We've had a lot of heated discussions lately - some of them not located in the Linguistics section despite the fact that they should have been held there, which concerned the origin of the Albanians of the Albanian language. Because these were almost always off-topic in other threads I decided to create a proper, separate thread on it. There are a lot of misconceptions about the Albanian language in existence, some of them will have to elaborated on here. We do have other examples of IE languages that are also attested relatively late (or even later than Albanian), the Baltic languages being a prime example of this. However, the big difference is that we have multiple Baltic languages attested (Latvian, Lithuanian, Old Prussian) that help us for the reconstruction of Proto-Baltic. Likewise, we do have the Slavic languages which share a significant number of commonalities with Baltic, which gave rise to the concept of a Balto-Slavic branch of Indo-European. In contrast, there is just the Albanian language alone (which includes it's dialects), and it is pretty clear that today Albanian represents a distinct branch inside the Indo-European language family. This of course poses a significant problem from the perspective of research. Before you proceed reading the rest here, I would like to say that I'm obviously not an expert on Albanian. However, give how Albanian is an Indo-European language, the same basic rules that apply to for other IE languages can be applied to the Albanian language as well. Also note that this first post is only an introduction, and that I will get into some more details later. I must admit that it certainly is frivolous when a non-Albanian attempts to tell Albanians where their language comes from, but I thought I should make a bold attempt here.
General features of Albanian:
- The standard word order in Albanian is Subject-Verb-Object, as it is in many other Indo-European languages.
- Albanian has two genders, masculine and feminine, similar to the Romance languages.
- Albanian has five cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative and ablative. A sixth case, the vocative, exists vestigially. Two other cases from Proto-Indo-European, the Instrumental and the Locative, have been lost.
Unique Features in Albanian
There are a few rather unique features found in the Albanian language that should be noted:
- the (partial) preservation of the laryngeal sounds reconstructed to have existed in the Proto-Indo-European language (preserved in the shape of /h/). The only other branch of IE in which these laryngeal sounds have been preserved are the Anatolian languages (such as Hittite and Luwian). Note that this doesn't automatically mean a relationship with the Anatolian languages (in fact, that can be ruled out due to fundamentally different grammatical structures), but it is certainly a parallel.
- What I would like to call 'Semantic anomalies'. There is a set of Albanian words which clearly have cognates in other Indo-European languages which have however considerably changed but yet related meanings. The big surprise here is actually that the meaning in other branches of IE is generally the same whereas in Albanian it is different. Some examples of this include (compared against cognates in various other IE languages):
Albanian 'motër' ("sister") versus for example English "mother", Latin "mater", Irish "máthair", Lithuanian 'motina', Hindi "mātā" - which however all have the meaning 'mother'.
Albanian 'verdhë' ("yellow") versus in various Romance languages "Verde" (green)
Albanian 'gjelbert' ("green") versus German "gelb" (yellow, note that the Albanian word must be a Germanic or otherwise Centum loanword, because the PIE root word *g´hel- would have yielded 'dhel-' in Albanian, which can be indeed still seen in the word 'dhëlper', "fox")
General considerations on the origin
When we talk about the origins of any language, we should consider the following simple guideline: no language, given sufficient time, remains the same. The amount of change may vary, with some languages being more conservative over longer stretches of time, and languages changing drastically in relatively short amounts of time. Of the former, Greek is a good example, whereas of the latter the changes from Archaic (Oghamic) Irish to Old Irish, or from Latin to Old French are good examples - in which in only a few short centuries drastic changes occured to a language. What this means in the case of Albanian is that whatever language it is descended from must have invariably looked anywhere between somewhat to considerably different from modern-day Albanian - also depending on what time slice we talk about. In any case, we can be certain that Albanian (or Proto-Albanian) 2000 years ago did not look like modern-day Albanian. This, of course, makes it hard for us to compare the modern-day language with whatever language it's ancestor was.
"Albanoi" vs. "Shqiptar"
One crucial point to be considered is that the term "Albanians" is an exonym (compare "Welsh", "Germans"), while "Shqiptar" is the endonym (compare "Cymry", "Deutsche"). This means we have no way to verify if the "Albanians" recorded in ancient sources are really the same as the modern-day Albanians. The ancient (Proto-Albanian) cognate of "Shqiptar" would have been something akin to "Skiptar", which should have been rendered into something akin to "Skipteroi" or "Skipteri" in Greek/Roman sources. Since this cannot be found anywhere, we must assume that the Albanians did not self-designate themselves as "Skipteri" in Antiquity, and that this self-designation was adopted only later.
