Which philosopher mentioned albanian language

We assume that a number of loanwords that can be referred to as material borrowing, calques or loan translations that are an important type of structural borrowing, as well as transfer of semantic patterns can be expected in the kinship terminologies of this area, with the constant presence of some Albanian speakers shifting to bcms. In addition, we discuss the role of the Ottoman Turkish in the way of life and languages of the Muslim communities in southern Montenegro, because Turkic borrowings appear to be typical for the system of kinship terms we analyse here.

The bcms terminology is a variant of the Sudanese, or descriptive system, one of the six major kinship systems identitfied in Lewis H. Several groupings of relatives in bcms are inconsistent with the Sudanese type.

Parents, their siblings and grandparents are normally addressed with kinship terms, while younger generations are usually addressed with personal names. The comparative data in the Table 3 shows that most of the terminology for the closest relatives in the direct line is not subject to the contact. Although the elaborate kinship system of bcms includes specific terminology for the fifth and further ascending and descending generations, these terms are not found in the dialect cf.

Words with the same root and similar meaning can be found in Albanian, bcms and the other Slavic languages, as well as in Turkish. The terms used for the distinction are either native or borrowed compounds composed of a noun and an adjective. Given the lack of semantically and structurally similar words in the dialects of the other bcms -speaking Muslims in Montenegro, Bosnia and Hercegovina, Kosovo, etc.

This term occurs in the Northwestern Gheg dialect of Albanian to the south of Shkodra, while in the other northern Gheg dialects this relative can be referred to just as daja Gjinari et al. A similar contact-induced lexical enrichment in the field of kinship terminology is observed in some other varieties of bcms , Bulgarian and Macedonian spoken in bilingual communities. None of these terms expresses the distinction between paternal and maternal side.

Similar structural change is attested only in those Slavic-speaking areas where contact with non-Slavic languages was or is in place. The variety of Split in Croatia demonstrates both material and pattern borrowing under the Romance Dalmatian? Loanwords of this kind are found elsewhere in the Balkan Slavic and in non-Slavic languages, as the comparative data in the Table 6 shows. It is noteworthy that both dialects exist in close contact with Albanian, which has adopted the original Turkish distinction of paternal and maternal aunts.

Table 5 with comments. A similar merger happens in Croatian, according to Hammel, : Our interviews showed that most of the speakers know these terms only passively. It retains its original meaning of in all recipient languages, including bcms and its varieties Sobolev, : — Together with the other Ottoman Turkisms listed above, it makes part of the linguistic evidence for the common cultural and historical development of the Islamic population in the southern Montenegro and northwestern Albania during Ottoman times.

On the other hand, the processes of language shifts were possible at small group e. This fact points at close relations of the two ethnic groups within what a topographically and politically single community, at least until the beginning of the twentieth century and the establishment of the modern political borders.

The inverse word order in the constructions for describing paternal and maternal grandfathers is an example of calquing. These speakers imposed properties from their dominant first, or native language onto the language in which they were less proficient.

The local bilingual speakers who extensively used Albanian since their childhood then adopted the new terms and semantic patterns. Albanian borrowings, or loanwords proper, within the semantic group of kinship terms are not substantial in number. They emerge in the speech of bilinguals due to the sustained bilingualism and usage of both languages in everyday communication.

Certainly, the analysis of a single semantic field, no matter how thorough, will be insufficient to reconstruct the whole picture of linguistic interaction in the area. The results will contribute to the understanding the history and sociolinguistic setting of Slavic-Albanian contact in the territory of Montenegro and in the Balkans as a whole.

I wish to express my thanks to prof. Andrej Sobolev ils ras , SPbSU , the anonymous reviewers, and to the editor-in-chief of the journal Henning Schreiber for their insightful comments on an earlier draft of this article. The Montenegrin warrior tradition: Questions and controversies over nato membership. NY : Palgrave Macmillan. Terminologija krvnog srodstva u srpskohrvatskom jeziku. Turcizmi u srpskohrvatskoj terminologiji srodstva. Blaku Murat. Boehm Christopher.

