (cf. Rmi salde ‘only,’ Mac sal ‘only,’ all from Turkish). For ‘if’ in Meglenoromanian, there is acu from Macedonian ako, and in Aromanian, one finds ama că, where ama, found all over the Balkans as ‘but’ (cf. §4.3.4.1), can here represent Greek άμα ‘when, if.’ In addition, Aromanian also has composite forms s-easte că/s-fúre că that are based on forms of the verb ‘be,’ with fúre deriving from the Latin perfect subjunctive of ‘be,’ fuerit. In that way, s-fúre că looks somewhat like Alb në qofte se ‘if; in case that’ (lit., ‘in may.it.be (optative) that’), so that calquing – of uncertain direction however – is a possibility here. Meglenoromanian also borrows Mac dali, interrogative marker meaning ‘if,’ in the sense of ‘whether.’ Romani also has dali as well as ako ‘if’ from Macedonian and eger ‘if’ from Turkish (StTrk eğer).

Recognizing calquing and composite complementizers brings an Albanian–Greek complementizer parallel into focus, though most likely not one at the level of conversational usage. Both languages have composite forms for ‘although’ that are derived from prepositional ‘with’ plus ‘all’ plus the factual complementizer, as does Aromanian: Alb megjithëse (me + gjithë + se), ModGrk μολονότι (με + ολο- ‘all’ + οτι), Aro cu tute cã. The Greek, however, is a learnèdism, as the -ν- as a neuter singular ending is a Katharevousa feature, and the Albanian and Aromanian forms are likely calqued from that. Nonetheless, such parallels depend on a degree of awareness of the lexicon and grammar of the source language on the part of some recipient language speakers, and to that extent are indicative of one dimension of multilingualism in the Balkans.Footnote ¹⁶⁷

4.3.3.5 Interrogation

An interrogative marker serves a discourse function, but is also grammatical in that it is an indicator of a major sentence-type. As such, it would be expected to be somewhat resistant to borrowing, so it is significant that an overt marker for yes-no questions has been borrowed in the Balkans.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ In particular, the Turkish postpositive mI, which is positioned in the string of postverbal elements before the personal endings, e.g., türkçe biliyor mu sunuz ‘Do you know Turkish?’ (= ‘Turkish know.prog q 2pl’) and shows vowel harmony with the verbal stem, was borrowed – in its rounded back harmonic form mu – into Edirne Greek during Ottoman times. Ronzevalle 1911: 451 describes it as “pleinement adoptée par les rouméliotes” (‘fully adopted by the Roumeliotes’) and gives the following examples:

1. 1. a. μπουρείς μου

      can.2SG Q

      ‘Can you (do it)?’ (Standard Greek: μπορείς?)

   2. b. θαρτ’ς             μου

      FUT.come.2SG Q

      ‘Will you come?’ (Standard Greek: θά ‘ρθεις?)

This marker seems simply to be phrase- or utterance-final in the Greek, occurring after the personal endings (e.g., 2SG -(ει)ς), so that it has a somewhat different syntactic status from its Turkish source. Nonetheless, its grammatical marking function is carried over in the transfer.Footnote ¹⁶⁹

Various dialects of Balkan Romani show reflexes of borrowed Turkish mI as well as the Slavic yes-no question marker li, also borrowed, though in each case these interrogative markers are sometimes transformed into Romani evidential markers; see §6.2.5.3 for details and discussion. Slavic li is also borrowed as an interrogative marker into Aromanian (Cuvata 2009: s.v.). Turkish mI also occurs in other Balkan expressions (see §4.3.4.2.1).

4.3.3.6 Articles

Articles are among the least commonly borrowed elements cross-linguistically in terms of their form, as noted by Matras 2009: 216,Footnote ¹⁷⁰ excluding cases where an article is incorporated in a lexical borrowing, as with Spanish algodón ‘cotton’ with the Arabic definite article al- carried along with the borrowed noun (quṭun). Interestingly, though, one case that Matras does cite is from the Balkans, involving the Romani of Epirus in contact with Albanian. In that variety of Romani, an indefinite article with the form njek occurs, most likely “a blend of inherited Romani (j)ek and Albanian një” (p. 217).

