Where does the Albanian language come from? [VIDEO]

[PaleoRevenge]

In Romanian family DNA project a sample has been added which is deep inside ethnic Hutsul territory and it is R-Z2705

FamilyTreeDNA - Genetic Testing for Ancestry, Family History & Genealogy

With our premier suite of DNA tests and the world’s most comprehensive matching database...your DNA has met its match!

www.familytreedna.com

Subgroup: R1b1a1a2-M269>L23>Z2103>M12149>Z2106>Z2109>CTS7822>CTS7556>Y5592>CTS9219>Y18959>BY611>Y23373>PH970>BY38894>FT101356>FTB11504

The R1a in Leordina belongs to a Romanian as the district is not Hutsul populated.

Leordina - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Johane Derite]

Update on The University of Basel's Department of Ancient Civilisations research project "The Albanian Language in Antiquity":
I posted about this project when it first started in 2022 when I was still running Albhistory, but I thought I'd do an update considering it's projected to be completed later this year ( runtime 01.08.2022 - 31.07.2026 )

The project's description:

"Within the Indo-European language family, to which most of the languages of Europe belong, Albanian forms a branch of its own. Along with Greek and the Romance languages, Albanian is the only direct descendant of those languages spoken in the Balkans in ancient times. Content and aim of the research project Albanian has only been known from written sources since the 16th century AD. Therefore, we do not know exactly what the language looked like in ancient times and in the early Middle Ages. It is also disputed in which region of the Balkans the precursor of Albanian, called Proto-Albanian, was spoken. Our project tries to find an answer to the questions of what the precursor of the Albanian language looked like between 1500 and 2000 years ago, and where this precursor was spoken. This can only be answered indirectly. The linguistic-historical comparison of words and the grammar of Albanian with other related languages allows certain conclusions about the earlier linguistic state of Albanian. In addition, the project is investigating the extensive ancient Greek and Latin vocabulary that Proto-Albanian borrowed, as well as the Proto-Albanian words that were incorporated into early Romanian. This will also allow us to determine the shape of Proto-Albanian more precisely. Scientific and social context The project aims first and foremost at the linguistic and cultural history of Albanian. The results will also be relevant for Greek, Latin, Romance and Indo-European linguistics. Furthermore, our results will contribute to a more balanced linguistic and cultural history of the Balkan Peninsula."

General description :

This project is inspired by the ongoing work of various colleagues on the grammatical description of Old Albanian texts and current work on Albanian etymology. Thanks to generous 4-year SNF funding (100012_208245; CHF 916’708,-), we can now address some of the most urgent research questions systematically: the lack of a complete and reliable reconstruction of Proto-Albanian, the absence of a consensus on the localization of Proto-Albanian in time and space, and the need for a reliable survey of the earliest loanwords into and from Proto-Albanian. Ultimately, our project seeks to determine what the precursor of the Albanian language looked like in Antiquity and where this precursor may have been spoken.



Set-up

Principal Investigator Michiel de Vaan

This research is divided into three complementary sub-projects that are carried out by the senior postdoctoral researcher PD Dr Sergio Neri and by the two PhD students Gerard Spaans and Alexander Herren:

SP1 (Sergio Neri): Elaborate a new and full reconstruction of Proto-Albanian; elaborate a relative chronology of the Latin loanwords into Albanian.

SP2 (Gerard Spaans): A study of Language contact between Greek and Albanian in Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages.

SP3 (Alexander Herren): A study of Language contact between Romanian and Albanian in the Middle Ages.

SP4 (the entire team): Elaborate a corpus of early loanwords into Albanian, that will be complementary to the Munich project Digitales philologisch-historisches Wörterbuch des Altalbanischen (15.–18. Jh.). < https://www.dpwa.gwi.uni-muenchen.de/>

The project outcome will be an academic monograph (or a series of longer articles) on the reconstruction of Proto-Albanian, two PhD theses (on Greek and Romanian as contact languages for Albanian), several collaborative, international peer-reviewed articles, and conference proceedings.

In addition, we will create an etymological database of Latin/Albanian, Albanian/Romanian, and Albanian/Greek lexical correspondences that will complement the Munich etymological database of Old Albanian."

OFFICAL PAGE LINK

The project is said to be completed by the 31st of July this year, hopefully this means that the resulting academic monograph and articles, conference proceedings, etc, don't lag too far behind, as I'm sure this is a very welcome and needed addition. The etymological database of Old Albanian from University of Munich is already an incredible resource, so I'm sure if it is up to that standard, and considering De Van's previously published work, it should be, then it should not be disappointing.

Hopefully they don't play it safe and try to appease vested interests and such.

Now, can we speculate about whether they will make any actual concrete claims about where Proto-Albanian was spoken?

In post #4,402 of this thread I shared some information from a talk given by Alexander Herren, who is heading sub-project 3 of this research project, so potentially we do have a sneak peek of at least some of the results of their study.

I'll repost it below:

"Very interesting new development:

This Tuesday at the 43rd edition of the International Seminar on Albanian Language, Literature, and Culture held in Prishtina, linguist and researcher Alexander Robert Herren gave a fascinating presentation of his new article about Proto-Albanian.

Mostly it was about comparing how "Proto-Albanian" is actually defined differently across the works of many different scholars and an attempt at giving a more updated and rigorous definition of what constitutes the Proto-Albanian language as well as timing its linguistic contacts with Eastern Romance more precisely.

This was a really interesting lecture but what really stood out for me was a short preview of a dissertation that he is working on that has huge ramifications.

Specifically, he gave us a sneak peek into some of the conclusions from his upcoming dissertation which i have put below:

"There are up to 120 lexemes in Daco-Romanian (and far fewer in the sub-Danubian Eastern Romance varieties, i.e. Aromanian, Megleno-Aromanian, and Istro- Romanian)."

