The Open court . t of the ancestors of the Greeks. Greek tra-ditions refer with great reverence to the sacred oak and the oracleof Dodona, and so the ancient Epirotes must have been cousins tothe Macedonians, the Thracians, the Illyrians and the Pelasgi ofancient Greece. The latter were probably their nearest kin. Thepresent language seems to preserve some traces of pre-Hellenicspeech, but it has been influenced successively by Greek, Roman,Slavic (Servian and Bulgarian) and Turkish ingredients. ALBANIA. 71 The eleventh edition of the Encyclopccdia Britannica contains thefollowing account of t
The Open court . t of the ancestors of the Greeks. Greek tra-ditions refer with great reverence to the sacred oak and the oracleof Dodona, and so the ancient Epirotes must have been cousins tothe Macedonians, the Thracians, the Illyrians and the Pelasgi ofancient Greece. The latter were probably their nearest kin. Thepresent language seems to preserve some traces of pre-Hellenicspeech, but it has been influenced successively by Greek, Roman,Slavic (Servian and Bulgarian) and Turkish ingredients. ALBANIA. 71 The eleventh edition of the Encyclopccdia Britannica contains thefollowing account of the Albanian language: Albanian is particularly interesting as the only surviving rep-resentative of the so-called Thraco-Illyrian group of languages whichformed the primitive speech of the peninsula. It has afiforded anattractive study to philologists, amongst whom may be mentioned]\Ialte-Brun, Leake, Xylander, Hahn, Miklosich and G. Meyer. Theanalysis of the language presents great difficulties, as. owing to the. A MOHAMMEDAN COUPLE OF SHIOLA SYPER. absence of literary monuments, no certainty can be arrived at withregard to its earlier forms and later development. The groundwork,so far as it can be ascertained, and grammar are Indo-European,but a large number of words have been borrowed from the Latinor Italian and Greek, and it is not always easy to decide whether themutilated and curtailed forms now in use represent adopted wordsor belong to the original vocabulary. There is also a considerablemixture of Turkish and Slavonic words. Notwithstanding certainpoints of resemblance in structure and phonetics. Albanian is en- 72 THE OPEN COURT. tirely distinct from the neighboring languages; in its relation toearly Latin and Greek it may be regarded as a coordinate memberof the Aryan stock. It possesses seven vowels; among the conso-nants are the aspirated d and t as in Greek, and many other soundssuch as b, d, sh, sh (French /), and hard g, which are wanting inGreek but exist in t
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1800, bookdecade188, booksubjectreligion, bookyear1887