It is worth mentioning here a parallel involving articles in the Balkans that is not quite as it seems. The Romani definite article (for more details on which see §6.1.2.2) has the form o in the masculine nominative and normally i in the feminine, which are quite strikingly identical to the Greek forms. Nonetheless, while some observers have intimated that contact with Greek may be involved in this parallel – Messing 1988: 18 says “It is probably not an accident that the Greek definite article for these two forms [Romani o and i] duplicates them” – the formal convergence is most likely merely a coincidence. Oblique forms of the article in some Central and Vlax Romani dialects preserve l- (< *t) from the early Indic demonstrative source of the Romani article, and one can note that masculine nouns in Romani typically end in -o and feminine nouns in -i, so that those phones, on system-internal grounds, are associated with those respective genders (Sampson 1926: 247; Matras 2002: 96–98; Boretzky & Igla 2004: Map 47). At the same time, however, the deployment of the article in Romani, e.g., its use with proper names, does point to the possibility of early Greek influence (Boretzky 2000a).

There is one contact effect involving articles in the Balkans that is noteworthy. While the quite Balkanized Torlak dialects of eastern BCMS do have a (postposed) definite article, there is some retreat in the use of the article in the dialect of Niš and the Timok dialects in general and under normative pressure from standard Serbian, which does not have a definite article (Toma 1998).Footnote ¹⁷¹

4.3.4.1 Connective Discourse Elements

A major aspect of conversation involves agreeing or disagreeing with an interlocutor, and particles marking these functions clearly connect speakers to previous utterances and indicate a speaker’s stance. In §4.3.3.3, instances of the borrowing of such discourse-related (as opposed to grammatical) negators are presented, and here the affirmative side, particles meaning ‘yes,’ are added. Several instances are documented: Slavic da is ‘yes’ in Romanian, and according to Popnicola 1997, it occurs locally in the Aromanian of Bitola; Aromanian dialectally also shows po, from Albanian, and malista ‘yes indeed,’ from Greek (Vrabie 2000: s.v.).Footnote ¹⁷⁵ Moreover, the Meglenoromanian spoken on the Greek side of the current border uses ne for ‘yes’ and ohi for ‘no’ (R. Atanasov 2016: 141, cf. Grk ναι, όχι). Albanian po also occurs in some dialects of Romani (e.g., Konopar Arli in Skopje). In earlier Bulgarian, though now obsolete, Turkish evet ‘yes’ is found, and dialectally the affirmatives ăhă, from dialectal Turkish ıhı, and zar, from Turkish zira, occur in the meaning ‘yes; right’ (Grannes et al. 2002: s.vv.).Footnote ¹⁷⁶

Quite widespread in the Balkans is a vocal gesture of affirmation with the form e. It is used in BSl to confirm something that someone else has said (i.e., not as an affirmative response to a discourse-new kind of yes/no question soliciting real information), in that sense functioning rather like English right. Albanian also has it, as does Greek, and in the Aromanian ‘yes’ (Cuvata 2006: s.v.; Papahagi 1974: s.v.). While it is a short utterance that undoubtedly belongs to the range of interjectional noises that humans can make universally, the functional match across these languages is striking.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ What is not at all certain is the direction and source of diffusion, and it could well be that it was independently arrived at in each language but mutually reinforced through contact.

A connection of a different sort that also diffuses in the Balkans is the linking of chunks of discourse additively and adversatively. Matras 2009: 194 claims that such connectives show a “borrowability hierarchy based on contrast [of] but > or > and,” so we take them in this order, though it is not always clear that this hierarchy is followed in the Balkans.

Certainly the connective with the greatest spread in the Balkans is ‘but,’ in that a subset of the forms ama/ami/ma/mi, each with various nuances of adversative value, occurring as a discourse marker and/or conjunction, is found in virtually all of the languages. Fielder 2008, 2009, 2010, 2015, 2019 has discussed this most thoroughly from the pan-Balkan angle, with other works that focus on the uses in particular languages. The distribution of the relevant forms is given in Table 4.10.Footnote ¹⁷⁸

The source is unclear and much disputed, as there are several plausible contact sources (e.g., Arabic into Turkish and then Turkish into other languages for ama, Italian into Greek and Albanian (and BCMS) for ma, Greek into other languages for ami (ΜGrk αμμή, etc.) as well as plausible internal sources in some cases (e.g., ama from Greek αμμή (from AGrk ἄν μή ‘if + not’) with final -α by analogy to αλλά ‘but,’ and μα by apocope from άμα), all of which make for the possibility of conflicting, and largely unprovable, claims.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ For instance, άμα/amma occurs in Greek and in Turkish and given the extent of Greek influence in the vocabulary of Aromanian, the occurrence of ama there could be due to Greek; however, Turkish has also had a considerable impact on the Aromanian lexicon, so that ama could be a Turkism there, as indeed Vrabie 2000: 83 judges it.Footnote ¹⁸⁰