So this is huge as it infers geographic information about the Proto-Albanian community, namely that it must have been closer and in more intense contacts with the proto-Romanians then the more southern proto-Aromanians, Megleno-Aromanians, etc.

This means Proto-Albanian must have been north of them.

Also very interesting is that certain phonological mismatches in the proto-albanian loans into Daco-Romanian shows that the period of contact when this intense cohabitation/exchange could have happened was when Proto-Albanian was undergoing internal phonological changes in its sound system."

View attachment 19324
View attachment 19325


So at least one of the subprojects does seem to place the proto-Albanian language more northeast of Albania, at least based on this sneak peek.

What about the other subprojects?

For SP1 there doesn't seem to be any info out there, as for SP2, based on publications from 2024 by Gerard Spaans concerning Albanian and Greek contacts, there isn't anyway to say one way or the other as these articles are only reviews of the current evidence of Ancient Greek words in Albanian, without any further discussion.

However, considering that it didn't seem like any major new loanwords look like they have been claimed to be discovered, the position of Matzinger will most likely be taken here (that the low number of Greek loanwords, and that they primarily concern vegetables, spices, fruits, animals, tools, i.e. market items, that it is from greek merchants in the balkan hinterland).

Until the results are published this remains only speculation though.

Nonetheless, something to look forward to.

To further tie into some aspects of the University of Basel project here:


Words for God in the Balkan Romance languages:

Standard Romanian (Daco-Romanian, spoken in Romania and Moldova):
Dumnezeu (most common and standard form; pronounced roughly "doo-mneh-ZEH-oo").
Dumnezău (a dialectal or older/variant spelling/pronunciation, especially in some regional or archaic contexts).
Zeu (used for "god" in a polytheistic or mythological sense, e.g., "the god Zeus"; from Latin deus, but rarely for the Christian God).
Domnul or Domnul Dumnezeu ("the Lord God"; Domnul means "the Lord," often used in religious contexts like "Domnul" for God or Jesus).

Aromanian (spoken by Aromanians/Vlachs in Greece, Albania, North Macedonia, Bulgaria, Serbia; various dialects like Pindus, Grammos, etc.):
Dumnidzã (primary word; pronounced roughly "doom-nee-DZUH" or similar, with variations like Dumnidză in some sources).
Domnu (used for "Lord," sometimes in compounds).
Zău or similar forms (rare, for pagan/mythological "god").

Megleno-Romanian (spoken by a small community in northern Greece and North Macedonia; limited documentation):
Domnu (attested in compounds and inscriptions; the form for "Lord/God" follows the pattern of Romanian Domnul).

Istro-Romanian (Čiribirska or Žejanski dialect in Istria, Croatia; very small speaker base):
Domnu (used in phrases like ku domnu for "goodbye," literally "with God" or "go with God," equivalent to Romanian cu Domnul).


All of these variations are derived from Vulgar Latin Domine Deus ("Lord God").

Now, how does this relate to Albanian?

Well, the Albanian word for God is "Zot".

This word for God in Albanian is inherited from a proto-indo-european word meaning "Master of the servants" ( Proto-Albanian *dᶻāti- < *di̯apti- < *dəi̯ápəti- < *dei̯i̯ā́(h) páti(h) < Proto-Indo-European *desi̯áh₂s pótis (“Master of the servants”).

This explains the Albanian term "i zoti" meaning competent, able and "zonjë" meaning Lady, Mistress of Household, Madam.

In a paper by Sergio Neri (Zur Etymologie von altalbanisch nja/një zet ‚zwanzig‘), who is heading Sub Project 1 in the University of Basel research project he agrees that this is the preffered reliable etymology of Zot.

So why is this relevant?

Well, the current paradigm of the Albanian Christianisation posits that Albanians learnt Christianity through exclusively Latin teachers.

This is Noel Malcolm's summarisation of this position:

"We know that the Bessi were converted by an enterprising bishop, Nicetas, in the late fourth century, and from the writings of a friend of Nicetas who celebrated this event we also know that he learned their language and taught them to practise their Christianity in it - in other words, that Bessan was used as a liturgical language. (The evidence of the Bessan-speaking monks supports this point.) Nicetas, whose own mother-tongue was Latin, may also have translated parts of the Bible; the obvious model - or competition - that he must have had in mind was the work of a heretical bishop, Ulfilas, who was using the Germanic Gothic language for liturgy and Bible-translation among the nearby population of Goths in northern Bulgaria. And, as comparison with other linguistic survivals (such as Armenian or Coptic) shows, nothing helps a language to survive quite so much as its use from a very early stage in a kind of national church.

One thing is quite certain: the Albanians did acquire their Christianity from a Latin-speaking teacher or teachers. The Albanian language contains much Latin-derived vocabulary anyway, having obviously absorbed words from nearby Romans or Romanized barbarians from the second century bc onwards; but the Latin element is especially rich in the area of Christian belief and Christian practice. Thus we have meshe (mass), from missa; ipeshk (bishop), from episcopus; ungjill (gospel), from evangelium; mrekull (miracle), from miraculum; and a great number of other words, extending far into the vocabulary of psychology, morality and even the natural world (such as qiell, meaning heaven or sky, from caelum).

Many of the words that would need to be put on such a list, in fact, are not special ecclesiastical terms, for which a non-Christian population would have no equivalent of its own; they are simple words such as 'spirit', 'sin', 'pray*, 'holy', and so on, for which most languages, even in pre-Christian times, have their own vocabulary. When other early evangelizers translated the Bible or the liturgy into Armenian, or Gothic, or Anglo-Saxon, they used local words for these things - that, indeed, is what is implied by the whole idea of translation. Why should Nicetas, translating into proto-Albanian, have simply transferred huge quantities of Latin words? Schramm notes the oddity of this in passing, and suggests unconvincingly that there must have been some special cultural reasons. But the oddity is more overwhelming than he admits. For example, even the word for a flock, as used in Christian discourse, was taken from the Latin (grigje, from grex) - of all the things in the world, the one for which a shepherding population must surely have had its own word already.

