Talk:Proto-Albanian language

Redirect
made a redirect since there was no valuable information. Who said that "Proto-Albanian" was spoken in the Ukraine? Also, the phylogenetic separation of Albanian is between Gheg and Tosk, not between Albanian and Arvanitic. In any case, "Proto-Albanian" is worthless as a concept, because there is no significant differentiation ("Proto-Albanian" would maybe have been spoken around AD 1200, which goes nowhere towards shedding light on the origins of the Albanian language). dab (&#5839;) 11:22, 15 May 2006 (UTC)
 * Removed Ukr claims and referenced. Article stands by itself now. --Ustallaretevjeter (talk) 15:12, 21 August 2014 (UTC)

There's no chance that an advanced branch, with quite a few archaic grammatical features, like Albanian would habe been spoken in its Proto-Form only in AD era. Have some common sense pls.LAGTON (talk) 14:42, 3 August 2019 (UTC)


 * The article currently claims that the Tosk–Gheg split happened already in the mid-first millennium AD. There's a problem here: Proto-Slavic as well as Common Slavic / Early Slavic must still have had archaic, Proto-Balto-Slavic and Baltic-like phonology, especially vocalism, in the 7th and 8th centuries, as argued convincingly and forcefully by Mareš and Holzer, but widely ignored or played down, even though the evidence is so stark (see for examples). This means that it is unlikely that typical Slavic loans in Albanian, which already show distinctive South Slavic traits, were borrowed in this period, and most of them seem to have been borrowed only in the 9th or 10th centuries or even later. There are plausible early loanwords from Slavic in Albanian though, like baltë 'mud' and daltë 'chisel', and sanë 'hay' may belong to this layer as well. These are less obvious and easy to recognise, conspicuously, and look much more native. As a result, it is entirely possible that the Tosk–Gheg split happened only significantly more recently and most Slavic borrowings are relatively late – just like in Romanian. Therefore, the chronologies proposed that presuppose an earlier split are also suspect.
 * As a result, more than a millennium may have elapsed between Archaic Albanian (by the beginning of intense Latin contact, probably in the 2nd century BC) and Proto-Albanian proper. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 16:57, 28 July 2020 (UTC)


 * The footnote Brown & Ogilvie 2008, p. 23: "In Tosk /a/ before a nasal has become a central vowel (shwa), and intervocalic /n/ has become /r/. These two sound changes have affected only the pre-Slav stratum of the Albanian lexicon, that is the native words and loanwords from Greek and Latin" is very interesting, but as argued above, this argument is not necessarily probative, as the apparent lack of these sound changes in Slavic loanwords (it is true that Tosk rhotacism does not seem to have affected the Slavic loanwords – at least there are no clear examples, or only very few isolated examples, compare Ylli 1997: 317) could be accidental, and it would be important to adduce examples of archaic Slavic loanwords that even predate the 9th century (like arguably daltë 'chisel' and perhaps shullë 'maidservant') that one would expect to show the mentioned changes defining of Tosk, but which really don't, in order to prove that the split must have preceded contact with Slavic (presumed to have started in the 7th century). --Florian Blaschke (talk) 03:25, 2 August 2020 (UTC)

Baltic & Slavic "similar to" Illyrian-Thracian or Dacian or Paleo-Balkan in general
I'm not sure how this is possible but none of the available reference supports this statement.Alexikoua (talk) 11:11, 15 July 2019 (UTC)
 * There is no such statement. Not sure what you are talking about. Ktrimi991 (talk) 11:17, 15 July 2019 (UTC)
 * One inline reference reads: "Thracian, Dacian and Albanian-Romanian Correspondences" pp. 57-60: "It [i.e., the Albanian language] can be said to be related more closely to Baltic and Slavic than to anything else, and certainly not to be close to Thracian.".

There is also [] Foundations of Baltic Languages, Pietro U. Dini, p. 239-240: a more northern placement of the so-called Proto-Albanian complex is proposed (near the Carpathian mountains and next to Baltic speaking populations).