Besides the spread of the (a)mV word(s) for ‘but,’ other borrowing of adversative/contrastive connectives in the Balkans is attested. Meglenoromanian borrows tucu from Macedonian tuku ‘but, rather.’ Romani of Agía Varvára has borrowed αλλά ‘but’ from Greek (Matras 2009: 194) and ala occurs in Bulgarian and Macedonian sources though it is not much used in the present day, if at all (Fielder 2008: 116). A form omos ‘however,’ from Greek όμως ‘however,’ is reported dialectally for Macedonian by Budziszewska 1983. Also, several Turkish ‘but’-like connectives are borrowed (some of which have other uses as well), see Table 4.11.

Finally, diffusion of ‘but’ is not restricted just to Balkan sources, if μα/ma in Greek and especially Albanian derives, as is quite plausible, from Italian ma.Footnote ¹⁸¹

We can also note here the calqued adversative whose literal meaning is ‘good but’ and which has the semantics of ‘however’: Trk iyi ama, Rmi šukar ama, Alb mirëpo, BSl [h]arno ama, Aro gine ama, Megl bun ama, Grk καλά άμα. A similar convergent adversative is the use of ‘and’ with subjunctive (i.e., DMS + finite verb) to mean ‘even if,’ e.g., BSl i da, Alb edhe të, BRo și s[ă], Grk και να, as in Mac i da dojdeš, fajde nema ‘even if you come, it’s no use (lit., ‘there is no profit’)’ (cf. also Sandfeld 1930: 108 regarding ‘and’ plus jussive in this meaning).

In the case of words for the disjunctive connective ‘or,’ there is one quite widely diffused form and other more localized borrowings. The widespread form is ya in the expression ya … ya meaning ‘either … or,’ and it is found in Romani, Greek (για … για), Aromanian (ia … ia), Albanian, Balkan Slavic and Meglenoromanian (ja … ja), and Turkish (ya … ya). The locus of diffusion for these languages is surely Turkish,Footnote ¹⁸³ as Matras 2009: 194 has it, commenting on Romani of Agía Varvára, though the presence of the word in Greek means that the Agía Varvára source in principle could be Greek as the local and “current contact language” rather than Turkish as “an older contact language.” Other cases where the source is clear are the appearance of Macedonian ili ‘or’ and a ‘or, whereas’ in the Turkish spoken in North Macedonia and in Aromanian (Papahagi 1974: 675) as well as ili … ili … ‘either … or … ’ in Meglenoromanian, the occurrence in Albanian and in SDBR of i from Greek ή ‘or’ and yohut in Albanian from Turkish yahut ‘or; otherwise’ (Dell’Agata 1966), and the borrowing into Bulgarian of ha … ha and Macedonian a … a from Turkish (Grannes et al. 2002: s.v.; Jašar-Nasteva 2001: 229).Footnote ¹⁸⁴ Similarly, Agía Varvára Romani (Igla 1996: 296) has the negative disjunctive connective ne … ne ‘neither … nor,’ from Turkish.Footnote ¹⁸⁵

The additive/conjunctive connective ‘and’ also yields examples of borrowing in the Balkans. Macedonian simplex ‘and,’ i, is borrowed into Aromanian,Footnote ¹⁸⁶ and also into the Turkish spoken in North Macedonia, whence there is “reciprocity,” in that the doubled hem … hem of Turkish, meaning ‘both … and,’ enters Macedonian, Aromanian, and Meglenoromanian (as em … em …), as well as Albanian, Bulgarian, Romanian, and Romani; single [h]em ‘and, too, and yet,’ occurs in all these languages was well as in the Greek of Ottoman-era Edirne (Ronzevalle 1911: 456). A borrowed form that is additively connective in that it keeps the discourse flowing is the Turkish demek ‘that is to say, namely,’ found throughout the Balkan languages, including Romani (e.g., Igla 1996: s.v.), Albanian (Boretzky 1976), Aromanian (Papahagi 1974: s.v. demec), Meglenoromanian, Macedonian, and colloquially in Bulgarian (Grannes et al. 2002: s.v.) and dialectally in Greek (LKNonline: s.v. ντεμέκ).Footnote ¹⁸⁷

The widespread occurrence of the amV word(s) for ‘but’ along with the wide distribution of ya for ‘or’ and the more restricted borrowing of ‘and’ would seem to suggest that Matras’s hierarchy mentioned above is suitably instantiated in the Balkans. However, it is important to realize that in a language that attests two of these connectives, they need not have been borrowed in the sequence predicted by the hierarchy; in the absence of appropriate historical records, one has to be agnostic.