The solution to this puzzle is blindingly simple. These elements of Latin vocabulary have undergone exactly the same sorts of sound-changes, compressions and erosions as all the other Latin words which entered the Albanian language over several centuries; and the reason why those words entered the language was that the Albanians were in contact, over a long period, with people who spoke Latin. The existence of large quantities of such Christianity-related Latin vocabulary does not show that someone 'translated' Christian discourse into early Albanian. It shows the precise opposite - namely, that Albanians were for a long time exposed to the conduct of their religion not in translation but in the original Latin.

This can even be demonstrated grammatically. The term for 'Holy Trinity', Shendertat, bears a final 't' and an accent on the last syllable: this shows that it developed from the accusative, sanctam trinitatem, not the nominative, sancta trinitas. That is in fact the normal pattern of development in Romance languages, which gives us, for example, Spanish ciudad from dvitatem (not from civitas), or French mont from montem (not from mons). (There are many other Albanian examples too, such as grigje, mentioned above, which is really from gregem, not grex.) What this phenomenon reflects is a pattern of usage in spoken Latin: these words were heard much more often as the objects in sentences than as the subjects. If Nicetas had been coining new Albanian words out of Latin for the purposes of his translation, he would surely have taken them from the nominative form. These words entered Albanian because Albanians heard them, over and over again, in spoken liturgical Latin.

Schramm's theory fails, therefore; and in so doing it performs a signal service. Thanks to Schramm, the Thracians can now be eliminated from these enquiries. His research into Nicetas's activities does indeed show that the Bessi received their Christianity, so to speak, in translation; this must force us to conclude that the Albanians, who received theirs in the original Latin, cannot be identified with the Bessi. The language of the Bessi must eventually have perished."

So without addressing the faults in Malcolm's arguments here first, let's accept his argument at face value.

If the words entered Albanian because Albanians "heard them over and over again in spoken liturgical Latin", how did the Proto-Albanians seem to miss the most important words in the entire liturgy, namely Domine Deus, which appear everywhere in the liturgy and literally are the point of the religion.

As seen above with examples from every single Balkan Latin dialect, there is a word for God, the central concept of Christianity, that is derived from Domine Deus.

Where is the Albanian Domine Deus?

Clearly here the Proto-Albanians seem to have underwent a different historical process of Christianisation than all the other Balkan Latin speakers that learnt Christianity from solely Latin teachers, and Malcolm's argument offers no explanatory mechanism for this, while Schramm's potentially does.

There is also the matter of other non-Latin words in Albanian Christianity that Bardhyl Demiraj has written about that belong to the oldest layer of Albanian Christianity, words like hir, (i) lumë, or the constructions like inëzot, tënëzonë, zotynë, sinëzot, tinëzot, etc, compounds that mirror that Latin liturgy ("Our God") but use native Albanian morphology and vocabulary.

Now to address the faults in Malcolm's reasoning:

1. Assumes that Nicetas' translation of the Bible into the "Bessi" language was comprehensive and completely non-Latin whereas the translation was most probably not if we speak probabilistically and realistically. It is more likely that the core concepts would have been translated first, Zot, etc, being the highest on that list of priority. The Proto-Albanians at the time of Nicetas most definitely were bilingual Latin speakers also, as Albanian's intense Latin contacts are known, even jokingly called a partially Latinised language by some. So Malcolm's comparison to Armenian or Gothic, etc doesn't hold as a suitable reference given that they didn't have intense contacts with Latin since 167 BC like proto-Albanians did in the Balkans. They were operating in quite different contexts.

2. Assumes that the Bessi liturgy/autonomy persisted whereas even Schramm argues that this was most likely a historically temporary situation after which the Proto-Albanians fell fully under the Latin. We can imagine a situation where the few native Albanian christian terms we have today would have originally had a much larger corpus but were eroded over time i.e. there may well have been native terms for flock. Although it can be argued that a certain partial religious autonomy that Arbanon seems to have had later on can be a sort of continuation of this.

3. Misses the fact that Nicetas was said to have preached not to just the Bessi but the Getae, Dacians, Scythians. So again, given that Proto-Albanians are placed in Moesia at this time, it becomes improbable Nicetas wasn't involved somehow.

4. Assumes that Schramm can't be wrong about certain claims without still being correct about others. It is perfectly possible that his dating and justification for proto-Albanian migration (Khan persecution of Christians 9th century) can be wrong entirely with him still being correct about Nicetas' role in Christianisation of Proto-Albanians.

I can go on but these are some of the most relevant critiques here.

Taking it from the obverse angle now, something that is relevant given the Albanian-Romanian symbiosis that Schramm recognised is the uniquely shared Christian vocabulary (whereas God is not shared by Albanian with any other Balkan Latin language) :

This refined hypothesis not only fully explains why only in the Central Mountain Group an ancient Balkan people and a remnant of Christianity survived. It also clarifies how a pastoral Romania could take shape. Finally, it addresses a question that has apparently never been posed before. Philological analyses have repeatedly confirmed that the languages of the Proto-Albanians and Proto-Romanians were connected by remarkably close interactions over a long period. It is difficult to identify even a single other case among known ethnic neighbors where two idioms interpenetrated so intensely. How, then, could this occur without one language displacing the other?

The compelling answer seems to be: the Romance peoples held their services in Latin, while the Bessi (or Proto-Albanians) used Bessian. Two distinct liturgical languages ensured that the two peoples did not merge into a single linguistic community, despite sharing the same faith and perhaps often the same church, but attending different services.

Linguistic evidence allows us to refine this picture further. Both languages show striking parallels in terms related to ritually established kinship ties: “wedding,” “to get engaged or married” derive from Latin corona, coronare; “father-in-law” and “mother-in-law” (consocer, consocera), and “witness, godparent” (with their female counterparts) from compatre and commatre. In the context of baptism, related to the latter term, both languages use derivatives of famulu (“baptized child”) and filianu (“godson”).

