Hi everyone. I would like to discuss a little bit about Albanian language, and its relationship to the so called PIE, which in my opinion is not only a hypothetical language, but also wrongly reconstructed, since not all Europian languages were taken into consideration during this reconstruction, and especially language like Albanian which is one of the few that has followed a clear natural phonetical and lexical development and has not undergone "language purifications" or scholastic standartizations, like the most of other now spoken European ones, until at least lately. Being such at least the following examples are wrong:
Welcome to Eupedia, Zeus.
It appears to me that you are having a large number of misconceptions about what Proto-Indo-European is, and also how it is reconstructed. Most notably, you have to bear in mind that the reconstruction is not only based on modern language (it would be a lot more difficult to do that), but also on ancient languages, to mention a few ones, notably Classical Greek, Mycenaean Greek, Avestan, Sanskrit and Hittite. Modern Albanian is
not particuarly representative at all of Proto-Indo-European, and the reasons for that have been addressed extensively in this thread.
The backbone of language reconstruction is the comparative method, and the concept of sound changes. The underlying assumption is that sound laws are exceptionless, that they irreversable (if a sound change happens, it applies to ALL words in the vocabulary), and also that sound changes have no memory of the past of a language. This means if there are words that seemingly violate these sound changes, they must have entered into a language after this sound change occured.
Let me point out that the comparative method has not only been successfully used for reconstructing Proto-Indo-European, but also for other language families, and it works every single time.
The noun 'dhëmb' has not derived from the PIE *g´ombh, but clearly from the Albanian verb "dhëmb" which is the correspondant for the 'pain'Assuming that Albanian 'dhelpër' comes from the ancestor of 'yellow' which is *g´hel, means that whoever made that assumption knows nothing about Albanian language. I will analyse this and many like this in another occassion.
I'll ask you something: would the Albanian word for "tooth" derive from the word for "to hurt"? The examples I have given clearly show that there is a regular correspondence between Albanian "dh" and the Proto-Indo-European sounds *g´ and *g´h (which Proto-Albanian must have merged at one stage), and that this perfectly corresponds with sounds in other Indo-European languages (notably *g´ is reflected as *k in Germanic, *g in Celtic, Greek and Latin, and *z in many Satem languages).
There is no "secret knowledge" about the Albanian language.
Albanian is not a Satem language, and the theory of isoglosses division in Satem and Centum is not correct, because at least in Albanian case the theory completely ignores the fact that Albanian in both dialectes doesn't use sibilants but clear velars. That must be applied even in Proto-Albanian, which is unknown anyways. And this theory being correct, does it make French language a Satem because of its 'son'.
The idea that Centum and Satem represents an early split is probably wrong, but the description that an Indo-European language is a "Centum" or "Satem" language is accurate nontheless.
Yes, the Albanian language possesses velars, but that doesn't make it a Centum language. The Baltic, Slavic and Indo-Iranic languages also all possess velars, that doesn't make them Centum. The question is, how do the sounds in one language correspond to sounds in other languages.
I actually am glad that you bring up the example of French, because it is indeed a language that has (at a later point) developed what appears at first glance to be Satem-like features. The best example is the French word for "dog", "chien" (pronounced "ʃjɛ:"). If you however look at the word in other Romance languages (Portuguese "cão", Spanish "can", Italian "cane", Romanian "câine"), and most importantly Latin ("canis"), then it's clear that this development of *k > *ʃ is a unique development French.
This gets clearer if you compare this with words for "dog" in other Indo-European branches:
Celtic:
- Irish "
cún"
- Welsh "
ci"
Germanic:
- English "
hound"
- German "
Hund".
- Icelandic "
hundur"
- Greek: "
kyon"
Baltic:
- Latvian "
suns"
- Lithuanian "
šuo"
- Armenian: "
shun"
Indo-Iranic:
- Sanskrit "
sva"
If you compare this, it is pretty clear that Albanian "
qen" must be a loanword.