We turn now to two case studies which are sufficiently complex to require presentation in considerable detail.

4.3.4.2 Modifying and Expressive Discourse Elements

This last element, de, as noted, actually does more than just connect; it adds attitude and speaker stance, and injects a certain expressiveness or tone into the utterance, thus modifying it in some way.Footnote ¹⁹⁵ There are also elements that are less expressive but fully modificational nonetheless. Both of these types of modifying discourse elements abound in conversation, and they have spread quite widely around the Balkans.

4.3.4.3 Interjections

Since the classification of discourse markers adopted here is necessarily somewhat arbitrary, several interjections have already been mentioned, such as the affirmation markers of §4.3.4.1,Footnote ²¹¹ and the exclamatory utterances with expressive value of §4.3.4.2.2. Still, there are others, and we present here first some miscellaneous cases involving exclamations, and then focus on two types that are well instantiated in the Balkans and allow for greater depth of analysis: attention-getting words and exhortative words.

4.3.7.1 Whole-Word Reduplication

Seliščev 1925: 46, 51–57 appears to be the first to draw attention to the Balkan “repetition du substantif, d’ordinaire à l’accusatif, pour exprimer des différenciations dans une quantité, des parties isolées, des groupes, des series” (‘repetition of a substantive, usually in the accusative, to express differences in a quantity, isolated parts, groups, series’), and he illustrates it with examples from Bulgarian, Albanian, Greek, and Aromanian. This phenomenon was mentioned by Sandfeld 1930: 162, referring to Seliščev. Asenova 2002: 276–290, as noted above, is the only modern handbook treatment of the Balkan languages that mentions this construct as a possible Balkanism; Asenova 1984 is replete with Greek and Bulgarian examples. A sampling is given in (4.13):Footnote ²⁴⁸

1. (4.13)

   Alb	copa-copa ‘all in pieces’ (Newmark 1998: s.v.)
   	copëra-copëra ‘piece by piece’ (Seliščev 1925: 53, from the 1802 Tetraglosson of Daniil Moschopolitis; see Kristophson 1974)
   	pika-pika ‘one drop after another, drop by drop’
   	pjesë-pjesë ‘piece by piece’
   	valë-valë ‘wave upon wave’
   	vende-vende ‘here and there; in several places’
   Aro	agalea galea ‘nonchalantly’ (Papahagi 1974: 116; base word from Grk αγάλια ‘slowly’)
   	bucãtsi bucãtsi ‘piece by piece’ (Seliščev 1925: 53)
   	pale pale ‘line by line’ (borrowed from Alb)
   Grk	τοίχο τοίχο ‘along the wall’
   	γιαλό γιαλό ‘along the sea’
   	δύο δύο ‘two by two’
   	κομμάτι κομμάτι ‘piece by piece’ (LKNonline: s.v.)
   	φιρί φιρί ‘insistently’ (from Trk fırıl fırıl, LKN: s.v.; Babiniotis 1998: s.v.)
   Blg	na vălni na vălni ‘in waves’ (Sofia region, Seliščev 1925: 52)
   	na tumbi na tumbi ‘in groups’ (Sofia region, Seliščev 1925: 52)
   	kupove kupove ‘in heaps’ (Sandfeld 1930: 162)
   Mac	komati komati ‘piece by piece’ (borrowed from Grk, Seliščev 1925: 53, from the 1802 Tetraglosson of Daniil Moschopolitis; see Kristophson 1974)
   	kupoi kupoi ‘in heaps’ (Prilep dialect, Seliščev p. 53)
   	na tumbi tumbi ‘in groups’ (Prilep, Seliščev p. 52)Footnote 249
   	(po)leka-poleka ‘slowly, little by little’
   Rmn	încet-încet ‘slowly-slowly, little by little’
   Trk	yavaş yavaş ‘slowly, gently, take it easy’

Seliščev observes (p. 54) that the doubled pattern occurs in Turkish (e.g., kapı kapı ‘door to door,’ cf. Göksel & Kerslake 2005: 100), and indeed one can find instances of this doubling in the Balkans with Turkish-derived words, as with Alb dallgë-dallgë ‘in waves; wavy,’ Mac dalgi dalgi ‘idem’ (cf. Trk dalga dalga ‘idem’).