Blood vengeance: The enactment and management of conflict in Montenegro and other tribal societies. Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press. Studime Filologjike 4 : 3 — Curtis Matthew C. Slavic-Albanian language contact, convergence, and coexistence.

PhD dissertation , Ohio State University. Slavic-Albanian language contact: lexicon. Slavia Centralis 2 : 5 — Beograd : SANU. Sabrana dela 2. Kinship in grammar. Typological Studies in Language Dizdari Tahir. Domosileckaja Marina V. Beograd : Slovo ljubve. Originally published in Srpski etnografski zbornik Beograd: Srpska kraljevska akademija.

Originally published in Srpski etnografski zbornik 8. Fine John V. The early medieval Balkans: a critical survey from the sixth to the late twelfth century. The late medieval Balkans: a critical survey from the late twelfth century to the Ottoman conquest.

Friedman Victor. From orientalism to democracy and back again. Turkish in the Balkans and in Balkan languages. In Detrez Raymond and Plas Pieter eds. Convergence vs. Brussels : P. Hammel Eugene A. Serbo-Croatian kinship terminology. Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers 16 : 45 — Haspelmath Martin.

Lexical borrowing: Concepts and issues. In Haspelmath M. Berlin : De Gruyter Mouton. Text 6. There is no merit in what some say, that the subject matter of logic is speculation concerning the expressions insofar as they signify meanings… And since the subject matter of logic is not in fact distinguished by these things, and there is no way in which they are its subject matter, [such people] are only babbling and showing themselves to be stupid.

One reason for this is that in Avicenna's psychology, language as a set of discrete expressions is not essential for the intellect in its operations. Note, however, that whatever Avicenna's official doctrine is, he recognizes and attempts to deal with the close nexus between language and thought.

Text 7. Were it possible for logic to be learned through pure cogitation, so that meanings alone would be observed in it, then this would suffice. And if it were possible for the disputant to disclose what is in his soul through some other device, then he would dispense entirely with its expression.

It is for this reason that the art of logic must be concerned in part with investigating the modes of expressions… But there is no value in the doctrine of those who say that the subject matter of logic is to investigate expressions in so far as they indicate meanings…but rather the matter should be understood in the way we described.

Avicenna's doctrine on the subject matter of logic was not adopted by the majority of logicians who followed him pace Sabra A recent study has clarified what is at issue in this debate El-Rouayheb The first is Avicenna's doctrine concerning the states of knowledge that logic aims at producing: conception and assent. Text 8. Assent, however, occurs when there takes place in the mind a relating of this form to the things themselves as being in accordance with them; denial is the opposite of that.

Conception is produced by definition, assent by proof. All Avicennan treatises on logic are structured in accordance with this doctrine: a first section deals with definition, which conduces to conception, a second with proof, which conduces to assent. The subject of an Aristotelian science is investigated with a view to identifying its per se attributes, that is, its necessary but non-constitutive properties. If the subject matter of logic is secondary intelligibles, then the proper task of logic will be identifying the per se attributes of secondary intelligibles.

Text 9. Text The subject matter of logic, I mean, the thing which the logician investigates in respect of its concomitants in so far as it is what it is, are precisely conceptions and assents. These are states which inhere in conceptions and assents in so far as they are what they are. So certainly its subject matter is conceptions and assents.

If what he means by conceptions and assents is everything on which these two nouns fall, it is the sciences in their entirety, because knowledge is divided into these two; whereupon what is understood from [his claim] is that the subject matter of logic is all the sciences.

Yet there is no doubt that they are not the subject matter of logic…. The truth is that the subject matter for logic is the secondary intelligibles in so far as reflection on them leads from the known to [understanding] the unknown or to something similar, as do reductio arguments or persuasive arguments [] or image-evoking arguments and the like.