These correspondences suggest that during family celebrations, Bessi and Vlachs also gathered together in worship. Thus, the ethnic separation of services applied only to the norm, with regulated exceptions. The weight of the regular, weekly winter services ensured that neither ethnic identity was lost despite their close and often harmonious symbiosis. Bilingualism was likely common, at least among men, in a setting where two peoples spent the winter months in close proximity, and the difference in liturgical language was not perceived as a social barrier. It was probably common to choose a godparent or even a spouse from the other people. A Latin word for a relative, noverca ("stepmother"), was preserved only in Romanian and (as a loanword) in Albanian (njerkë)."

So Albanian like Romanian refers to:

1. engagement/marriage as "kurorëzim/kurorë/kunorë" from Latin. corona, coronare
2. bride's father/bridegroom's father as krushk (krushqit for bridal party) from Latin. consocer, consocera
3. witness, godparent as "kumtër" / "kumbarë" from Latin. compatre
4. baptised child / godson as "famull" and "fijan" from Latin. famulu and filianu
5. stepmother as "njerkë" from Latin. noverca


This is a huge subject, requiring a research project of its own, but the problem of Albanian Christianisation clearly seems to intersect with the problem of the Albanian-Romanian symbiosis. There seems to definitely be a special relationship where in some areas they very intimately overlap and are congruent, whereas in others Albanian stands out as singular to all the other Balkan Latin groups (native terminology like Zot, etc).

 

[Johane Derite]

To further tie into some aspects of the University of Basel project here:


Words for God in the Balkan Romance languages:

Standard Romanian (Daco-Romanian, spoken in Romania and Moldova):
Dumnezeu (most common and standard form; pronounced roughly "doo-mneh-ZEH-oo").
Dumnezău (a dialectal or older/variant spelling/pronunciation, especially in some regional or archaic contexts).
Zeu (used for "god" in a polytheistic or mythological sense, e.g., "the god Zeus"; from Latin deus, but rarely for the Christian God).
Domnul or Domnul Dumnezeu ("the Lord God"; Domnul means "the Lord," often used in religious contexts like "Domnul" for God or Jesus).

Aromanian (spoken by Aromanians/Vlachs in Greece, Albania, North Macedonia, Bulgaria, Serbia; various dialects like Pindus, Grammos, etc.):
Dumnidzã (primary word; pronounced roughly "doom-nee-DZUH" or similar, with variations like Dumnidză in some sources).
Domnu (used for "Lord," sometimes in compounds).
Zău or similar forms (rare, for pagan/mythological "god").

Megleno-Romanian (spoken by a small community in northern Greece and North Macedonia; limited documentation):
Domnu (attested in compounds and inscriptions; the form for "Lord/God" follows the pattern of Romanian Domnul).

Istro-Romanian (Čiribirska or Žejanski dialect in Istria, Croatia; very small speaker base):
Domnu (used in phrases like ku domnu for "goodbye," literally "with God" or "go with God," equivalent to Romanian cu Domnul).


All of these variations are derived from Vulgar Latin Domine Deus ("Lord God").

Now, how does this relate to Albanian?

Well, the Albanian word for God is "Zot".

This word for God in Albanian is inherited from a proto-indo-european word meaning "Master of the servants" ( Proto-Albanian *dᶻāti- < *di̯apti- < *dəi̯ápəti- < *dei̯i̯ā́(h) páti(h) < Proto-Indo-European *desi̯áh₂s pótis (“Master of the servants”).

This explains the Albanian term "i zoti" meaning competent, able and "zonjë" meaning Lady, Mistress of Household, Madam.

In a paper by Sergio Neri (Zur Etymologie von altalbanisch nja/një zet ‚zwanzig‘), who is heading Sub Project 1 in the University of Basel research project he agrees that this is the preffered reliable etymology of Zot.

So why is this relevant?

Well, the current paradigm of the Albanian Christianisation posits that Albanians learnt Christianity through exclusively Latin teachers.

This is Noel Malcolm's summarisation of this position:




So without addressing the faults in Malcolm's arguments here first, let's accept his argument at face value.

If the words entered Albanian because Albanians "heard them over and over again in spoken liturgical Latin", how did the Proto-Albanians seem to miss the most important words in the entire liturgy, namely Domine Deus, which appear everywhere in the liturgy and literally are the point of the religion.

As seen above with examples from every single Balkan Latin dialect, there is a word for God, the central concept of Christianity, that is derived from Domine Deus.

Where is the Albanian Domine Deus?

Clearly here the Proto-Albanians seem to have underwent a different historical process of Christianisation than all the other Balkan Latin speakers that learnt Christianity from solely Latin teachers, and Malcolm's argument offers no explanatory mechanism for this, while Schramm's potentially does.

There is also the matter of other non-Latin words in Albanian Christianity that Bardhyl Demiraj has written about that belong to the oldest layer of Albanian Christianity, words like hir, (i) lumë, or the constructions like inëzot, tënëzonë, zotynë, sinëzot, tinëzot, etc, compounds that mirror that Latin liturgy ("Our God") but use native Albanian morphology and vocabulary.

Now to address the faults in Malcolm's reasoning:

1. Assumes that Nicetas' translation of the Bible into the "Bessi" language was comprehensive and completely non-Latin whereas the translation was most probably not if we speak probabilistically and realistically. It is more likely that the core concepts would have been translated first, Zot, etc, being the highest on that list of priority. The Proto-Albanians at the time of Nicetas most definitely were bilingual Latin speakers also, as Albanian's intense Latin contacts are known, even jokingly called a partially Latinised language by some. So Malcolm's comparison to Armenian or Gothic, etc doesn't hold as a suitable reference given that they didn't have intense contacts with Latin since 167 BC like proto-Albanians did in the Balkans. They were operating in quite different contexts.