Seliščev thinks that Turkish played some role in this Balkan reduplicative pattern, in particular the bare nominal doubling found in some parts of modern Balkan Slavic, such as the Macedonian kupoi kupoi (StMac kupovi kupovi) and Bulgarian kupove kupove noted above in (4.13), but he is quick to point out that a certain type of nonbare nominal doubling occurs in early Slavic and the bare type occurs in early Greek, thus predating contact with Turkish in each case. The Slavic Gospels have na spody na spody ‘by groups,’ in Mark 6: 39–40, with the preposition na included in the doubling, and Greek here has συμπόσια συμπόσια ‘by companies’ (6: 39) and πρασιαὶ πρασιαί ‘by groups’ (6: 40). Other examples in the New Testament, e.g., Mark 6: 7 ‘by twos,’ with δύο δύο in the Greek compared with dъva dъva, literally ‘two two’ in the Slavic Gospels but also dъva i dъva ‘two and two’ and dъva nъ dъva ‘two but two’ in different early (eleventh-/twelfth-century) renditions, suggest that the simple bare-element doubling in early Slavic was a calque on the Greek and that, as Seliščev (p. 56) puts it, “le redoublement du nom de nombre avec valeur distributive répugnait au sens linguistique des Slaves” (‘doubling of a noun of number with distributive value was repugnant to the linguistic sensibility of the Slavs’), so that something, e.g., a conjunction, needed to be added to make the doubling in the translation of the Gospel more natively Slavic (hence dъva i dъva/dъva nъ dъva). And, there are instances in Greek that predate the New Testament, most importantly the Classical Greek example μῡρία μῡρία ‘by the tens-of-thousands’ (lit., ‘ten-thousand ten-thousand’) found in Aeschylus’s Persians, l.980 (472 BCE).Footnote ²⁵⁰

But far from being a Greek pattern that spread, there are indications that the doubling could simply be independent in each language, a possibility that Seliščev both is aware of and does not entirely dismiss and that Sandfeld is inclined to credit. That is, a doubling pattern is found in many languages in expressions of distributivity and what Moravcsik 1978: 318 calls “scattered plurality,” e.g., Quileute, Twi, Yoruba, and Mitla Zapotec, and so it most likely reflects simply a universal iconic way of referring to multiple instantiations of essentially the same entity. Both Seliščev (p. 46) and Sandfeld (p. 162) note its occurrence in Italian, and in broader Indo-European terms, it is a regular compound type in early Sanskrit (āmreḍita), e.g., dive-dive ‘day by day; daily,’ pade pade ‘in every place,’ and elsewhere; thus the pattern could in principle be a parallel inheritance in each language from Proto-Indo-European and not a contact phenomenon. Indeed, Stolz 2006 (see also Stolz 2003) treats whole-word reduplication, what he calls “total reduplication,” as a potential language universal, so that its occurrence in any given language, under this view, need not involve contact or inheritance.

Still, for the specific doubling that occurs in modern Balkan Slavic without an added element cited above, Turkish influence can reasonably be invoked to explain the absence of a conjunction. Moreover, for individual lexemes or lexical constructs, contact is certainly indicated, as the borrowed komati komati (Mac) and agalea galea (Aro) examples above show. One widespread reduplicative phrase in the Balkans is Turkish yavaş yavaş ‘slowly, gradually’ (lit., ‘slow slow’), a doubling of yavaş ‘slow, gentle, docile,’ a form which has also entered these languages (see Table 4.16).

The languages also show other formations with similar meaning composed of native, or at least non-Turkish, material; see Table 4.17.