When the full Organon was finally assembled in Arabic, it included the whole range of texts in the order given them by the Alexandrian philosophers. There was an inherited expectation that this was the full and proper stretch of logical inquiry, an expectation which was to come under pressure in the Muslim world. It had already come under revision in Avicenna's Pointers and Reminders , but more substantial change was to follow.

One factor at work in determining the structure of Avicennan logic treatises was the doctrine of secondary intelligibles, a doctrine which led to the exclusion of parts of the Organon from the realm of the strictly logical, specifically, the Categories.

The arguments that excluded the Categories must also have problematized the inclusion of some other parts of the Organon , such as the Topics. Another factor at work was the doctrine of conceptions and assents. If, as was commonly accepted, argument is designed to bring about an assent, then one might ask what kinds of assent there are, and what variables in an argument lead to different kinds of assent. This doctrine was to replace the Alexandrian doctrine of the context theory, in which logic is taken to cover different material implementations of syllogistic reasoning, whether in demonstration, dialectic, rhetoric, poetics or sophistry.

According to the Alexandrian version of the theory, a stretch of discourse was to be analysed according to the context in which it was found: in poetry, one expected to find false and impossible statements, in demonstration, necessary and true statements. The Arabic logicians were to reject this version, though they ultimately lost interest in the range of disciplines coordinated by the theory. A final factor, or range of factors, at work on the shape of the logic treatise that emerged in the thirteenth century arose out of discussions in law, especially the tradition of legal dialectic; this tradition was ultimately to crystallise as a new discipline that replaced the discussion of the Topics and Sophistical Fallacies.

Similarly disciplines grew out of grammar and theology which replaced the logical study of rhetoric and poetics. I examine each of these factors in turn. Avicenna's doctrine of secondary intelligibles assigns logic a subject matter whose essential properties the logician studies; this makes logic a science in the Aristotelian sense of the term.

But—according to the strictures applying to an Aristotelian science—no science can probe the existence of its subject matter, but rather must take it as given from a higher science in this case, metaphysics.

Yet the Categories shuttles between secondary intelligibles and the primary intelligibles which are the pre-condition for the existence of the secondary intelligibles.

Avicenna himself adverted to the problem of whether or not Categories was a properly logical book, and decided that it was not, though he treated it in the Cure out of deference to Peripatetic custom. His arguments for deeming it not to be properly logical have been gathered together in the past see esp. Gutas — , but the line of argument had already been stated neatly by later logicians. How can the primary intelligibles be investigated even though [such investigation] is a [presupposed] part of the science [of logic]?

This would be circular. But rather, [the ten categories] are investigated in logic to aid in properly realizing the genera and specific differences. A study of the categories will, in short, be helpful in giving concrete examples of the logical doctrines presented.

The same arguments in removing the Categories from logic should apply to texts which investigate the commonplace reasoning of the Topics , though I have not seen such an argument made by an Arabic logician.

A few preliminary words by way of introduction to this dense passage. Arabic logicians, like most Aristotelian logicians, speak of form and matter in propositions and proofs, and they have quite specific distinctions in mind when they do so. The matter in a proposition is what underwrites as true or false the modality the proposition has. The matter in an argument, by contrast, is the epistemic status or persuasive force each of the premises has which, given a formally appropriate proof, will confer a similar or lesser epistemic status or persuasive force on the conclusion.

For the terms of art used to deal with syllogistic matter, see now Gutas Since Avicenna had finished explaining the formal and quasi-formal aspects of syllogistic, he turned to its material aspects. With respect to these, syllogistic divides into five kinds, because it either conveys an assent, or an influence of another kind I mean an evoked image or wonder.

What leads to assent leads either to an assent which is truth-apt or to one which is not. And what is truth-apt is either taken [in the argument] as true haqq , or is not so taken. And what is taken as true either is or isn't true. That which leads to true truth-apt assent is [1] demonstration; untrue truth-apt assent is [2] sophistry. Propositions to be used as premises for demonstration make the most irresistible demands for our assent; premises for lower kinds of discourse make weaker demands.