2. Assumes that the Bessi liturgy/autonomy persisted whereas even Schramm argues that this was most likely a historically temporary situation after which the Proto-Albanians fell fully under the Latin. We can imagine a situation where the few native Albanian christian terms we have today would have originally had a much larger corpus but were eroded over time i.e. there may well have been native terms for flock. Although it can be argued that a certain partial religious autonomy that Arbanon seems to have had later on can be a sort of continuation of this.

3. Misses the fact that Nicetas was said to have preached not to just the Bessi but the Getae, Dacians, Scythians. So again, given that Proto-Albanians are placed in Moesia at this time, it becomes improbable Nicetas wasn't involved somehow.

4. Assumes that Schramm can't be wrong about certain claims without still being correct about others. It is perfectly possible that his dating and justification for proto-Albanian migration (Khan persecution of Christians 9th century) can be wrong entirely with him still being correct about Nicetas' role in Christianisation of Proto-Albanians.

I can go on but these are some of the most relevant critiques here.

Taking it from the obverse angle now, something that is relevant given the Albanian-Romanian symbiosis that Schramm recognised is the uniquely shared Christian vocabulary (whereas God is not shared by Albanian with any other Balkan Latin language) :



So Albanian like Romanian refers to:

1. engagement/marriage as "kurorëzim/kurorë/kunorë" from Latin. corona, coronare
2. bride's father/bridegroom's father as krushk (krushqit for bridal party) from Latin. consocer, consocera
3. witness, godparent as "kumtër" / "kumbarë" from Latin. compatre
4. baptised child / godson as "famull" and "fijan" from Latin. famulu and filianu
5. stepmother as "njerkë" from Latin. noverca


This is a huge subject, requiring a research project of its own, but the problem of Albanian Christianisation clearly seems to intersect with the problem of the Albanian-Romanian symbiosis. There seems to definitely be a special relationship where in some areas they very intimately overlap and are congruent, whereas in others Albanian stands out as singular to all the other Balkan Latin groups (native terminology like Zot, etc).

I just remembered this is one of the subjects for which Kelmendasi over at Genarchivist banned me for.

I wonder, if he could, would he ban Michiel de Van from publishing this 2026 Basel study that says Albanian shares more lexemes with Daco-Romanian than any other Balkan Latin variety?

Funnily enough, ever since I was banned, the "Albanian Discussion Thread" on Genarchivist is a ghost town, with only an ineffectual post or two every couple of months, but otherwise literally no discourse or engagement. It's funny, he became a moderator and his first result of moderation in Genarchivist was to kill the Albanian discussion thread dead...

Likewise I noticed that Arbanology and all the other cheap imitations of Albhistory that constantly used to ankle bite and countersignal me have all evaporated into nothing, with a bullshit token post once every 3 months about how Albanian is J2b or some half assed banality about Messapic.

If the purpose of a system is what it does, then what is the purpose of the ideological system that these individuals belong to?

The pattern seems to be to kill mass momentum and engagement on the investigation of Albanian linguistics and archaeology.

With Albhistory I was almost at 10,000 followers with countless local and worldwide linguists, historians, archaeologists, journalists, politicians etc, among them, and I made multiple posts daily in order to build momentum and engagement/interest around the Albanian question. I shared ethnography, art, music, archaeology, linguistics, history, etc, relating to Albanians and I curated and presented it in a way to make it accessible and educational while also making it an attractive academic puzzle that was fun and mysterious, so as to recruit even people that would otherwise have no reason to care about the subject into contributing to the study of it. I worked hard to popularise the term "Proto-Albanian", before me it was a specialist term relegated to only academic linguistics or historical articles, and there was no real mass awareness among Albanians, let alone foreigners. Not like there is any mass awareness even today, but it is ten thousands times better than before my efforts.

Whereas now? The Albanian space on twitter has become a volatile cesspool of either provincial embarrassments to mankind, islamists, idiots just asking Grok to launder legitimacy to stupid petty arguments, or the few Illyrian 50 follower bunkers/silos that never break containment circle jerking over their Illyrian qpadms and mediocre maps / pie graphs, without ever bringing anything new or pushing the discourse forward.

 

[Jovialis]

I haven't read this thread, but I am curious as to what people think about the theory that both Albanian and Greek come directly from Yamnaya.

 

[Al'Nasi]

I haven't read this thread, but I am curious as to what people think about the theory that both Albanian and Greek come directly from Yamnaya.

Not followed this as deeply as most this is what I have grabbed from conversations and data floating about.
Seems to be generally Agreed that they come from the same source but as to if Albanian and Greek share a common root not shared with others or if the original root is also shared with others we are not sure. Albanian was recorded too late and is part of the balkan sprachtbund with Greek which makes it harder to decouple from Greek. As well as Albanian having a large number of Latin loans and partial satemisation, knowing what is going on there is pretty hard. If we look at another language in this proposed Yamnaya group that being Armenian, it has a millennia on Albanian which at a minimum gives us an older form of the language with more clear overlap with Greek. Personally I think they do come from a single source not shared with the other indo-european languages, there is a few small details seen shared between them like the common "not" root word, and such small shared developments that push me towards that direction but even then it could be they had already split as dialects in the steppe and were just a unique cluster.
Edit: by other I mean Tocharian and Corded-Ware/Bell-Beaker I realised I was not clear with my wording

 

[Johane Derite]

Albanian archaeologist Luan Perzhita just published an article in an Albanian newspaper Nacional claming that Fushë-Kosova has been inhabited by Albanians since 6000BC...

This is promoting some new book of his about Fushë-Kosova.

The absurdity of this is that on the cover of his book he features one of the famous iron age channelled ware finds from Kosova, no doubt he claims this as Illyrian when it belongs to one of the typical non-Illyrian cultural packages of Kosova, most often classified as Daco-Mysian.

These boomer archaeologists are poisoning the public with this garbage.