And in some instances, influence from the reduplicated pattern can be detected; while Greek σιγά ‘slowly’ derives from the Ancient Greek adverb σιγῇ ‘in silence’ (a frozen dative case),Footnote ²⁵² the earlier form occurs only singly, not doubled; hence the repetition in σιγά σιγά is likely to be a reflection of the doubling pattern with this sememe in neighboring contact languages.Footnote ²⁵³

Moreover, the Albanian forms dalë dalë/dalë ngadalë/dalëngadalë may reveal a further, different contact-related detail. Although the semantics of the connection are challenging, inasmuch as adjectival dalë by itself means ‘protruding, sticking out; worldly,’ these forms appear to involve whole-word doubling. The latter two show the occurrence of a linking element, in this case a preposition, between the doubled pieces. That is, the Albanian dalë ngadalë/dalëngadalë presumably are etymologically *dalë nga dalë , where nga is the preposition ‘from’ (Geg kah, and note Geg kadal ‘slowly’). This use of nga is striking, as it agrees with what is seen in Slavic and with what, to judge from Seliščev’s discussion summarized above, is needed at an early stage to make the doubling suitable for use in Slavic; it is reasonable to suppose then that the Albanian usage here reflects a contact effect and is due to Slavic influence, the result of a calquing on a Slavic model. Similarly, while Aromanian in 1802 showed bucãtsi bucãtsi for ‘piece by piece,’ as given in (4.13) above, Papahagi 1974: 289 cites the same expression as bucãtsi di bucãtsi, with the preposition di ‘from’ between the doubled pieces, just as in the presumed Albanian *dalë nga dalë (cf. also Mac leka poleka), again a likely contact effect, either via Slavic or via Albanian.

4.3.7.2 Turkish-Origin Reduplication Patterns

Besides this whole-word doubling, Turkish has two reduplicative patterns that have had an impact on the Balkan lexicon. These are detailed in the two subsections that follow.

4.3.7.3 Other Reduplications

All of the languages show other reduplications with various forms and various meanings. Romanian, for instance, has talmeş-balmeş for ‘jumble,’ and Greek has (somewhat onomatopoetic) τσαφ-τσουφ ‘in an instant.’ However, none of these have any systematic status across the several languages nor a specific or demonstrable contact dimension. There is, however, one reduplicative phrase with expressive value that occurs widely throughout the Balkans that shows several variant forms with varied meanings but most centering on inadequate verbal skills. There is some dispute as to the ultimate source, but its widespread manifestation makes it noteworthy in this regard, no matter what its origin is.Footnote ²⁶⁴ Relevant forms are given in (4.15):Footnote ²⁶⁵Footnote ²⁶⁶

1. (4.15)

   Trk	çatra-patra ‘incorrectly and brokenly (speaking a foreign language)’
   	çıtır pıtır ‘with a sweet babble (said of the talking of a child), prattling’
   	çat pat ‘a little, some (ability in speaking a language)’
   Grk	τšὰτ πὰτ (OEGrk, Ronzevalle 1911: 287, 1912: 70)
   	tšatır patır (OEGrk, Ronzevalle 1911: 288, 1912: 70; also BDJ field notes (Alexandroupolis region, from a twenty-year-old         speaker, 1981)
   	τσάτρα πάτρα ‘stumblingly (with reference to speaking a language)’
   	tšátara pátara (OEGrk, Ronzevalle 1911: 287, “plus expressif que τšὰτ πὰτ pour dire mal parler une langue” (‘more expressive than         τšὰτ πὰτ for saying ‘to speak a language badly’)
   Blg	čatăr-patăr ‘idiom (dial[ectal]) so-so, passably, poorly’ (Grannes et al. 2002)
   	čatara-patara ‘idem’
   	čatra-patra ‘idem’
   	čat-pat ‘idem’
   Mac	čat-pat ‘idem’
   Aro	ceat-pat ‘so-so, comme si comme ça’ (Papahagi 1974: 432)
   Rmn	ceat-pat ‘idem’
   Alb	çatrapil ‘confusion, disorder’

This pattern may in some sense be related to the m-doubling since it involves whole-word repetition of a word with a labial initial, though in this case a p-; note too that labials are involved in the intensive prefixation reduplication as prefix-final elements. Still, this particular case is not the borrowing of any sort of pattern per se but is rather a lexical borrowing, albeit interesting and relevant as ERIC loans given the phrase’s colloquial character.

4.3.7.4 Conclusions Regarding Reduplication

By its very nature, as argued in §4.3.7.1, reduplication lends itself well to expressive functions, and thus to conversational uses. All of the Balkan evidence cited here illustrates this point well. Given that there are several instances of the borrowing of reduplicative forms in the Balkans, there can be no doubt that reduplication can thrive in situations of language contact, and the positive suggestions of reduplicative patterns spreading make that all the clearer. In these ways, then, reduplication in the Balkans fits in well with the ERIC-loan typology advanced here, both as to its function and as to its role in discourse and conversational interaction. As such, it provides support for viewing the nature of language contact in the region as both intense and intimate.