The vast majority of the later Arabic logicians no more than nod towards the context theory in a paragraph towards the end of their treatises. A logician should only be interested—in so far as he is interested in material implementation of formal reasoning at all—in demonstration because it leads him to what is true and certain, and in sophistry, because it may confuse him in the search for demonstrative truth.

Philosophically, the context theory is an attempt to account for the cognitive and communicative impact of every kind of discourse. It examines in extraordinary detail the Aristotelian claim that the syllogism lies at the heart of all human reasoning and, in an attempt to make good the claim, presents an account of syllogistic forms attenuated in accordance with the epistemic matter of their premises.

It also recognizes that communication depends on more than merely objective truth and formal validity, and offers an account of what motivates the assent of the human knower to any given stretch of discourse. As a theory, its global reach may be more impressive than its analytical grasp, but it is a marked advance on a theory only partly developed in the Alexandrian school.

The doctrine of secondary intelligibles cut down the number of subjects treated within the logic treatises, or at least, treated as strictly logical subjects, and the doctrine of dividing knowledge into conception and assent determined the structure of what was left in Avicennan logic treatises. Formal interests of post-Avicennan logicians further limited interest in demonstration; syllogistic, for example, became a central focus of research from the thirteenth century on. Further changes were introduced for clarity of exposition.

The later scholars came and changed the technical terms of logic; and they appended to the investigation of the five universals its fruit, which is to say the discussion of definitions and descriptions which they moved from the Posterior Analytics ; and they dropped the Categories because a logician is only accidentally and not essentially interested in that book; and they appended to On Interpretation the treatment of conversion even if it had been in the Topics in the texts of the ancients, it is none the less in some respects among the things which follow on from the treatment of propositions.

Moreover, they treated the syllogistic with respect to its productivity generally, not with respect to its matter. They dropped the investigation of [the syllogistic] with respect to matter, which is to say, these five books: Posterior Analytics , Topics , Rhetoric , Poetics , and Sophistical Fallacies though sometimes some of them give a brief outline of them. It is clear that whether the structure of the Organon was appropriate for Arabic logic treatises was contested at least until the end of the thirteenth century.

He consciously adopted the etiquette of debate from treatises on forensic argument, and he told his readers that he intended it to replace study of the Topics and the Sophistical Fallacies. It has been the custom of our predecessors to place a chapter on dialectics jadal in their logical works. This [art] is, with respect to establishing a thesis and explaining it, just like logic with respect to deliberation and thought; for, through it we are kept on the desired path and are saved from the recalcitrance of speech.

I have set it out in two sections, the first, on the ordering and etiquette of debate, the second, on error and its causes. Other language sciences also went into the codices with the logic manuals. It made no difference what position one adopted on the origin of language, because either God or the community could function as the one imposing language.

Note that the units of thought are at least logically prior to language, so language is not considered a pre-condition of thought. Language is the totality of expressions together with the totality of their meanings. Once expressions have been assigned their meanings by the impositor, this is irrevocable. Larkin There were a number of modal systems developed and debated among the Arabic logicians.

The material devoted to the topic is too voluminous for anything more than a sketchy account of one line of development and debate. I follow a few aspects of Avicenna's syllogistic through its treatment in the thirteenth century, and its transformation into a compact body of doctrine taught in the madrasa.

With regret, in this redaction of the entry I omit mention of Alfarabi and Averroes, not because they are not important, but because, first, Alfarabi's most important treatment of the syllogistic is lost and, secondly, Averroes stands outside the Avicennan tradition of logic. It will become clear that Avicenna's syllogistic puzzled those who came after him, and still puzzles those today who try to work out what Avicenna was doing.

There is some ground to think that Avicenna's syllogistic is, from a systematic point of view, something of a failure; that was a fairly common assessment among thirteenth-century logicians. This in turn gives rise to the thought that perhaps Avicenna wasn't trying to produce a systematic syllogistic, that he had other goals in mind as he dealt with material descended ultimately from Aristotle's Prior Analytics some of it, from the commentators, seemingly in conflict with what Aristotle is doing.

