From: nsn@mundil.cs.mu.OZ.AU (Nick Stavros NICHOLAS)
Subject: Albanian Resources, and befuddled GB/PSG semantic content query
Organization: Computer Science, University of Melbourne, Australia
Date: Sat, 11 Apr 1992 04:10:33 GMT

I've gotten hold of the second edition of Martin Camaj's Albanian Grammar
(Otto Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden, 1984; translated from German), and it is
*damn* cool, especially since it includes descriptions of Geg, Tosk, *and*
Arb"eresh (Italo-albanian). If you're going to be reading Albanian literature
(including Camaj's own work), looks like an awareness of Geg will be
indispensable.

Anyone know if, with the current situation in Albania, the official language
looks like heading back towards the pre-communist norm (southern Geg)? Forty
years is a long time, but it is all just a matter of social prestige...

On the politics of Albanian, I also got hold of Arshi Pipa's "The Politics
of Language in Socialist Albania" (East European Monographs, Boulder 1989).
Basically a protracted flame against the 1972 "standard" dictionary, and 
not all the points in it seem relevant. The author seems to hold the unstated
thesis that Geg is a herrensprache. The way he snaps at Camaj for making
concessions to Tosk irritated me. The author also wants to use Greek and
Norwegian as examples of a peaceful-coexistence diglossia, as a model for
Albania. I'm not that clued in about Nynorsk, but what you have now in
Greek is no longer a diglossia (just a very messy range of demotic registers,
with instances of katharevousa grammar limited to the church), and the 
coexistence was never peaceful.

Though this should be easy to look up, I'm wondering whether it was Greek or
Albanian that was responsible for the Sprachbund phenomenon of word-initial
mb-, nd-, ntz-/nx- etc. The Greek has an etymological pedigree ([e]mbaino),
but Camaj hints that the Albanian does too. Probably just mutual reinforcement?

Down with revvolutionary language change, of course. Be it Albanian or
Esperanto (saluton, Janis %^)

On a completely irrelevant tangent, is it fair to summarise GB and the PSGs
by saying that the former still tries to hang on to semantic content with
its theta-roles, thus retaining some commonality of analysis between an
active and passive form of the "same" sentence, whereas the PSGs drop the
semantics and relegate everything to the lexicon and the subcategorisation
rule? (I mean, you just plug in lexical features into the tree, irrespective
of the putative predicate arguments/complements of the word). Or am I totally
missing something? I was just struck by the fact that apparently, in PSG,
the parse of "There was decided to have been an accident" is independent of
"They decided there was an accident", while certainly in Classical TG, and I,
um, think in GB too, the two parses are related.

Go easy on the flames, or don't go easy on the flames, on this very newbie
question.

I must say that the linguistic content of sci.lang is, well, improving. Has
the sci.linguistics reorganisation been shelved?

Thank you for your forbearance. 
---

'Dera me xhama t"e larm"e,	 	| Nick Nicholas, EE & CS, Melbourne Uni
 Dera mbas blerimit		 	| Inmail: nsn@munagin.ee.mu.oz.au
 Me xhama t"e larm"e!			| Outmail: nsn@mundil.cs.mu.oz.au
 Lumtunia nuk ka ngjyra tjera.'		| mi ka'e tavla bau la lojban. je'uru'e
 - Martin Camaj, `Nj"e Shp'i e Vetme'	| better .sig suggestions welcome