Balkan Insights into the Syntax of *m in Indo-European

Proto-Indo-European had two sentential negation markers, *m , used in prohibitions (negative commands) and *ne/n , used in other sentence-types (e.g. indicative mood statements, subjunctive clauses, etc.). A survey of the reflexes of *m across the family reveals other functions for it, e.g. word-formation, elliptical negation, etc. Interestingly, one function, independent occurrence as a one-word prohibitive utterance (like English Don’t!) is restricted just to IndoEuropean languages of the Balkans, specifically Albanian, PostClassical (particularly Modern) Greek, and Romany. The Romany development is a relatively recent phenomenon, resulting from language contact, but the history of the Albanian and later Greek developments is less clear. Various explanations for this apparent Balkan innovation are explored here, with particular attention to what they say about the range of uses reconstructible for *m in ProtoIndo-European.