If I understand correctly, this is broadly speaking how Hodges approaches Avicenna see Hodges b, a, and b in Other Internet Resources. On the other hand, it may be that Avicenna has a complex system that repays close analysis; Thom's studies of Avicenna's syllogistic proceed on that assumption.

I tend to think the Thom approach is the more promising. In any event, thirteenth-century logicians took Avicenna to have tried and failed to present a coherent system. In this brief overview, I describe one aspect of Avicenna's truth-conditions for modal propositions which became common doctrine among later Arabic logicians.

I go on to examine some of what Avicenna said about the subject term of a proposition, and some of the inferences he defended. Avicenna's doctrines on both subject term and modal inferences became much-debated issues in thirteenth-century logic; I follow one line of the debate.

In a famous and much-quoted passage, Avicenna lays out six conditions under which a proposition may be said to have a given modalization all his examples are of necessity propositions, but the same conditions apply to propositions under all modalizations ; the first two conditions are the most important:. Likewise for every negative which resembles this affirmative statement. Avicenna stipulated for the subject term of all his propositions, whether explicitly modalized or not:.

Know that when we say every J is B , we do not mean the totality kulliyya of J is the totality of B. Obviously, there was something going on. I decided to delve deeper into how present progressive can be expressed in the dialect. In my field study of the dialect I concentrated on this question and conducted a series of interviews with the remaining speakers.

Considering this, eliciting the data I was interested in was a challenge. Translation would not work, because the speakers tended to produce ad hoc word-by-word translations from Albanian cf.

That is why I preferred using non-linguistic stimuli to make the interlocutors produce sentences. In 24 pictures, the book depicts the adventures of a boy and a dog who are looking for their frog, and line up to a connected visual narrative. No text is offered in the book in any language. In total, I recorded six interviews with the last six speakers of the dialect in — The interviews lasted between 15 minutes and one hour, depending on how fluent the speaker was and how many deviations from the storyline he or she made.

In the original book there were no page numbers or picture numbers. To refer to the pictures, I simply use the cardinal number of the page the book is easy to navigate, as it has only 29 pages in total. There is another group of uses that seemed more interesting. If we take this isolated example it may seem that there is not so much to talk about: the marker is used in a not quite clear meaning but the main idea is still clear from the context.

There are a couple more examples that seem to be much more definitive. There is one more example in the Gospel translations. In the personal letters, one example of progressive was found. The fact that it matches the probable etymology for Albanian duke is a coincidence: the development of these two markers can hardly be connected, as the initial locative meaning of duke is by no means apparent in modern Albanian.

Presumably, the structural influence of progressive po constructions also played its role. He seems to have acquisited the marker to the extent he could even compare it and match it to its Albanian counterpart, and to comment on that metalinguistically, cf.

This is probably the same way it was treated in Kajnas between the s and the s, as can be seen from its rare use during that period. Its use to express progressivity in Kajnas in the s was not yet stabilized, and it was used optionally. Another marker for progressive I discovered in the interviews was toko. He comments on it elsewhere Ibid.

These can be differentiated positionally, as progressive toko has only a verb not a VP in its scope, while adversative toko operates on the sentence level e. This is also implied by the fact that toko cannot be separated from the verb only clitics can be placed between them, see Another limitation is that progressive toko can only have an imperfective verb in the present 19 — in fact, historical present or past 20, 21 — imperfect, never aorist.

From these 29 cases, 16 are present progressive 27 — in direct speech of the characters and historical present as in 11 , and 13 cases are imperfect progressive as in examples 20 and It is not applied to qualities and states but only to events that have limited duration and are not complete, which makes it progressive sensu stricto.

