Belonging to the earliest layer of Christian vocabulary in Albanian there are also (to a lesser extent) non-Latin, "native" Albanian terms like i lumë, frymë, etc and compositions like imzot, tënëzonë, etc, that also suggest translation into Proto-Albanian by clergy.
Fascinatingly, this could possibly pose a problem to Noel Malcolm's Dardani theory.
One of the main reasons Malcolm lists for rejecting Schramm's Bessi theory is the Christianisation of the Bessi that was done by Nicetas of Remesiana (which happened in the time that the Proto-Albanians were christianised.) and it was supposedly done in the language
of the Bessi.
Noel Malcolm:
"
The early conversion of the Bessi to Christianity is indeed, in Schramm's view, the key to the entire question of how and why Albanian survived as a language. 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. "
What this doesn't explain though, is how Albanians learnt the early Christian non-latin terms
"tënëzonë, imzot, hirplotë (which show ancient albanian grammatical features)
frymë, i lumë, etc" if they were learning these terms in "
spoken liturgical Latin" from "
Latin-speaking teacher or teachers".
Why did the Latin liturgy have these Albanian words in them?
Hmm...
Schramm:
Und Niceta war gewiß kein Purist, der bereits geläufigen Übernahmen das Heimatrecht abgesprochen hätte. Aber er wird, wo ihn seine Aufgaben als Übersetzer und als Verfasser eigenständiger hessischer Texte vor das Problem stellte,
wie ein christlicher Inhalt angemessen wiederzugeben sei, lieber auf hessisches Wortgut als auf das Latein zurückgegriffen haben, so vertraut ihm diese Zivilisationssprache auch
sein mochte. Wo aber Niceta und die Fortsetzer seines Werkes auf diese Weise tätig und produktiv wurden, kann man nur hier und da ahnen: so, wenn für
credere und credentia
die Erbwörter besoj und bese (neben fe < fede) eingetreten sind, während
resurrectio durch ngjallje,
remissio (peccatorum) durch ndjese und
temptätiö durch tundim vertreten wird.
Anfänge des albanischen Christentums
Pg 94
Schramm again here makes an interesting argument:
In die Überlegungen einzubeziehen sind Kontrastbeispiele, die ein kraß anderes Bild bieten und sich nicht zuletzt innerhalb der albanischen Sprachgeschichte finden.
Auf Anhieb lehrreich erscheint mir ein Text, der augenfällig macht, was aus dieser Sprache wurde, wenn ihr keinerlei Aufwertung im Rahmen der Kirche widerfuhr und kein
Platz in den Gottesdiensten eingeräumt wurde. Ein junger Mann namens Luca Matranga, was für alb. Leke Matrenga steht, hat, als er sich in den achtziger Jahren des 16. Jh.s auf
die Weihe zum katholischen Priester vorbereitete, einen albanischen Katechismus verfaßt, der 1592 in Rom gedruckt wurde und für die Seelsorge in seinem Heimatmilieu albanischer Flüchtlingsgemeinden auf Sizilien bestimmt war.
Die Albanergruppe, der Matranga entstammte, war aus der Peloponnes übergesiedelt und hatte 1547 in Piana degli Albanesi ihre erste Gemeinde auf italienischem Boden gegründet.
In Griechenland hatten diese Albaner jahrhundertelang an rein griechisch gehaltenen Gottesdiensten teilgenommen. Und von griechischen Seelsorgern waren sie betreut worden.
Vor diesem historischen Hintergrund wird verständlich, warum bei Matranga auch Begriffe wie Trost, auferstehen, Bescheidenheit, verherrlichen, bekennen und Versuchung aus
dem Griechischen entlehnt erscheinen. Hier zeigt sich, daß unter bestimmten Bedingungen die Kraft eines Volkes erlahmen kann, christliche Inhalte mit seinen eigenen Mitteln auszudrücken.
Anfänge des albanischen Christentums
Pg 95
Schramm excellently uses the example of Matranga, who wrote the oldest Tosk christian book, and who comes from a community of Albanians from Greece that migrated to Italy, to
demonstrate how "contaminated" the Albanian christian vocabulary of Matranga is by Greek religious vocabulary because of living in a Greek religious environment.