 

[Johane Derite]

A new stage has been reached where the resentment of E-V13 from the J2b-L283 crowd (Hillurian aka Fshatar/Nik and co) has now led to them generating fantasies about submissiveness of Thracians (a proxy for their E-V13 resentment).

To be clear this claim about "Thracian submissiveness" is a totally fictitious conclusion that is wholly motivated by his personal psychological resentment/pathology over the fact that E-V13 is the largest paternal origin of Albanian men, meaning most Albanian men descend from originally Daco-Thracians paternally.

 

[Teipares]

A new stage has been reached where the resentment of E-V13 from the J2b-L283 crowd (Hillurian aka Fshatar/Nik and co) has now led to them generating fantasies about submissiveness of Thracians (a proxy for their E-V13 resentment).

To be clear this claim about "Thracian submissiveness" is a totally fictitious conclusion that is wholly motivated by his personal psychological resentment/pathology over the fact that E-V13 is the largest paternal origin of Albanian men, meaning most Albanian men descend from originally Daco-Thracians paternally.

View attachment 19421

Ah yes I am sure that all thracians included practiced such cultures and that there is no deviation from south Thracians, Dacians, Moesians etc. This was amongst the elites to consolidate power be it or not, there are more cultures throughout history that practiced worse things than that ex (Aztecs,Carthaginians) you can't deny ancestry on some obscure topic . As for Rhoemetalces I what does that have to do with proto-Albanians its like Italians trash talking on a Spanish king. Kto o daku me shume dun me u heq si Ilir per arsyje historike me Romaket(Perandoret Ilir) aka Larpers edhe beshtyjn te paret tone. Harrojne qe njerezit malor kane qene dako-traket e jo kto pirata Ilir. Asigjo kundra Ilireve, perkundrazi kane pat pjesen e vet ne histori. Barbona ka pat historia po kto duhet me msu qe nuk na nevojitet nji histori e pavertet per me u shty, shumica europianeve barbona ishin ti shofin ku jane sot me zhvillime qe tejkalojne Shqiperine edhe shtetet qe dikur ishin te fuqishme. Went on a rant there, gjithsesi ju lumte per punen qe boni un nuk merrem me kto thjesht e ndjek nga anash per me msu rreth historise tone.

 

[PaleoRevenge]

I am waiting for lililians to start speaking Italian in French accent, back to their imperial roots, since having Daco-Thracian heritage is such a burden.

 

[Riverman]

The real Thracian custom was elite polygyny and sometimes widow sacrifices, a custom which spread with Thracian influences as far as Frög in Southern Austria. So they were strongly patriarchal and patrilinear based on the surviving evidence. That they were so can also be seen in the fact that the Thracians were nearly exclusively E-V13. They seem to have been even more reluctant to accept foreign males, in their unmixed core groups, as most other tribal clans people of the Iron Age, which means something.
You can see that also that some of the more purely local Daco-Thracian individuals from Viminacium were still (!) almost the same as the LBA-EIA Thracian people. That shows how little they mixed over at least 1000 or more years with the neighbours - if looking at their core groups which weren't broken, lost their ethnic-tribal cohesion.

If indeed the ethnogenesis started with Cotofeni, that would make the Thracians one of the earliest and oldest (Indo-) European people on the continent (3600-3400 BC onwards).

 

[Johane Derite]

Hillurian aka Fshatar/Nik is still going on about "submissiveness" (seems to be a common theme with him, something to analyse psychologically there) and making sure to project his resentment onto E-V13...

Here he claims that South Slavs have E-V13 because they "mixed with roman danubian plebs of basarabi extension."

This is factually wrong as we know most south slavic E-v13 probably came via Albanian or Vlach assimilation that happened moreso in the high to late middle ages than any immediate mixing with "roman danubian plebs".

Also quite important to recognise the presence of R-Z2705 among Serbs.

But ultimately though this is just another desperate projection of his intended to lower the status of E-V13, which in his mind apparently will raise the status of J2b-L283?

The evidence for now all points to Albanian R-Z2705 and E-V13 not being a part of the same population as Albanian J2b-L283, this is clear, so it is really just a futile and pointless waste of time, this entire thing of trying to lump heterogeneous elements into one to bolster the claim. It will just fail and you'll concede it anyway.

Likewise, 4 years ago everyone was trying to countersignal me and paleo and hawk, etc, and push E-V13 being illyrian, now they have all quietly conceded it's clear daco-thracian lean and have focused more on damage control with trying to claim a branch here or there being Illyrian, or that E-V13 somehow "belongs to all the balkan groups equally".

4 years wasted to ultimately just end up agreeing with what I was saying back then but wrapped up in a way so as to spare your egos.

Now I see that Stefan and co are pushing more for Dardanian origin, and they've begun to construct all sorts of fanciful copes way over inflating Glasinac-Mati reach to safely "Illyrianise" the Dardani.

Give it up before you waste another 4 years. These contstructs are pathetic and useless. Glasinac-Mati only had real influence in Drin / Western Kosovo. These fantasy maps that are being pushed of them dominating Nish and Skopje are absurd archaeologically.

All of Kosovo extending as far as into south Albania was overrun by channelled ware in the late bronze age - early iron age. This massive wave had nothing to do with Glasinac-Mati or Illyrians. This channelled ware showed up in Mat itself also, so these channelled ware people imposed themselves even on the Glasinac-Mati people. Meanwhile these Illyro-Taliban clowns are claiming all of Dardnaia was Glasinac-Mati, when the true archaeological record shows the exact opposite, that only the western Drin region was properly so.

If you are an Albanian actually interested in the truth or belong to E-V13 and you like and boost this clown and his Illyro-Taliban network then you are a moron.

 

[Dahoi]

I find one problem with the Daco-Thracian origin of Albanians, the Messapic Albanian conection. Maybe this could be explained if Daco-Thracians were a Yamnaya IE people, what do you think abt this?