The very regular use of progressive toko in most of the interviews I conducted with the last speakers of the dialect in — was unexpected. Another speaker, SB, uses progressive toko only once. As an illustration I would like to show a part of the interview I conducted with RM after Mayer, : 12— In 23 toko is applied to the actions in progress, synchronic to the moment of speech 1, 3, 5, 6. An interesting contrast can be seen between verbs of perception that belong to the narrative 1 detjeto[ However, the narrator differentiates between the layer of the narration and reality, and that is signalled by presence or absence of progressive toko , so that it thus can be interpreted as a deictic element.

Note also that even in quite long fragments of narrative describing ongoing actions and their settings, the verbs for actions are quite rare. Bees do that and that[ Obviously this method of data elicitation has certain limits.

One of them is that my interlocutors tend to use present instead of the past when describing the pictures in the frog story only one case of progressive imperfect was found in my data. However, the frog story gives a good example of moving reference at least in present.

Static pictures are combined to create a storyline, and each picture depicts several momentary actions in progress. This is a boy. The boy is in the bed.

The speakers seem to match progressive toko and Albanian progressive po : apart from mere mutual translatability, there are also cases of code-switching around toko or po.

In example 27 , the speaker switches to Albanian after the pause. In 28 , the speaker in the flow of Kajnas speech switches to Albanian, inserts Albanian po , but then he probably realizes that he is supposed to talk Kajnas and switches back. This means that, structurally, the speakers match progressive constructions to their Albanian counterparts.

The match is also supported by the similar homonymy: both po and toko have progressive and adversative meanings. The possible process of grammaticalization of toko in Kajnas seems to have combined influences from both Albanian progressive markers: adversative meaning provided the match with po , while phonetic similarity to duke supported the transfer of meaning.

Albanian-Kajnas bilingualism with Albanian as first language seems to have supported the grammaticalization of toko that has been identified with po , and then it sometimes seems to be mechanically put everywhere where po would have been expected in Albanian.

To sum up, the situation with progressive markers in Kajnas seems to be as follows. While in genetically-related languages Slavic there is no grammaticalized progressive marking unless under strong external influence, as in Slovincian , Kajnas has developed two markers of this kind. Both of them are simple, unbound, and syllabic, and have finite verb forms in their scope present or past imperfect.

Both of them seem to structurally follow the Albanian progressive po constructions. The increasing Albanian influence structurally, from po constructions; on the phonetic level, from duke and continuous language attrition in the background supported the increase of obligatoriness of toko. It should be underlined that for the stage of the first appearance of the progressive markers in the texts, we cannot speak about imperfect acquisition or language attrition of the dialect.

In the s, it is still a vivid language variety that is used in various styles as well as in informal family communication, and at the same time it already uses the aforementioned markers in various functions, progressive among them. The uneven use of these markers by different members of the Kajnas language community in — demonstrates various issues connected to language shrinkage.

Of the six presumably last speakers I have interviewed, four have acquired progressive toko that seems to be very regular in their speech. One SB has partly acquired it, he also happens to be the least fluent speaker.

On the basis of the existing data from the previous stages of the dialect, I come to the conclusion that with the continuous loss of speakers, two markers that for some period of time coexisted in Kajnas were, due to imperfect acquisition, inherited by now separate parts of the language community. The grammaticalization of toko was supported by the phonetic similarity to Albanian duke and structural identification to po. EM, female, —, born in Boboshtica, graduated from a pedagogical college as a teacher of Albanian in elementary school.

Lived in Boboshtica. Recorded on 15 September Recorded on 19 September RM, 39 male, born in in Drenova, graduated from Tirana University as a teacher of science. Recorded on 14 September SB, male, born in in Boboshtica, graduated from a pedagogical college as a school teacher of mathematics.

Lives in Boboshtica. Recorded on 25 July ViM, 39 female, born in in Drenova. Recorded on 24—25 July VsM, 39 male, born in in Drenova. Recorded on 03 September I am grateful to Anastasia Makarova University of Zurich for the help with the map. Jorgji Gjinari. There have been attempts to connect Albanian with some of the sparsely attested ancient languages of the Balkans, particularly Illyrian but also Dacian and Thracian.