Possible origins of Albanian
The general consensus is that Albanian must be - with high likelihood - descended from one of the Paleo-Balkan languages. This is a "grab-all" term for the collection of the rather poorly attested languages that were spoken on the Balkan peninsula in Antiquity - including Dacian, Illyrian and Thracian. The relationship between these languages is disputed, but what is clear is that they were without exception Indo-European languages. In any case, there are several main rivaling hypotheses which I briefly want to elaborate on:
1) The Illyrian Hypothesis
The Illyrians were an Indo-European people who lived in the northwestern part of the Balkan peninsula, including the northern areas of modern-day Albania. Very little is known about the Illyrian language itself (exclusively onomastic), but it has been suggested as the ancestor of the Albanian language. Wether Illyrian is suitable as an ancestor stands and falls mainly with the question if Illyrian was a Centum language or a Satem language (Albanian being part of the latter). What is an additional problem with Illyrian is the fact that the Albanian language has been noted for it's scarcity of native naval and maritime terms (instead we find borrowings, such as 'tokë' (shore), which is derived from Slavic 'tok' (to flow)). As a result, the Proto-Albanians are generally assumed to have dwelled somewhere in inland, away from the sea. In contrast, the Illyrians are well-known to have possessed a highly sophisticated naval culture and were feared by both the Greeks and the Romans as pirates in the Adriatic sea. As such, the Illyrians lend themselves poorly as the ancestors to the Albanians.
2) The Dacian Hypothesis
The Dacians, who inhabited the eastern parts of the Balkans penninsula - as well as adjacent areas in central and eastern Europe are one of the main contenders as ancestors of the Albanians. In general, Dacian was a Satem language. Additionally, there is a large vocabulary of words shared by the Albanian and Romanian language - with Romanian being generally considered as a Romance language that has a Dacian substratum.The main problem with the Dacian hypothesis is that the Dacian-inhabited areas, are located sufficiently far away that one must ask for a considerable migration of the Proto-Albanians towards their present-day location.In any case, even if Albanian is not descended from the Dacian language, it is nonetheless clear that Dacian words entered the Albanian vocabulary just like they did enter Romanian.
3) The Thracian Hypothesis
While this hypothesis is rarely discussed and tends to be generally dismissed, but I think it should be elaborated why. Thracian in generally shares also many similarities with Albanian (including being a Satem language, and lexical similarities), but a relationship is unlikely for a different reason: the Thracians lived in an area that was to become completely hellenized in later history. Had the Proto-Albanians originated here, we would expect them to have much more Greek loanwords and very little in Latin loanwords. Instead, we only see relatively few (and ancient) Greek loanwords and a substantial amount of Latin loanwords. From that perspective, we must assume that the origins of the Albanians lie north of the Jireček Line that historically divided the Balkan penninsula into a Latin and Greek part.
Loanwords in Albanian
One set of evidence which provides additional evidence is the amount of loanwords from in Albanian. As with other languages, loanwords allow a relative chronology of when a word entered Albanian vocabulary due to it's adherence (or non-adherence) to Albanian sound laws. I will get to these sound laws later, but for now I would like to give an overview of the sources we can find, in chronological order:
- Classical (Dorian) Greek: the oldest loanwords found in Albanian, apparently, are from classical Greek, clearly predating the Roman period.
- Latin: the vast bulk of loanwords into Albanian are of Latin origin and these make up a substantial part of the Albanian vocabulary. These, naturally, date from the period of the Roman Empire.
- Germanic loanwords. Most of these are of East Germanic origin and likely date from the Migration Period (it cannot have been later due to the demise of East Germanic).
- Slavic loanwords. These too must have entered into the Albanian language during the Migration Period or in subsequent centuries.
- Turkic loanwords. These date from the Ottoman period. These include for instance 'Bakër' (copper) and 'Kallaj' (tin).
From this we can establish with certainty that we can be reasonably sure that the Albanians lived at their (very) approximate present-day location (the Balkan penninsula) since Classical Antiquity.
This is all for now as an introduction. I will post more later (in particular on Albanian sound laws).
| Forum | Europe Travel Guide | Ecology | Facts & Trivia | Genetics | History | Linguistics |
| Austria | France | Germany | Ireland | Italy | Portugal | Spain | Switzerland |
 Eupedia Top > Eupedia Forum & Japan Forum
|
Originally Posted by Yetos
