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I know that the Albanian language is an Indo-European isolate however there must be some affinities with neighbouring languages like Hellenic and Slavic languages? If that is the case then which languages have influenced Albanian the most?
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It's an IE isolate, like you said. No current IE langauge is in the same family with Albanian.
That said, Albanian is part of the Balkan *Sprachbund, so it shares similarities (in grammar, syntax, vocabulary and phonology, not origin other than being IE) with other Balkan languages.
Linguists have also paid special attention to similarities of Albanian and Romanian. Before the Slavic migration in the Balkans in the 6th century, Albanian and Romanian must have been spoken right next to or even overlaped with each other, they have exchanged a non-insigificant number of features with each other.
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r/unexpectedmetathesis
r/unepxectedmetathesis
Thanks, fixed.
Lol what did it say before?
Though some believe that many of the pre-Latin languages in the area were related to it.
This is well accepted. Although, due to the scarcity of written records from these languages, it's not clear which language.
common lexic in Romanian and Albanian -- about 500 words of various provenance: Dacian, Latin, Slavic.
FTFY. Dacian was spoken in modern day Romania but it's wrong to refer to the Dacian language as "Romanian" just cause Romanian has a Dacian substrate. Btw, Paeonian and Thracian may have also been part of the same dialect continuum as Dacian and Illyrian (Albanian). Dacian and Thracian are proposed to be closer to each other than Dacian and Albanian are. Paeonians are sometimes considered to have been a subgroup of Thracians.
We can call that Romanian. By the 6th century, Romanian must have been Latinized already, because that's when the Roman influence in the Balkans ends and the Slavic one starts.
What do you mean by "Romanian must have been Latinized"? The Dacian language of modern day Romania was wiped out and replaced with a completely different language. The Romanian language is not a continuity of Dacian, it is completely different like how English is completely different to Brythonic and how Anatolian-Turkish is completely different to Hittite. The only thing in common between Romanian and Dacian is that they are both IE languages. The reason people relate Albanian with Romanian is because of the Dacian substrate that Romanian has.
I meant, by 6th century we are talking about a Latin language, so it's fair to call it Romanian, though I did phrase it wrong.
"Dacian" is controversial. It's not clear what the ancestor language of Albanian is.
The post-6th century Latin language has no relation to Albanian though other than the fact both it and Albanian are IE languages.
Dacian is the language that shares a lot of similarities with Albanian. Dacian is definitely not the ancestral language of Albanian, but Dacian is theorized to have a common ancestor with Albanian.
Thank you, does this mean there is a strong Latin based component in the Albanian language?
It's a two fold influence.
Albanian has a very strong Latin component that's for sure. This Romance element resembles Romanian but also the now extinct Balkan romance, Dalmatian (where it differs from Romanian).
On the other hand, Romanian has a number of words common to Albanian and no other language. They are not of Romance origin. That's the Eastern Romance substratum. Those are words that are most often traced as native in Albanian, meaning directly descended from PIE.
Additionally, Romanian too is part of the Balkan sprachbund. For example, like Albanian and other Balkan languages, Romanian puts the noun article (English 'the', Spanish 'el, la' etc.) at the end of the word, not in front of it.
This is anecdotal from an Albanian speaker who's recently become interested in Albanian etymology. Albanian is pretty distinct when it comes to purely Albanian words, and any quick research will show you that it's very isolated. However, due to the fact that the Albanian region has been under foreign control for a large portion of its history, it has a lot of loan words or foreign word roots. This is mostly shown in a lot of latin loan words. A particularly cool way Albanian has integrated latin is that it has somewhat kept the hard "c" sound that latin used to have. So the word for cities in latin - civitas, pronounced 'keeveetas' according to my high school latin classes - became qytet in albanian. While the 'q' sound isn't equivalent to a k sound, it hasn't become the soft c that it is in italian, for example. Another one, 'mik' from the latin 'amicus' (friend) does keep the hard k sound without altering it.
A lot of the latin influence in Albanian is similar to Romanian, as another commenter has pointed out. I personally don't know much Romanian, but I knew a Romanian speaker a few years ago and there seemed to be quite a few similarities in certain words. Additionally, some more quick research does show that there are many similarities between Romanian words and Albanian latin loan words.
Finally, there's the very obvious one: the loan words from Turkish. Since Albania was ruled by the Ottoman Empire for 500ish years, a low of Turkish words crept into Albanian vocabulary. 'Merhaba', the turkish word for Hi, is used in old, formal Albanian speech. The turkish word for mug, fincan, is very similar to the Albanian word filxhan (the c in turkish is pronounced like the xh in albanian). Tamam is the same in both, meaning okay/all right. Zor and kolay also have similar meanings in both.