4.3.9.1 Body Parts

Balkan languages show both differences and similarities in the distribution of dedicated versus metaphorical terms for body parts. Thus, for example, both English and the Balkan languages have specific terms for vagina/vulva – English cunt, Slavic pizda and its derivatives (pička etc., Bulg putka is of different origin, BER VI), which is cognate with Albanian pidh (Hamp 1968; but note also piçkë, piç, from Slavic), Grk μουνί (likely from Vtn mona), Trk am, Rmi mindž, BRo pizdă/kizdă (a borrowing from Slavic). Romani is the source of BSl mindža, which in turn is the likely source of Trk mınca/minco (since final -inç – devoicing is automatic – is permissible in Turkish). On the other hand, terms for ‘penis’ in English such as cock, dick, prick all have other potential meanings (although in context they are unambiguous), while in the Balkan languages SSl kur and its derivatives, albeit etymologically related to CoSl *kurŭ ‘cock,’ are unambiguous (but see Loma 2004 for alternative explanations). The phallic qualities attributed to the rooster are such that the parallel between English and Balkan Slavic is merely typological. Bulgarian also has East Slavic huj.Footnote ²⁹⁶ The bird metaphor is also the source of Balkan Romance pulă < Lat pulla ‘birdie, etc.’ According to Meyer 1891: 176, Albanian kar, which is the vox propria, is borrowed from Romani, for which this word preserves the original meaning, cf. Prkt kāṭa ‘penis.’ The word also occurs in Romanian slang car ‘idem’ (Leschber 1995: 158, cf. also a carici ‘to fuck,’ Armjanov 2001: 69, karam ‘fuck v.’ archaic).Footnote ²⁹⁷ Of a different source are AGrk πέος, πόσθη, which are derivatives of PIE *pes- (*pes-os and *pos-dhā respectively; so also Lat penis < *pes-ni-), and Rmn/Aro puță (which is diminutive) from VLat pūtium (cf. Lat praeputim), the source also of ModGrk πούτσος (not diminutive); cf. also Alb pucarak ‘spirited, brave person.’ Turkish sik is both the noun and the verbal root meaning ‘fuck’ (cf. to bone in English, from boner ‘erection’, and to ball from balls ‘testicles’, for typological parallels). For ‘testicles/balls,’ BSl made/măde, Rmn coaie, Aro coalje, hãrhãndeale, boashe, Alb herdhe, ModGrk αρχίδια (these latter two from PIE *Hórǵhis ‘idem’), Rmi pele (Skt pela), Trk taşak (also = Jud) are unambiguous (but cf. Trk taş ‘stone’), whereas English balls, nuts, etc. are metaphorical (cf. ‘eggs’ mentioned above). Words for ‘arse’ are generally native: Mac gaz/Blg găz, Alb bythë, Rmi bul, Trk göt, Grk κώλος, but note Rmn cur (related to κώλος, with rhotacism, or possibly from Latin colon), Jud kulo (possibly from Greek, though it could well be inherited from Latin; cf. French cul).Footnote ²⁹⁸ Romanian găoază ‘ass(hole)’ does not have a simple etymology, but at least the influence of BSl seems likely. Various equivalents for ‘tits’ do not present any specifically Balkan or contact features.

4.3.9.2 Bodily Activities, Functions, and Products

In general, like body parts, obscene expressions relating to bodily activities, functions, and products are of native origin in the Balkans. Excretory functions such as ‘piss’ and ‘fart’ lend themselves to onomatopoeia, and yet Mac/Blg prdi/părdja, Alb pjerdh, Grk πέρδομαι (MedGrk denominal πορδίζω), Jud pedar are all cognate with English fart, thus from PIE *perd-, possibly itself onomatopoetic. Rmn/Aro băși/bes (Lat vissīre) is likewise onomatopoetic, while Rmi kha[n]jarel (khand ‘stink’ < OInd gandha- ‘odor’), and Trk osur- (cf. *ASR- (Clauson 1972: 250)) are connected to ‘odor.’ Rmn pîrdalnic (WMuntenia purdalnic) ‘damned, diabolical, devil’ is a borrowing from BSl. The noun is generally derived from the verbal root.