Северна Македонија
0
What and that is the word of god just one article?? How do you know that they didn’t compare it to Venetian which was believed to be Illyrian for a while??? Just look at current Illyrian words and Albanian words, plus look at those ancient samples as well before posting one articleOriginally Posted by wvwvw
Austrian Scholars Leave Albania Lost for Words
Viennese researchers upset traditionally minded Albanians by pouring cold water on the theory that the Albanian language has its roots in Ancient Illyria.
Joachim Matzinger and Stefan Schumacher
Deep in the bowels of Vienna University, two Austrian academics are poring over the ancient texts of a far-away people in the Balkans.
Like a couple of detectives searching for clues, Stefan Schumacher and Joachim Matzinger are out to reconstruct the origins of Albanian - a language whose history and development has received remarkably little attention outside the world of Albanian scholars.
“The way that languages change can be traced,” Schumacher declares, with certainty.
Matzinger points put that when the few surviving fragments of Illyrian and Albanian are compared, they have almost nothing in common.
"The two are opposites and cannot fit together,” he says. “Albanian is not as the same as Illyrian from a linguistic point of view.”
Although Albanian and Illyrian have little or nothing in common, judging from the handful of Illyrian words that archeologists have retrieved, the Albanian link has long been cherished by Albanian nationalists.
Pani says that despite the Hoxha regime’s efforts to burn the doctrine of the Albanians’ Illyrian origins into the nation’s consciousness, the theory has become increasingly anachronistic.
Many members of Pani’s generation born in the Sixties subscribed to the government policy of naming children after names drawn from ancient tombs.
"While I was named after my grandfather, keeping up a family tradition, other parents gave their children Illyrian names that I doubt they knew the meaning of,” says Pani, who today teaches at Jena university in Germany.
"But I doubt many parents today would want to name their children ‘Bledar’ or ‘Agron,’ when the first means ‘dead’ and the second ‘arcadian,” he adds.
"The political pressure in which Albania’s scientific community worked after the communist took over, made it difficult to deal with flaws with the doctrine of the Illyrian origin,” he said.
But while the Illyrian theory no longer commands universal support, it hasn’t lost all its supporters in Albanian academia.
According Schumacher, Albania forged its own national myth, just as Germany or the US had done earlier, with a view to creating foundations for a shared identity.
“It’s not easy to create an identity for Albanians if you just say that they descend from mountains tribes about whom the historians of antiquity wrote nothing,” he notes.
The friction between ideological myth and reality, when it comes to forging national identity, and laying claim to territory, is not unique to Albania.
Schumacher points out that Romanian history books teach that Romanians descend from the Roman legionnaires who guarded the Roman province of Dacia – a questionable theory to which few non-Romanians lend much credence, but which shores up Romania’s claim to Transylvania, a land to which Hungarians historically also lay claim.
“The Romanian language developed somewhere south of the Danube, but Romanians don’t want to admit that because the Hungarians can claim that they have been there before,” notes Schumacher.
Reply With Quote
Ελλάδα
Bookmarks