Balkan sprachbund

The Slavic, Hellenic, Romance, Albanian and Indo-Aryan branches all belong to the large Indo-European family, and the Turkish language is non-Indo-European.

However, no ancient dialects of Greek possessed Balkanisms, so that the features shared with other regional languages appear to be post-classical innovations.

Also, Greek appears to be only peripheral to the Balkan language area, lacking some important features, such as the postposed article.

[12] The Roman Empire ruled all the Balkans, and local variation of Latin may have left its mark on all languages there, which were later the substrate to Slavic newcomers.

The weak point of this theory is that other Romance languages have few of the features, and there is no proof that the Eastern Romans were isolated for enough time to develop them.

[citation needed] The most commonly accepted theory, advanced by Polish scholar Zbigniew Gołąb, is that the innovations came from different sources and the languages influenced each other: some features can be traced from Latin, Slavic, or Greek languages, whereas others, particularly features that are shared only by Romanian, Albanian, Macedonian and Bulgarian, could be explained by the substratum kept after Romanization (in the case of Romanian) or Slavicization (in the case of Bulgarian).

Decategorization is less advanced in fossilized literary Romanian voi and in Serbo-Croatian ću, ćeš, će, where the future marker is still an inflected auxiliary.

In modern Greek, Bulgarian, Macedonian, and Albanian, Aromanian, and spoken Romanian, decategorization and erosion have given rise to an uninflected tense form, where the frozen third-person singular of the verb has turned into an invariable particle followed by the main verb inflected for person (compare Rom 1.sg.

A somewhat less typical case of this is Greek, where the verb "to have" is followed by the so-called απαρέμφατο ('invariant form', historically the aorist infinitive): έχω υποσχεθεί.

However, a completely different construction is used in Bulgarian and Serbo-Croatian, which have inherited from Common Slavic an analytic perfect formed with the verb "to be" and the past active participle: обещал съм, obeštal sǎm (Bul.)

On the other hand, Macedonian, the third Slavic language in the sprachbund, is like Romanian and Albanian in that it uses quite typical Balkan constructions consisting of the verb to have and a past passive participle (имам ветено, imam veteno = "I have promised").

Speakers who use the indicative mood instead and state "Патот беше затворен" imply thereby that they personally witnessed the road's closure.

With the exception of Greek, Serbo-Croatian, and Romani, all languages in the union have their definite article attached to the end of the noun, instead of before it.

It is possible that postposed article in Balkan Slavic is the result of influence from Eastern Romance languages (Romanian or Aromanian) during the Middle Ages.

[dubious – discuss] For example, "I see George" in Balkan languages: Note: The neutral case in normal (SVO) word order is without a clitic: "Гледам Георги."

However, the form with an additional clitic pronoun is also perfectly normal and can be used for emphasis: "Гледам го Георги."

And the clitic is obligatory in the case of a topicalized object (with OVS-word order), which serves also as the common colloquial equivalent of a passive construction.

The replacement of synthetic adjectival comparative forms with analytic ones by means of preposed markers is common.

Compare with similar structures in Bulgarian: висш(-(ия(т))/а(та)/о(то)/и(те)) = "(the) higher, (the) superior" (по-висш(-(ия(т))/а(та)/о(то)/и(те)) = "(the) [more] higher, (the) [more] superior"; 'най-висш(-(ия(т))/о(то)/а(та)/и(те))' = "(the) ([most]) highest, supreme"; нисш (also spelled as низш sometimes) = "low, lower, inferior", it can also possess further comparative or superlative as with 'висш' above.

Albanian, Aromanian, Bulgarian, Greek, Romanian, Serbo-Croatian and Macedonian also share a large number of words of various origins: Apart from the direct loans, there are also many calques that were passed from one Balkan language to another, most of them between Albanian, Macedonian, Bulgarian, Greek, Aromanian and Romanian.

[19] Another example is the wish "(∅/to/for) many years": Note: In Old Church Slavonic[20] and archaic Eastern South Slavic dialects, the term сполай(j) ти (spolaj ti) was commonly used in meaning thank you, derived from the Byzantine Greek εἰς πολλὰ ἔτη (is polla eti).