Actually there is a lot of bibliography in favor of the Proto-Albanian-Baltic connection which gains popularity among scholars. Baltic is certainly not a language of the Balkan area.Alexikoua (talk) 11:37, 15 July 2019 (UTC)
 * That is not a statement. Anyways, as Curtis says, Hamp's position is that the ancestor of Albanian (Albanoid) was spoken in an area from Poland to the actual place where Albanian is spoken (Albania, Kosovo etc). Hence, Hamp's position is that Albanian's ancestor was a Paleo-Balkan language. Hamp argues that because it was spoken from Poland to today's Albania, Albanian is similar with Thracian and Baltic, and fits well with Latin and Macedonian. Ktrimi991 (talk) 11:42, 15 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Also, supporters of the Dacian and Moesian origin of the Albanian language place in the Carpathian area. Where is the Paleo-Balkan origin disputed? If you wish you can open a RfC. I will not repeat what has been explained to you several times. Ktrimi991 (talk) 11:47, 15 July 2019 (UTC)
 * If "the similar" you are trying to refer to is the one in the last sentence of the lede, the similar tongue is the one proposed by Hamp (Albanoid), not a Slavic or Baltic language. Ktrimi991 (talk) 11:57, 15 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Actually you are self-refuting yourself. However, if you still insist that Baltic and Slavic can be considered similar (as you refer) to Paleo-Balkan you need to provide a decent source for this claim.Alexikoua (talk) 12:43, 15 July 2019 (UTC)
 * You do not understand what it has been said to you several times in several places. Instead, read what the source you placed above says:For Baltic linguistics the new element is the connection between the Baltic languages and the ancient languages of the Balkan area (Thracio-Dacian, Phrygian, Macedonian, etc.), which have been studied over the last decades. Ktrimi991 (talk) 12:49, 15 July 2019 (UTC)
 * It's fine you admit that Albanian is related to Baltic. I guess there is finally no objection for it's inclusion as an additional candidate language.Alexikoua (talk) 12:58, 15 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Of course Albanian has connections with Baltic languages, just like with Greek, Latin, English and all other Indo-European languages. I said what I had to say, not once but many times. It is up to you to decide what you want to do: accept the current version or open a RfC. Cheers, Ktrimi991 (talk) 13:13, 15 July 2019 (UTC)
 * If you do the latter, make sure the participants are aware that your sources were removed from another article as irrelevant to the issue you are trying to raise . Ktrimi991 (talk) 13:36, 15 July 2019 (UTC)

Can people who have absolutely no understanding of historical linguistics please, please stop meddling with this article? The editing on this article in the last few days has been atrocious; I don't know what older version to revert to. This needs a thorough pruning back and rewriting from start. Please, people, don't do that without first establishing proper weight on talk, and if your only interest in this topic is in treating it as an idiological battleground, then stay the hell away from it. Fut.Perf. ☼ 13:42, 15 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Maybe I should have pinged in my previous comment as I mentioned an edit of them there. I am not totally sure what do you plan to do but the main problem is the interpretation of Hamp and Curtis. If you are able and willing to help, please do. On my edits, all what I added are some of the sources of the last sentence in the lede. I am totally open to being reverted and discussing them if anyone does see problems with them. Ktrimi991 (talk) 14:08, 15 July 2019 (UTC)
 * As a matter of fact, I also changed traditionally thought to be Illyrian to The candidates are Illyrian, Thracian, Dacian or another similar tongue. Ktrimi991 (talk) 14:14, 15 July 2019 (UTC)