Schramm:
In the town of Remesiana on the northwestern side of the Bessian mountains, there was an important bishop called Nicetas who lived there in the second half of the fourth century. He had made a name for himself in the Latin Church as a theologian and exemplary preacher. Widely known was a series of sermons he held making information on the faith available to adults who wished to be baptized. One realizes in them how determined Nicetas was that the message of the Church be understood and appreciated as much as possible by those wishing to join it. It was the Gothic bishop Ulfilas who gave him an opportunity to spread this message beyond the mountains where he lived. Ulfilas had fled with his congregation from the region north of the Danube River to the Christian southern side in order to avoid religious persecution. These refugees were resettled on the northern slopes of the Balkan Mountain range, above the fertile valleys, a mere 250-270 kilometres from Remesiana. This immigrant group proved to Nicetas that a
Christian mountain people could lead a peaceful existence in the tenets of their faith and serve as pass guards for one of the roads leading over the mountains. The Bishop of Remesiana was also impressed by the missionary zeal of Ulfilas’ congregation to convert the surrounding Germanic and other barbarian tribes. This was dangerous because Ulfilas was a homoousian, i.e. a moderate Arian, whereas Nicetas was a determined supporter of Athanasian Christianity. If he did not convert the Bessians, there was a good chance that Ulfilas or his followers would, and would do so in such a way that Nicetas regarded as blasphemous.
Ulfilas’ surprising charisma was based in good part on the fact that he made Gothic an ecclesiastical language by translating the Bible, or a good part of it, and the liturgy, into that language. This resulted in the rapid success of his mission. The hearts and the minds of the Ostrogothic barbarians who could now attend mass in their language and read the Bible in Gothic, were suddenly more receptive to the new faith than they had been with mass in Latin or Greek. Nicetas had no difficulty following this example because he and most of the people of Remesiana were familiar with Bessian and Latin. Among the texts that he wrote or translated into a language that had never been written down were songs and, most likely, liturgical and biblical texts.
Of course, Nicetas had one disadvantage over Ulfilas, whose followers had already been converted when they emigrated to their new homeland on the lower slopes of the Balkan Mountain range.
Nicetas’ Bessian heathens housed in isolated settlements high up among the rugged mountain peaks. As bishop, he would not have been able to spend much time in missionary activities up in the mountains without neglecting his work in Remesiana. However, this disadvantage was compensated for when he conferred to monks and nuns – probably for the first time in the history of Christianity – the task of converting a people systematically to the new faith. These pious men and women abandoned their customs as hermits far from human settlements. Their traditional lifestyle, that arose in the contemplative world of eastern Christianity and was originally focussed on meditation and incessant prayer, received a second calling in new missionary activity. By the end of the fourth century, Bessian monks and nuns from the old-established local population that had just been converted to Christianity were recruited for the new mission. Proof of the swift rise of monastic life and the strength and breadth of its effectiveness is the fact that by the sixth century there were colonies of Bessian monks in Constantinople and – as autonomous monastic communities or subgroups of ethnically mixed monasteries, in the Holy Land. They conducted their monastic activities using their own language for the liturgy.
As such, this people, who were long seen as wild and savage robbers in the remote reaches of the mountains and who terrified the inhabitants of the lower slopes and plains, rose to join the small and illustrious circle of monastic nations who, with a liturgical language of their own, not only pursued an active monastic lifestyle at home but also engaged in pilgrimages. Among other such nations as the Copts, Syrians, Armenians and Georgians, the Bessians were, before the emergence of the Christian Irish in the fifth century, the only
Christian group to look westward to Rome."
Noel Malcolm's argument here that we don't have entirely translated Albanian liturgy of words like "flock" would not seem to make sense since Nicetas was not a native Bessian speaker, neither were his monks or nuns that he sent to spread Christianity among the Bessi (in the second half of the 300s AD).
Likewise this argument is weakened by the fact that the absorbtion of latin christian vocabulary from "Roman & Romanised barbarians" as Malcolm mentions would likely have eaten away at their supposed Bessian native liturgy and weakened it (like matrangas' community was hellenized partially by living in greece)
Especially in the zone of Illyria where a latinized Illyrian populace lived.
In the 300s AD, proto-Albanians would have been bi-lingual and at least have understood Latin partially (of the eastern variety shared with Vlachs and Romanians).
So the proto-Albanians could theoritcally have been converted at this time by a latin speaking priest like Nicetas, who partially translated into proto-Albanian, and partially just used the common western latin vocabulary of Christianity (looking westward to rome) of the time.
This would explain why their latin christian vocabulary is of the western strain despite their normal latin being majority of the eastern strain (either that or they converted to christianity after moving west) like romanian & vlach.
This would also explain why Albanian has ancient native non-latin christian terminology, since this would require clergy to at least partially translate terms into proto-Albanian. Lots to think about.
