Dabbling diary #2: Albanian — a “half-Romance” language?
Ever since I taught myself Serbo-Croatian back in 2012, I’ve figured I’d eventually like to learn Albanian at some point too —in part to better understand the “other side” of one of the bigger unresolved political issues of post-Cold War Europe, and also to learn another language that’s representative of the Balkan sprachbund.
I first tried studying Albanian in 2013, but stopped after finishing one textbook (and in order to spend more time on Hindi etc.). I tried again in 2017, after I’d spent a month or so studying Romanian and my attention started to drift to other parts of the Balkans. And now (I guess there’s a four-year cycle to this?), after having leveled-up my Turkish in the past few years and recently getting into Italian (and its dialects) as well, I figured it was as good a time as any to take another shot at Albanian, which has had a lot of cultural interaction with both Italian and Turkish for many centuries.
Linguistically, Albanian is notable in that it constitutes its own independent branch of Indo-European. But another pretty interesting (and imho underrated) peculiarity of the language is that something like 60 percent of its vocabulary consists of loanwords from various forms of Latin, some of which is 2000 years old and not that easy to recognize because of historical sound changes.
For example, consider the word mbret, which means “king” in Albanian. It comes from Latin imperator “emperor”! The word vepër, which means “deed” or “work”, comes from Latin opera; the word arsye, “reason”, comes from Latin ratio via some complicated sound changes; and so on.
A lot of very common Albanian words are of Latin origin too. Shumë “very” comes from summus “highest” (cf. summa cum laude), while pak “few/little” comes from paucus (cf. Spanish poco, French peu). Mik “friend” and shok “comrade” come from amicus and socius. Kundër “against” comes from contra. The word for “hello”, përshëndetje, includes the root shëndet “health”, which is related to French santé and English sanitation.
Apparently, this large amount of Latin influence led some early researchers (like in the 19th century) to consider Albanian a “half-Romanized mixed language.” And for what it’s worth, there’s also a whole Wikipedia article dedicated to the Albanian-Romanian linguistic relationship. In any case, these links serve as an interesting reminder of how extensive Latin influence was in the Balkans once upon a time, before the arrival of South Slavic speakers.
I could list dozens more examples of Latin words in Albanian, most of which I’ve found in two books —A Concise Historical Grammar of the Albanian Language and Albanian Etymological Dictionary—or the “Albanian terms borrowed from Vulgar Latin” category in Wiktionary. Here I’ll just list a few more of my favorites.
- mësoj “to learn” comes from Latin invitiare, with the “nv” cluster merging into an “m”. Western Romance languages don’t use this root to mean “learn” anymore, but Romanian has preserved it — as învăța
- kujtoj “to remember, to think” is from Latin cogitare
- luftë “war” comes from late Latin lucta, and is cognate with Spanish lucha, French lutte, Portuguese luta, Italian lotta and Romanian luptă
- shkëndijë “spark” (and the name of a North Macedonian soccer team) comes from Latin scintilla (cf. English scintillate)
- fytyrë “face” is from Latin factura, cognate with English feature
- fëmijë “child” is from Latin familia with a slight shift in meaning
- kafshë “animal” is from Latin causa “cause” with a pretty big shift in meaning — and cognate with Spanish/Italian cosa “thing”
- kuvend “conversation, assembly” is from Latin conventus (compare Romanian cuvânt “word” and also Modern Greek κουβέντα “word, conversation”)
- dërgoj “to send” is from Latin delegare, cognate with English delegate
- fshat “village” is from Late Latin fossatum “ditch”, and related to Romanian sat with the same meaning
- ftoj “to invite” is from Latin invitare
- fqinj “neighbor” is from Latin vicinus, cognate with French voisin, Italian vicino, and English vicinity
- dëshmoj “to testify” is from Latin testimoniare
- farkë “forge” is from Latin fabrica (Interestingly, the English word forge is from the same Latin root too — Old French sound changes can also get pretty crazy)
Separately, there’s also a significant number of words that seem like they might have been borrowed from modern Italian, or maybe Venetian, or at least coined by analogy with Italian words: e.g. shpjegoj “to explain” looks a lot like spiegare, zhvilloj “to develop” seems to parallel sviluppare, and shfrytëzoj “to exploit, take advantage” looks analogous to sfruttare. And then there are clear Italian borrowings like sfidë “challenge”, from sfida. (Meanwhile according to Wiktionary, Italian gara “competion” could actually be from Albanian garë? Big if true.)
And of course there are plenty of loans in Albanian from Slavic (e.g. bisedë “discussion”, zakonisht “usually”), Turkish/Perso-Arabic (e.g. budalla “fool”, kala “fort”) and a bit of Greek (e.g. akoma “still”).
If the 60-percent estimate is accurate, the amount of Latin loans in Albanian is comparable to the amount of French and Latin in English, or the amount of Chinese in Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese. But just like in those situations, the fact that 60 (or whatever) percent of words in the dictionary are of Latin origin doesn’t mean that 60 percent of words in a given text will be of Latin origin, since native words tend to get used more frequently.
(The position of Latin loans in Albanian is much less structured and systematized than Sino-Japanese, Sino-Korean, or Sino-Vietnamese, however. Most native speakers are probably not aware of the Latin etymologies of most of these words.)
Even when sound changes make a lot of the Latin loans hard to recognize, I feel like the large amount of Romance words does seem to make Albanian vocabulary a bit easier to pick up. In general, I’ve been pleasantly surprised with how quickly my prior knowledge of Albanian has come back since I started studying it again (although maybe I shouldn’t be that surprised anymore, since that’s what happens every time I start reviewing a language that I’ve neglected for a while).
I’m not sure how long I’ll stick with Albanian this time around (I do already have a few other languages in mind that I’d like to study next), but I have a good amount of learning material lined up, and my comprehension is at the point where I can sort of read and listen to real-life material too, so I could potentially keep working on Albanian for several more months if I feel like it and don’t get distracted.
(For the most part, my primary focus languages are still Korean and Vietnamese, although I’m also trying to consume content in several other languages on a regular basis.)
Anyway, it does help that there’s lots of Albanian music to listen to out there:
