Looking around the Old Bazaar in the Albanian town of Kruja, we came across this book by the dictator Enver Hoxha who ruled Albanian from 1944 until 1985. Photo: Kate Clark The book is volume 2 of a Russian translation of his Selected Works. (A few doors down the road, we saw half a dozen…… Continue reading Enver Hoxha in Russian in the Old Bazaar
Tag: Albanian
Albanian suppletive verbs
Sometimes, an inflected form of a verb was originally an inflected form of another verb. For example, went—the past tense form of the English verb go—was originally the past tense of the now obsolescent verb wend. This phenomenon is called suppletion and I have discussed it before at https://languagemiscellany.com/2024/11/borrowing-verb-forms-from-another-verb/ Albanian has a surprisingly large number of verbs with…… Continue reading Albanian suppletive verbs
Albanian words of unknown or uncertain origin
In previous posts, I mentioned 70 words inherited by Albanian directly from Proto-Indo-European (PIE) and another 68 words borrowed by Albanian from other languages (mostly Indo-European). In this post, I look at another 32 Albanian words with no confirmed source in PIE or in borrowings. Together, these 3 posts cover the 170 Standard Albanian words…… Continue reading Albanian words of unknown or uncertain origin
Where did Albanian borrow words from?
In this post, I look at 68 words that Albanian borrowed from other languages,. Most of the words were borrowed from other Indo-European languages. In a previous post, I mentioned 70 other words that Albanian inherited directly from Proto-Indo-European (PIE), the presumed ancestor of the Indo-European family of languages. https://languagemiscellany.com/2025/09/where-did-albanian-words-come-from/ The information comes from the…… Continue reading Where did Albanian borrow words from?
Where did Albanian words come from?
In this post, I look at 70 words that Albanian inherited directly from Proto-Indo-European (PIE), the presumed ancestor of the Indo-European family of languages. The information comes from the IE-COR database—a database of cognates for 109 modern and 52 older Indo-European languages. I’ve written before about IE-COR. Database of Indo-European cognates – Language Miscellany IE-COR…… Continue reading Where did Albanian words come from?
A is for Bee
A is for BEE: An Alphabet Book in Translation, by Ellen Heck, is a delightful alphabet book for children. Each page lists one or more words starting with the same letter and has bright pictures illustrating each word. The pages are in alphabetical order. This is an alphabet book with a twist: each page lists…… Continue reading A is for Bee
From the Steppes or from Anatolia?
A recent paper takes a further look at some old questions: when did Indo-European languages separate from the rest of that language family, and in which order? where did speakers of Proto Indo-European—the ancestral language of the Indo-European language family—live? The paper Language trees with sampled ancestors support a hybrid model for the origin of…… Continue reading From the Steppes or from Anatolia?
Structure of numbers in Indo-European
How are numerals formed in Indo-European languages today, and how were they formed in the ancestral language Proto-Indo-European (PIE)? And do ordering patterns of components within numerals align with other word order patterns in the same languages? Andreea S. Calude and Annemarie Verkerk considered those questions in a paper looking at how 81 present and past…… Continue reading Structure of numbers in Indo-European