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Addition of Illyrian languages to the branch[edit]
Hello, I find this article fairly well sourced, and interesting. However, I noticed the Illyrian languages are not added to the branch. Is there any scientific reason for this? Or is it just a minor shortcoming. Thanks! --- 193.121.83.85 (talk) 09:34, 28 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
According to Matzinger (2016), cited in Proto-Albanian language, the ancestral stages of Albanian in antiquity cannot be identified with any of the known ancient Paleo-Balkan languages, including Illyrian and Thracian, which all deviate from reconstructible Early Proto-Albanian in important and striking ways, especially in historical phonology, so there is no chance to identify any known ancient language with Early Proto-Albanian. Instead, Albanian was a separate (if unattested) language already in antiquity, neither identical with "Illyrian" (which wasn't a single language anyway, but a number of clearly distinct languages) nor Thracian nor any other.
It might be worth mentioning that Duridanov's reconstruction of Dacian historical phonology is strikingly similar to that of Early Proto-Albanian, even almost identical, but I don't know how solid his reconstruction is; I'm not an expert on the surviving Dacian material.
I'm open to the possibility that in antiquity, Balto-Slavic, Albanian, Dacian and also Thracian were all relatively similar to each other, beyond their general similarities as ancient Indo-European languages, but I suspect the similarities between some of them are often overstated. In classical antiquity, most Indo-European languages were relatively similar to each other (probably having diverged since only about 3000 years), so it would not be unexpected to find numerous parallels between many pairs, especially with an eclectic approach, even between languages such as Latin and Greek that were not extremely closely related.
This applies even more in a region with several relatively closely related languages in close contact with each other, effectively a linguistic area, such as the modern Balkans also are. (Dacian could plausibly have been in contact with Balto-Slavic, as well, and in turn with Thracian, helping to explain some more specific structural parallels.) So I must warn that statements such as Dacian or Thracian effectively being Baltic languages (which sounds like an anachronism, given that Thracian existed in place at least since the 6th century BC, and Balto-Slavic was spoken far more north and at this early time Baltic languages may well not have existed yet separately) or Paleo-Balkan languages being identical with each other should be taken with more than a grain of salt. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 17:40, 30 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