 

[Riverman]

I find one problem with the Daco-Thracian origin of Albanians, the Messapic Albanian conection. Maybe this could be explained if Daco-Thracians were a Yamnaya IE people, what do you think abt this?

We need Cotofeni samples to be sure. Because if Cotofeni was still like Bodrogkeresztur, so completely local dominated, despite small steppe, then its possible.

 

[Johane Derite]

I find one problem with the Daco-Thracian origin of Albanians, the Messapic Albanian conection. Maybe this could be explained if Daco-Thracians were a Yamnaya IE people, what do you think abt this?

Its overstated and not actually understood / contextualised properly by the parties usually parroting it.

Firstly, it has become a sort of canon that there is a messapic-albanian connection among the parties that push the Illyrian position, but it is never presented with the context of what this messapic albanian relation actually described by linguists is.

I am personally mostly responsible for popularising it online, but the origin is entirely from Matzinger and his research on the Messapic language and some articles that he did in other publications. From there on then other linguists, most notably Hyllested & Joseph make the claim that:

"Technically speaking, from a genealogical standpoint, Messapic likely is the closest IE language to Albanian (Matzinger 2005)"

but they are only saying this citing him as a source, not making any new claims based on their own evidence pertaining to messapic and how it relates to Albanian.

So since Matzinger is the primary source and genesis of this "messapic" canon, what is his position exactly?

Well, firstly the context in which he argues for Albanian-Messapic proximity is in relation to the Indo-European phylogeny, which plainly just means that compared to German or Slavic Albanian is more closely related to Illyrian, Messapic, etc, which is accurate.

He says this based on some phonological developments (tektalreihen as they relate to satem/centum) as well as some etymologies (barzidihes, bile, etc), but otherwise he doesn't say anything specifically on this question.

More or less it is just a huge overstating of a relative proximity due to his argument that Albanian falls phylogenetically within a group called "balkan indoeuropean".

There is no study of Albanian in relation to daco-mysian vs messapic that was done by matzinger where he writes that Albanian is closer to messapic than dacian or daco-thracian, or something of the sort, so the way it is taken out of context to push for one direction as opposed to the other within the paleobalkan realm is totally nonsense.

We have examples of Albanian being closer to Dacian than Messapic in attested messapic reflexes like of PIE *n̥ that gives /an/ in Messapic which is not the case in Albanian. Dacian. Aksiopa shows the same development as in Albanian. Mat, whereas Messapic would be Mant/Anksiopa.

 

[Johane Derite]

Maybe this could be explained if Daco-Thracians were a Yamnaya IE people, what do you think abt this?

As for the indo-europeanisation question, if you look at "bur-" names that appear among both Thracians and Dacians (in tribal names like Buri, Buridensi, personal names like Buris, Burilas, Burebista, Mukaburi and toponyms like Buridava, Burikodava,) these are one of the most attested names we find among them, and linguists have always connected them with Albanian. Burrë (man) since the early days of indo european philology. Despite this, the implications have rarely been understood.

We know that culturally this word had a very high relevance in Albanian history (one of the the earliest attested Albanian language names is burmazi (burrëmadhi, big-man), and would have had even more so in the pre-Christian era of proto-Albanians.

Concepts like "burrni" (manhood, honour, ) and "besa" (oath, faith, etc) would have been central to the pre-Christian IE cultural/religious package of patrilineal Albanian clans.

So we should expect this word to appear among proto-Albanian anthroponymy.

The fact that it appears so frequently among Thracians and Dacians is an indication that this is in the similar phylogenetic group as proto-Albanian, as it is not just an etymologically shared word but a corresponding cultural significance of that word.

There are also other aspects such as the singular path of E-V13 indo-europeanisation for which there is no other true analogue among the indo-european cases so far. Branches like I1 among germanics don't dominate in the way that E-V13 does, and it is clear that culturally there was something singular about the Daco-Thracian group.

Albanian likewise has so many idiosyncracies as an IE group that for me suggest a singular path (i.e. things like the word "motër" in Albanian meaning sister, whereas in every other IE language this stem results in a word that means "mother". This has challenged linguists for a long time and a lot of theories abound, but which ever theory explains it, it has to be a singular path that Albanian took in contrast to other IE languages).

Also with the recent akbari revelations of which there have been so many that a lot have not even been digested as of yet, it seems that the "Daco-Thracian" world split goes deeper than just an iron age phenomenon.

I am totally unconvinced by Aspar and Rafc's models of some random tiny stamped ware group exploding out of the rhodopians in the iron age to become both the dacians and the thracians.

Georgiev famously claimed that the Daco-Mysians were linguistically as different to the Thracians (while still being related phylogenetically, same branch) as Armenian was from Iranian, so this sort of deeper EBA-MBA split of common Daco-Thracian also more comfortably allows for one of the branches of the wider Daco-Thracian to be the Proto-Albanian branch.

This also puts Dardanian back on the table as belonging to this Daco-Thracian group, maybe the westernmost branch of a Dardano-Daco-Thracian group.

 

[Johane Derite]

Its overstated and not actually understood / contextualised properly by the parties usually parroting it.

Firstly, it has become a sort of canon that there is a messapic-albanian connection among the parties that push the Illyrian position, but it is never presented with the context of what this messapic albanian relation actually described by linguists is.

I am personally mostly responsible for popularising it online, but the origin is entirely from Matzinger and his research on the Messapic language and some articles that he did in other publications. From there on then other linguists, most notably Hyllested & Joseph make the claim that:

"Technically speaking, from a genealogical standpoint, Messapic likely is the closest IE language to Albanian (Matzinger 2005)"

but they are only saying this citing him as a source, not making any new claims based on their own evidence pertaining to messapic and how it relates to Albanian.

So since Matzinger is the primary source and genesis of this "messapic" canon, what is his position exactly?