 * This is all massively WP:UNDUE at best. Hamp's view is one (dated) view in the field. Another view is that hte lack of sufficient Albanian links to Baltic excludes Thracian as a candidate parent. Additionally, words about "Proto-Albanian" being in the Carpathians are being used misleadingly here. Proto-Albanian can refer to many things. What is not disputed is that one language that is called by scholarship "Proto-Albanian" has an extensive Latin superstrate that displaced the majority of native vocabulary. That excludes any part of the Carpathians that was even a bit close to the Baltic language area as an option for the immediate ancestor of Old Albanian. Furthermore, the chronological argument would be impossible to say Albanian was in the Carpathians during the Roman era because of Baltic contact -- becuase during that time Iranian languages were spoken north of the Carpathians (superseded by Gothic -- not Baltic, and not even Slavic which was around Pripyat at the time). Still possible are Roman Dacia and Roman Thrace and of course Illyria. But we can also talk about earlier (Pre-)Proto-Albanian before Latin contact -- for which some Doric Greek contact can be detected (see Orel on this), but perhaps there are theories placing this in the Carpathians. PIE split 6000 years ago and it does not do any of us favors to reduce 5000 of these years to a single time. All of this can be expanded upon. Hamp can be mentioned but we are not putting it in wikivoice that Albanian is a Balto-Slavic language as this is crazy fringe. --Calthinus (talk) 17:35, 15 July 2019 (UTC)


 * My previous comment might be a bit opaque. I should clarify : the Proto-Albanian language described by Orel, which is described on this page, is the parent of Old Albanian. Mainstream historical linguistics does not discuss any possibility of it being spoken in an area not ruled by Romans. Maybe its ancestor was -- like other IE languages, of course at some point it came from either the Kurgan or Anatolia -- but that is not the topic here and they should not be confused. --Calthinus (talk) 17:41, 15 July 2019 (UTC)
 * I have Orel on hand now. I'll do a significant expansion of this page starting in an hour. It needs it. --Calthinus (talk) 17:43, 15 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Indeed Calthinus. The murky origin of the Albanian language should not be misued for the creation of fringe narratives. A part of the Carpathians is in the Balkans (Serbia and Romania) and any possible connection of the ancestor of the Albanian language with the said region does not show Albanian is a Slavic or Baltic language!!! Also, what do you think of a sentence added by an IP (today deleted by Fut Perf together with the rest of recent additions) that Albanian first existed separately from Illyrian in the northern Balkans during the 2nd millennium BC? Albanian language in the second millenium BC? Is this a theory accepted by the mainstream academic world or is it another crazy claim? I ask not only because of this article but also because the same authors have been used on other related articles. I cant add diffs rn to make what I am talking about clearer. Ktrimi991 (talk) 18:10, 15 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Please check the Balkans article, part of the Carpathians including Serbia and Romania is not part of the Balkans (not even historically).(KIENGIR (talk) 18:13, 15 July 2019 (UTC))
 * Hello . Thanks for your information. The Balkans do have many definitions. Parts of Croatia, Greece, Serbia and Romania are in most contexts not considered to be part of the Balkans, but the ancient tribes that lived there are considered Paleo-Balkan ones. Cheers, Ktrimi991 (talk) 18:26, 15 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Aight I have to run. I've added most the vowels. Will do more time allowing. wouldn't be against moving some stuff here to Phonological history of Albanian. Cheers. --Calthinus (talk) 20:54, 15 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Great. I am placing a barnstar on your talk page :) Ktrimi991 (talk) 21:01, 15 July 2019 (UTC)

What about the fact that Vladimir Orel is not even fluent in Albanian? Example: he tried to give an etymology for an albanian participle and thought it was a "noun".LAGTON (talk) 14:39, 3 August 2019 (UTC)