However, none of this shows that modern albanian is related to these language, just that languages such as latin and turkish have had profound impacts on the language over the centuries.
Some corrections. It would be more like kee-WE-tas not VEE.
Merhaba is not in use, tamam means 'precisely that'. I would add that, while it's true that many Turkish loanwords entered the vocabulary, during the communist era many of them fell out of use due to newly coined words created specifically to replace these loanwords. The younger generation uses significantly fewer Turkish loanwords than older one. This was the case with other Balkan countries too.
<q> in Albanian has a lot of variation, it is preserved as a hard k or a palatalized one in many dialects, but in other ones, like the one used by newscasters, it approaches German ch sound in ich. In fact, Albanian speakers who learn German simply pronounce it as such because that's how they hear it.
You are correct in the others :)
I'll address it by points to not make my response cluttered:
Dang I forgot 'v' is more like a 'w' or 'u' in Latin, it's been a few years since high school latin
I didn't want to delve too deep into Albanian history in my post, and mostly just wanted to showcase Turkish's influence in the language. I've been trying to learn Turkish recently and have been talking to my parents, born and raised in Albania, about the words I learn and their relevance in Albanian language. They (and therefore, I) agree with you that Turkish loanwords have fallen out of use and are mostly used by the older generation. There are words that have not fallen out of practice (like my example of filxhan, kolay) others like the turkish word for mosque (cami, 'xhami' in Albania) or the word for money (para in both). However, again, I didn't really want to go into the history of Albania in the post, and I didn't want to make too many claims since most of my experience with this is anectodal. You are 100% correct, in that a lot of Turkish words have fallen out of favor.
Q is sooooooo hard to describe to non-albanians over the internet without using Phonetical alphabets or anything like that. Albanian 'q' and 'y' is hard for English speakers (in my experience) to say because there aren't really any words with those sounds in English (common words, afaik). For the most part, I haven't seen English speakers able to pronounce the Albanian 'q' well, and most pronounce it as K. My personal favorite example is the Albanian-Swiss Soccer player Xherdan Shaqiri. Everytime he scores a goal the commentators scream "Shakiri! Shakiri!" :p
It's always surprising and nice to see someone else who is familiar with Albanian, regardless of whether they're a native speaker or not. Also you likely know way more about the language than I do, so I appreciate your comment. Thanks for the corrections! :)
This is very detailed, thank you very much! I've noticed some Turkish influence on Albanian names as well.
It's no problem! There's a LOT of Turkish influence on Albanian names! For example, the current president of Turkey's first name, Recep, is the same as a very popular name in Albania, Rexhep (same pronunciation, different spelling). The more Turkish I learn, the more I learn about the extent of its influence on the culture and language as a whole
I can just tell it's definitely not closely related to Balto-Slavic.
There are words in Albanian common with Romanian, but they are borrowings into Romanian, or maybe from a common substrate.
There is a number of words in South Slavic which are borrowed from this common word pool, the most famous being vatra 'fire' (existing besides inherited Slavic oganj/ogenj, which is IE as it gets).
Albanian is conservative in some aspects (still has cases, for example), but there were many sound changes, and some common IE vocabulary (e.g. nose) was replaced.It seems some non-IE words in Old Greek are in Albanian too.
I heard once that Albanian is more closely related to Germanic languages than other IE languages. Not that it's a Germanic language, but that in the past there was an Albano-Germanic branch of the IE tree that both proto-Germanic and proto-Albanian came from. Can anyone back this up?
Also, Albanian was related to extinct languages spoken in the Balkans during Roman times, such as Illyrian.
Albanian has been compared with Germanic, Balto-Slavic, Celtic, Italic etc. langauges and the results have been inconclusive. It's not clear which IE family is the closest to Albanian.
It's generally accepted Albanian descends from a (so-called) Paleo-Balkan language that was not Greek.
I've read this too, but also that this is dismissed by some linguists because this link can be traced to Germanic loan words. While they've become a part of the Albanian language, like latin and turkish words, the Germanic words aren't an inherent part of Albanian. However, take my words with a grain of salt because I'm just retelling things I've read. With languages as isolated as Albanian, it's hard to see what was inherently in the language, what was evolved from a common ancestor, and what is a loan word from another distinct language.