Well, firstly the context in which he argues for Albanian-Messapic proximity is in relation to the Indo-European phylogeny, which plainly just means that compared to German or Slavic Albanian is more closely related to Illyrian, Messapic, etc, which is accurate.

He says this based on some phonological developments (tektalreihen as they relate to satem/centum) as well as some etymologies (barzidihes, bile, etc), but otherwise he doesn't say anything specifically on this question.

More or less it is just a huge overstating of a relative proximity due to his argument that Albanian falls phylogenetically within a group called "balkan indoeuropean".

There is no study of Albanian in relation to daco-mysian vs messapic that was done by matzinger where he writes that Albanian is closer to messapic than dacian or daco-thracian, or something of the sort, so the way it is taken out of context to push for one direction as opposed to the other within the paleobalkan realm is totally nonsense.

We have examples of Albanian being closer to Dacian than Messapic in attested messapic reflexes like of PIE *n̥ that gives /an/ in Messapic which is not the case in Albanian. Dacian. Aksiopa shows the same development as in Albanian. Mat, whereas Messapic would be Mant/Anksiopa.


View attachment 19503

I forgot entirely about that conference presentation with Gavranovic. There he actually did argue for full satem Daco-Thracians vs Full Centum Illyrians, and a messapic half satem half centum group in the middle that Albanian and Armenian also belonged to.

There were many odd things about this argument, from placing Armenians in the balkans to this demarcation of these groups based on this incomplete scheme that linguists like Radu Craciun have criticised as mainly being based on orthography and inconsistent application

I think the dna evidence is enough to move forward away from such a model.

 

[PaleoRevenge]

Georgiev famously claimed that the Daco-Mysians were linguistically as different to the Thracians (while still being related phylogenetically, same branch) as Armenian was from Iranian, so this sort of deeper EBA-MBA split of common Daco-Thracian also more comfortably allows for one of the branches of the wider Daco-Thracian to be the Proto-Albanian branch.

I doubt they were vastly different as Georgiev implied, the ancients regarded Dacians and Thracians of the same stock, one would not get such an impression of a people if they are speaking what Georgiev implies totally different speeches.

mount/fshatar can cope and lick his wounds as he speaks in E-V13 tongue from the same vile mouth he curses. His ancestors were Romanized and mixed with proto-Islamic genetics. Now he speaks Albanian and bites the hand of those that taught him.

A map made by one his subordinates, ligjidhjer

Viminacium is a sea of Dacian onomastics. His own made map. They trip on their own feet.

 

[Johane Derite]

I doubt they were vastly different as Georgiev implied, the ancients regarded Dacians and Thracians of the same stock, one would not get such an impression of a people if they are speaking what Georgiev implies totally different speeches.

mount/fshatar can cope and lick his wounds as he speaks in E-V13 tongue from the same vile mouth he curses. His ancestors were Romanized and mixed with proto-Islamic genetics. Now he speaks Albanian and bites the hand of those that taught him.

A map made by one his subordinates, ligjidhjer

Viminacium is a sea of Dacian onomastics. His own made map. They trip on their own feet.

It's also plain wrong and missing countless Daco-thracian examples within Dardania and even Illyria. Also note how he doesn't mark his sources and page numbers, it's just his personal whims presented as data. He is a cheap clownshow

 

[PaleoRevenge]

Whatever the sources, he has Daco-Thracian vastly outnumber Illyrians in Viminacium, not even close. Which matches ancient DNA samples. It makes no impression on his brain. Where are his models now, the IBD data refutes it all. His models were self-serving he tortured the right function to force the results he wanted. Inability of self-reflection is the hallmark of a primitive brain.

 

[Johane Derite]

Concerning the Indo-Europeanisation question with Albanian particularities:

The Albanian inherited kinship terms (some of them are from either Ottoman times or Roman times so those have to be discarded) show a drastic difference from every other IE branch.

Albanian either lost words entirely that other branches use (i.e. the equivalent to Brother and its cognates among other IE languages is missing in Albanian) or it made new terms that are also lacking entirely in other IE branches (the Albanian word for Brother "vëlla" is made from a compound of Proto-Indo-European *swé (“self, one's”) and *h₁lewdʰ- (“grow”), whence respectively vetë (“self”) and lej (“to be born”). This is an ancient development within early stages of proto-Albanian).

You likewise have other examples of this:

Albanian lacks an equivalent cognate for "Sister" but instead uses Motër which is from the stem that all the other IE languages use for Mother instead.

An equivalent of "Father" Pater, etc, is also entirely absent in Albanian, which has At instead.

What does this indicate?

It must point to something historical about the proto-Albanians, namely that culturally/politically/historically they must have diverged from the other IE branches in such an equivalent way as to how much they diverged linguistically, given that kinship terms concern the innermost core of the language pertaining to social and therefore political organisation, family unit, community, etc. This level of overhaul is unusual among IE branches and points to major social reorganization away from the original PIE family system.

Linguists have always noted this peculiarity, Orel for example writes:

"The entire system of Indo-European kinship terms was completely reshaped in Proto-Albanian (apparently reflecting a radical social change). The only remaining terms keeping their original function are those of the parents-in-law and son-in-law[.]"

Because we have Illyrian. Bra for brother attested in Hesychius, which is absent in Albanian entirely, we can already say that some aspects of attested Illyrian kinship terminology/system seem to clash already with Albanian.

We can also speculate about how this "radical social change" that must have affected the early proto-Albanians could be reflected in archaeology and material culture.

Should we expect to see a linear progression of Yamnaya customs nearly identical to the steppe but just transplanted in the western balkans? Well, no, that doesn't really map archaeologically onto "radical social change".

We should rather expect a material culture that diverges away from the Yamnaya system.

Riverman's theory about Cotofeni here is interesting, as a Yamanaya descended group that did undergo some sort of overhaul and restructuring so as not to simply be a linear transmission of Yamnaya (unlike the western balkan inhuming groups which are much more straightforward Yamnaya descendants).