A Linguist's Linguist: Studies in South Slavic Linguistics in Honor of E. Wayles Brown

The Diffusion of Macedonian Inflections into Megleno-Romanian: A Reconsideration of the Evidence

The Diffusion of Macedonian Inflections into Megleno-Romanian: A Reconsideration of the Evidence Victor A. Friedman A frequently cited example of the diffusion of inflectional affixes via language contact uses data from Macedonian and Megleno-Romanian that have their source in Capidan (1925: 159-61). The example is cited with sufficient frequency that it merits re-examination, elaboration, and updating. The first citation of the phenomenon after Capidan was in Weinreich (1953: 32-33), who is cited by Heath (1984: 370); Thomason (2001: 77, 153) gives the data without citation, and she is cited by Myers-Scotton (2002: 92). As presented in Weinreich, a dialect of Romanian called Meglenite (specified as spoken north of Salonica) has borrowed first and second singular present tense markers (-um or -am and -is in Weinreich, -m and -5 in Thomason), from the local dialect of Bulgarian. Both Weinreich and Thomason give the same example: aflum, aflis from aflu, afli 'find 1, 2 sg'. At the time Capidan was writing, Megleno-Romanian was claimed as a Romanian dialect and Macedonian was claimed as Bulgarian; however, today (as was already the case when Weinreich was writing) Megleno-Romanian has the status of a separate language within Balkan Romance, and the Lower Vardar dialects with which it is or was in contact are part of Macedonian1 With regard to the presentation of Macedonian in Capidan as well as Weinreich's account of both languages based on Capidan, there are clarifications and corrections that are in order. Also, the matter has been studied more recently by Atanasov (1984, 1990, 2002), who, however , omits some of the data from Capidan.2 Finally, the Megleno-Ro1 See Ivanescu (1980: 30-46) for a summary of the Balkan Romance debate and Friedman (2000) on Balkan Slavic. 2 Of the other potential sources on this phenomenon, Wild (1983) does not give conjugational data, while the texts in Papatsafa (1997) are not specified for origin. Steven Franks, Vrinda Chidambaram, and Brian Joseph, eds. A Linguist's Linguist: Studies in South Slavic Linguistics in Honor of E. Wa yles Browne. Bloomington, IN: Siavica, 22333 . 224 VICTOR A. FRIEDMAN manian data themselves are not as simple as presented in Weinreich. In fact, the phenomenon also has potential language-internal explanations , as we show below. Setting the scene must begin with the Gevgelija dialect of Macedonian , for which Ivanov (1932) gives data that are roughly contemporaneous with the time Capidan was writing, while Peev (1979) has additional material from the same dialect zone3 It is interesting to note that in his account, Capidan (1925: 159) starts from standard Bulgarian but then moves to the system of the dialects that became standard Macedonian (i.e., West Central). He does not give the actual data from the Lower Vardar (southeastern) Macedonian dialects-of which Gevgelija is the northwesternmost-with which Megleno-Romanian was in contact. As is well known to Slavists, the 1 sg pres marker -m, which is descended from the Indo-European mi-conjugation and which by the ninth century was attested in only five verbs in Old Church Slavonic , was eventually generalized as the 1 sg pres marker to varying degrees in West and South Slavic (see Janda 1996). It was precisely in western Macedonia that this generalization went furthest. In standard Macedonian and the west central dialects on which it is based, there are three conjugations, but all verbs (except sum 'I am') take -am in the 1 sg pres, e.g., sakam-sakas-saka 'want', beram-berd-bere 'gather', nosamnosis -nosi 'carry' (all 1, 2, 3 sg pres). In the Gevgelija region there has been paradigm merger and a change in the 1 sg pres vowel: the respective paradigms are sakum-sakis-sake, berum-beris-bere, nosumnosis -nose (see Ivanov 1932: 86-88 and Peev 1979: 85-87 for details and discussion, also Elson 1983 and Friedman 1985 on the distribution of Macedonian paradigm mergers)4 To understand the Megleno-Romanian data, we must first set the language in its historical and geographic context. During the Ottoman period, Megleno-Romanian was spoken in a dozen or so villages in the Meglen region, most of them in the township (nahiye) of Karadzova 3 See the appendix for an explanation of the principles of orthography and toponymy citation used in this article. 4 Ivanov (1932: 87) notes that the 1 sg ending can also occur as -am, -am, or -om (this last mostly in songs), and he attributes this to the influence of neighboring dialects...