 * What about it? There's no need for an Albanologist to be fluent in Albanian (fluency is a high standard), just as a Latinist does not have to be fluent in Latin. Even if it was really an error (which I'm not convinced of – the example was not named, so it cannot be verified), mistakes can happen to anyone – including to native speakers. This reads like a baseless, petty smear by a disgruntled nationalist.
 * As for similarities between Balto-Slavic and (some) Paleo-Balkan languages:
 * As Matzinger argues, Illyrian, Albanian and Daco-Thracian are all distinct branches of Indo-European, and so is Balto-Slavic. It is true that Albanian and Daco-Thracian show remarkable resemblances to Balto-Slavic, especially in the area of historical phonology, however, and I've wondered myself if Balto-Slavic and Albanian, possibly together with Daco-Thracian and arguably also Indo-Iranian, might form some kind of satem clade or at least early dialectal contact zone within Indo-European (specifically excluding Armenian, and in any case Greek and Phrygian), but it's all pretty vague.
 * Hypotheses such as Mayer's, which classify Thracian as a Balto-Slavic language, or even specifically Baltic or East Baltic, in any case, can be safely dismissed as extremely implausible to impossible, considering that Thracian was definitely an entity (in the form of which we have evidence, mainly toponymic) by the 6th/5th centuries BC, and likely even several centuries earlier, maybe even already in the second millennium BC; considering that Proto-Balto-Slavic is dated by some into the second millennium BC as well, at least the hypothesis of Thracian as Balto-Slavic is not entirely impossible, though it is implausible, and depends on an early dating of Proto-Balto-Slavic, which I do not find compelling at all (compare Kim 2018: p. 1974, who plainly dates it much later). However, Mayer's even more extreme hypothesis is plainly anachronistic: It is basically excluded that Lithuanian and Latvian were separate as early as, say, the 5th century BC, in view of their exceedingly close relationship (the Lithuanian–Latvian split could easily only have happened in the mid-first millennium AD, compare Kallio 2006: p. 155 fn. 3). --Florian Blaschke (talk) 04:43, 2 August 2020 (UTC)

Propose splits as this page develops
Hi -- I intend to include works from Orel, Demiraj and Matasovic here that pretty extensively cover not only the phonology but also morphology, lexicon etc. This page will get very long. I propose the following three way split

1) Phonological history of Albanian -- to describe diachronic developments in detail so they do not crowd out other parts of the page 2) Early Proto-Albanian -- describes the phonology, morphology etc of EPA, as well as developments from PIE to EPA. 3) Late Proto-Albanian -- same as above for LPA. Thanks for fixing my habit of referring to it as "later". This page may need to be further refined to differentiate Roman imperial era Albanian from Dark Age Albanian and that as well from Old Albanian, but those bridges can be crossed when they are reached.

Any objections? --Calthinus (talk) 16:53, 17 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Very good idea. Of course I do not have any objections, you are probably the only Wikipedia editor capable of upgrading this article to true encyclopedic standards. The rest of us either add a few sentences that do no cover the entire aspects of the subject in a balanced way or merely revert back to a version of the last year blindly deleting all other people's work. Pinging because the ping in your comment was not correct. Cheers, Ktrimi991 (talk) 18:13, 17 July 2019 (UTC)
 * I agree, it's a good idea. — Βατο (talk) 19:04, 17 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Same here. Any addition to the article would be great, but I think this hits the nail on the head here. ArbDardh (talk) 22:35, 17 July 2019 (UTC)

Confusing PIE sound transcription
I am just a bit confused and concerned by the way PIE was transcribed here, I got the fact that the editor of the page used IPA but I think the fact that the three laryngeal h₁, h₂ and h₃ are missing and the transcription of Proto-Indo-European is slightly different from how it usually is, would create some confusion here. Can someone do something about that please? ALBA-CENTAURI (talk) 14:31, 12 November 2020 (UTC)

History of PIE *s
In the section "Consonants", the development of PIE *s is a hybrid of Orel and Rusakov. Orel (2000) only reconstructs *s for EPA (p. 60; 273), which is also reflected in various examples (check gjarpër, gjerb and others). In User:Calthinus's version, there is consequently no *z in the consonant table and the examples.