While this is plausible geographically, given that we know the Illyrians lived in an area that includes the modern Albanian-speaking area, there is no concrete linguistic evidence for any of these proposals. Some have proposed a connection between the ancestor of Albanian without assigning a specific identity to this ancestor and a Latinized variety of that ancestor that may have ultimately yielded Romanian, as there are several shared words not of Latin origin in both languages.

Mention of the Albanian people and the Albanian language appears rather late in the historical record. The first mentions of the Albanian language predate its first attestation by several centuries. Elsie describes a text in which the investigation of a robbery in Ragusa modern Dubrovnik, Croatia refers to a witness who said Audivi unam vocem clamantem in monte in lingua albanesca 'I heard a voice crying in the mountains in the Albanian language'.

In the Anonymi Descriptio Europae Orientalis 'Anonymous description of Eastern Europe', the author writes Habent enim Albani prefati linguam distinctam a Latinis, Grecis et Sclavis ita quod in nullo se inteligunt cum aliis nationibus 'The aformentioned Albanians have a language which is entirely distinct from that of the Latins, Greeks and Slavs such that in no way can they communicate with other peoples'.

While the earliest attested Albanian texts are from over a century later, the existence of Albanian texts is mentioned in in Directorium ad passagium faciendum by a French monk whose identity is uncertain : licet Albanenses aliam omnino linguam a latina habeant et diversam, tamen litteram latinam habent in uso et in omnibus suis libris 'The Albanians have a language different from Latin, although they use Latin letters in their books' note that this could potentially be saying that Albanians just wrote in Latin.

The oldest unambiguous attested Albanian is a single line embedded in a Latin document from Over the following century the attested Albanian "texts" are of similar size, including a single line in a Latin play from and a short list of Albanian words from Again, like the earlier attestations of Albanian, Buzuku's 'Missal' is written in Geg.

Most of the early documentation of Albanian is in Geg, as that area was more difficult for the Ottomans to subdue and consequently discourage the use of Albanian. Albanian dialects are traditionally divided into two groups: Geg dialects in the north, and Tosk dialects in the south. The dividing line is traditionally considered to be the Shkumbin river, which runs east-west though central Albania at approximately the 41st parallel north.

Dialects spoken in Kosovo and Macedonia are Geg dialects, while those spoken in northwestern Greece are Tosk dialects. However, Standard Albanian is predominantly based on Tosk. Even though they are predominantly located in Geg-speaking areas, the standard variety used in Kosovo and Macedonia is the same one used in Albania i.

Standard Albanian, while predominantly based on Tosk, does also have some Geg features. For example, the Standard Albanian 1st person singular present verb ending -j is a Geg feature; most Tosk dialects, on the other hand, have the ending -nj. As with the other languages of the Balkans, the development of Albanian has been drastically affected by contact with speakers of other languages. While reports of over 90 percent of Albanian's lexicon being composed of foreign words are definitely overstated, lexical borrowing has had an enormous effect on Albanian.

There are several strata of lexical borrowings. As part of Balkan Sprachbund, Albanian shares a number of features with the other languages of the Balkans e. The following are some of Albanian's more notable Balkan features:. The earliest texts were written in various forms of the Latin alphabet, with additional characters borrowed from the Greek alphabet as well as some additional characters of other origins. Up until the late 19th century, the script used to write Albanian appears to have been dependent on the religion of the scribe: Latin for Catholics, Greek for Orthodox Christians, and Perso-Arabic script for Muslims.

In the late 19th century there were various attempts to create a standardized alphabet for Albanian; in , the modern Albanian alphabet was codified at the Congress of Manastir. The modern Albanian alphabet consists of 36 letters, several of which are digraphs. As briefly discussed above, Geg has nasalized vowels. The normal convention is to write these vowels with a circumflex accent.