|
|
|
ALBANIAN |
||
|
ALBANIAN, as a language, is a branch of the Indo-European family tree, and consists of only one language, which is the official language of Albania having about 3.3 million speakers. It is moreover spoken in Kosovo, South Serbia and Montenegro by a further 3 million speakers; Macedonia and Greece, 840,000 speakers; Turkey with 300,000 and Italy with 90,000 speakers respectively. The Albanian language is considered to be the only language derived from the extinct language of the Illyrians, the transition from Illyrian to Albanian apparently occurring between the 4th and 6th centuries AD. The name Albanian has been found in records since the time of Ptolemy. In Calabria, Albanian is called Arberishtja or Arberichte, in modern Greek Arvantis (Arvanite), and in Turkish Arnaut. This name must have been transmitted early through Greek speech. Albanian was clearly classified as an Indo-European origin by the German philologist, Franz Bopp, in 1854. The details about how Albanian mainly corresponds with Indo-European languages were elaborated by another German philologist, Gustav Meyer during the 1880-1890 period. Danish linguist Holger Pedersen and Austrian Norbert Jokl also presented further linguistic refinements. Albanian shows no obvious close affinity to any other Indo-European language and it is plainly the sole modern survivor of its own subgroup. Of ancient languages, both Dacian (or Daco-Mysian) and Illyrian have been tentatively considered to be its ancestor or nearest relative. Even so, as an Indo-European language, its origin is uncertain and it was not until 1854 that it was conclusively proven to belong to that family. The vocabulary contains many words which are not found in any other Indo-European language, though there has been considerable borrowing from Latin, Greek, Turkish, and the Slavic languages. It has striking similarities with Balkan languages, Bulgarian, Serbian, Old Greek and Romanian. The first written documents appeared in the 15th century AD, the first book being the Meshari, or missal book, in 1555. Before 1908 when Albanian adopted a Roman style alphabet, the little literature that was preserved, was written in local makeshift Italianate or Hellenizing orthographies, or even in Turko-Arabic characters. The orthography now has 36 Latin-based letters made up of 7 vowels and 29 consonants. The official language as written in its new orthography was based on the south Gheg dialect of Elbasan from the beginning of the Albanian state in 1912 until 1945 but has since been modelled on Tosk. Albanian speakers in Kosovo and Macedonia speak eastern varieties of Gheg but have, since 1974, widely adopted a common orthography with Albania. Albanian is divided into grammatical categories which are much like those of other Indo-European languages. Nouns show overt gender, number, and three or four cases. An unusual feature is that nouns are further inflected obligatorily with suffixes to show definite or indefinite meaning. Thus buk, bread, becomes buka, the bread. Adjectives and dependent nouns follow the noun they modify, and remarkably acquire a particle preceding them that agrees with the noun. Thus in nj burr i madh, meaning a big man, burr for man is modified by madh, meaning big, which in turn is preceded by i in concordance with the term for man. In the same manner in dy burra t mdhenj meaning two big men, mdhenj, the plural masculine form for big, follows the noun burra, men, and is preceded by a particle t that agrees with the noun. The morphology of Albanian is relatively complex, especially in the verbal sphere, with two aspects, eight tenses and six modes. This gives roughly the number and variety of forms found in French or Italian and are quite irregular in forming their stems. Noun plurals are also notable for the irregularity of a large number of verbs. When a definite noun is the direct object of the sentence, a pronoun in the objective case that repeats this information must also be inserted in the verb phrase. Thus, i-a dhash librin atij literally means "him-it I-gave the-book to-him" which in standard English would be "I gave the book to him". Word positioning is mostly subject-verb-object, adjectives having an end position. The verb system includes many archaic traits, such as the retention of distinct active and middle personal endings (as in Greek) and the change of a stem vowel e in the present to o in the past tense, a feature shared with the Baltic languages. For example, there is mbledh, gathers, transitive, as well as mblidhet, gathers, is gathered, intransitive, in the present tense, and mblodha, I gathered, with an o in the past. Owing to superficial changes occurring in the phonetic form of the language over 3,000 years and the borrowing of words from a variety of neighbouring cultures, the continuity of the Indo-European heritage in Albanian has been underrated. In general, the grammar and formal distinctions of Albanian are reminiscent of modern Greek and the Romance languages, mostly Romanian. The sounds suggest Hungarian or Greek, but Gheg with its nasal vowels strikes the ear as distinctive. Although Albanian has a host of borrowings from its neighbours, it shows exceedingly few evidences of contact with ancient Greek. Obviously close contacts with the Romans gave many Latin loans, like mik for friend, from Latin amicus; kndoj, to sing, read, from L. cantare. Furthermore, such loanwords in Albanian attest to the similarities in development of the Latin spoken in the Balkans and of Romanian, a Balkan Romance tongue. For example, Latin paludem, a swamp, became padulem, and then padure in Romanian and pyll in Albanian, both with a modified meaning for forest. Conversely, Romanian also shares some apparently non-Latin indigenous terms with Albanian, such as the Romanian brad and Albanian bredh, meaning fir. Thus, these two languages reflect special historical contacts of early date. Early communication with the Goths presumably contributed tirq for trousers or breeches, from an old compound "thigh-breech", while early Slavic contacts gave gozhd for a nail. Many Italian, Turkish, modern Greek, Serbian and Macedonian-Slav loans can be attributed to cultural contacts over the past half-millennium with political dominances of Venetians and Ottomans, and to the geographic presence of Greeks to the south and Slavs to the east. A fair number of features, like the formation of the future tense and of the noun phrase, are shared with other languages of the Balkans but are of obscure origin and development. Albanian or its earlier kin could easily be the source for at least some of these, yet the study of such regional features in the Balkans has now become a classic case for research on the phenomena of linguistic diffusion. |
||