With this edit, User:Directrule changed the tables to follow Rusakov (2017), who projects the split of initial *s to the EPA stage and reconstructs *ź and *ś (de Vaan does the same for "Pre-Proto-Albanian" *ʒ, *ʃ). These EPA sounds are spelled *z and *s in the current version of the article. As a consequence, we have an inconsistent hybrid now: a consonant table sourced to Orel but containing sounds not reconstructed by Orel, and examples (e.g. IE *serp- "to crawl" > EPA *serpena  > Alb gjarpër "snake") with Orel's EPA *s- when we should have *z- (or better: *ź-) per Rusakov.

We need to fix this, but how? Return to Orel (2000) only, or take Rusakov (2017) as model, which to me as a historical linguist looks more compelling in its higher granularity. OTOH, the sexy thing about Orel is that he reconstructs full words/roots for intermediate stages (like EPA *serpena ), whereas Rusakov (and also de Vaan) only presents the starting and end points (e.g. PIE *sokʷ- > gjak). Based on Rusakov, we would have to remove the EPA forms which is a pity (unless we do OR/SYNTH and modify the examples to match Rusakov, e.g. EPA *zerpena ; for me however, that's not an option). What do you think? Austronesier (talk) 13:39, 21 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Hello User:Calthinus did a huge work in this article presenting the earliest phase of the study of PAlb, firstly introduced by Orel. I think now it's better that the article reflects more recent sources. Aside Rusakov and De Vaan, much has been written by Joachim Matzinger, Stephan Schumacher and Bardhyl Demiraj, in particular for EPAlb. Several Indo-European reflexes can be found in the online project "Digitales Philologisch-Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Altalbanischen" led by Demiraj and Hackstein. For instance, in that dictionary the EPAlb forms of gjarpër and gjak are with *ź. Matzinger provides for EPAlb these:
 * short vowels: */a/, */e/, */i/, */u/ long vowels: */ā/, */ō/, */ī/, */ū/ obstruents: */b/, */d/, */g/, */p/, */t/, */k/ sonorants: */l/, */ll/, */m/, */n/, */nn/, */r/, */rr/ approximants: */i̯/, */u̯/ sibilants: */ś/ (< */s/), */ź/ spirants: */f/ (< */sp/), */x/ (< */sK/) affricates: */ć/, */ȷ́/, */č/, */ǰ/
 * But he writes some of them using alternative symbols in different publications.
 * Btw, the article states: " Indeed, there is information about the stage of Albanian after the splitting from the parent IE language during the contacts with other IE (pre-)proto-languages and before loanwords from Ancient Greek. For that stage it would be useful the term "Pre-Proto-Albanian", but some scholars use it alternatively to "Early-Proto-Albanian" for the phase that preceded Latin borrowings. And "Early-Proto-Albanian" is even used by some scholars for the Roman period. A clear distinction in the terminology throughout the article might be convenient. – Βατο (talk) 20:10, 21 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Thanks for these pointers! Once I find some time, I can update the tables and expecially the examples to better align with more recent sources. Rusakov as a secondary source is probably a good model to follow per WP:RS/AC, and we can use Demiraj and Hackstein for examples that give intermediate stages as long as they are consistent with the notation we choose here.
 * Btw, do you happen to have a digital copy of Schumacher & Matzinger's Die Verben des Altalbanischen. Belegwörterbuch, Vorgeschichte und Etymologie? It would be nice to have some reconstructed morphological paradigms here as well. –Austronesier (talk) 20:29, 25 January 2024 (UTC)
 * That would be great! Unfortunately I don't have a copy of Schumacher & Matzinger's book. – Βατο (talk) 01:00, 26 January 2024 (UTC)
 * I have Die Verben des Altalbanischen: Belegwörterbuch, Vorgeschichte und Etymologie (2013) by Stefan Schumacher and Joachim Matzinger incomplete; namely, everything, except parts F and G. In any case, there is a lot there. You can download it from [deactivated link] (there is a download button in the upper right corner); please let me know when you do, so I can deactivate the link. Demetrios1993 (talk) 19:04, 29 January 2024 (UTC)
 * ✅ Great, thanks a lot! –Austronesier (talk) 20:49, 1 February 2024 (UTC)