Homage to the Balkanist Gerhard Rohlfs

Abstract

With his research on the language structure of Southern Italy, the eminent German scholar of the Romance languages Gerhard Rohlfs (1892–1986) also occupies a special place in Balkan linguistics. Southern Italy strongly resembles the linguistic pattern of the Balkans and can in itself be viewed as a reflection of the “Balkan linguistic union”. A starting point in Rohlfs’ theory of south Italian «Graecism» (Griechentum, Gräzität, grecità) is the idea that Greek had been extant continuously since the times of Magna Graecia. The peculiarity of the grammatical structure in the Greek and Italian dialects of Southern Italy is the substitution of the infinitive and the preserved opposition between the simple and the complex preterites (Aorist and Perfect) – which is also a main characteristic of the Balkan languages.
G. Rohlfs was one of the few Balkanists who related the substitution of the infinitive to modality. The identical phenomenon in the southern part of the Balkans forms a direct analogy with Southern Italy. Rohlfs’ research focused on revealing unexplored phenomena in the Balkan languages and probed deeply into well-known facts, such as the present tense indicating future activities and the hypothetical functions of the imperfect.
The contributions of Rohlfs are of primary importance to Balkan linguistics in the domains of:
1) Theory of language contacts;
2) Areal linguistics methodology;
3) Theoretical fundamentals of Balkan linguistics.