But if Illyrian survived as Albanian, it did so only by means of physical contraction, withdrawal and isolation, which naturally would have taken place in mountain terrain. This is why the purest element of Albanian vocabulary refers to mountains, high-altitude plants and shepherding: the point is not that the proto-Albanians had never lived any other sort of life, but that the only ones who survived as Albanian-speakers did so precisely because that was the sort of isolated and independent life they led, probably for several centuries. The Illyrians who lived on the coastal plains were Romanized, like the ones on the Dalmatian coast and indeed in most areas of Yugoslavia. By the time the Slavs began arriving in the sixth century, there were only scattered pockets of speakers of the old 'barbarian' languages left anywhere in the Balkans, and all of them were in mountainous regions. [54]
Of these, the only population considered important enough to be mentioned by name in early written sources was the Thracian tribe of the Bessi, who lived in the western and southern mountains of Bulgaria. We know that their version of the Thracian language was still being spoken in the second half of the sixth century, and we also know that they had been converted to Christianity: the most striking piece of evidence refers to monks speaking 'Bessan', as well as Latin and other languages, in a monastery on Mount Sinai in the 560s. [55] Until very recently, this was treated by most scholars as just an intriguing oddity, a last lingering survival which must have been extinguished before long. However, a dazzling new piece of research and speculative reconstruction by the German scholar Gottfried Schramm has proposed that these Thracian Bessi were none other than the real ancestors of the Albanians.
According to Schramm, the Bessi must have moved out of their western Bulgarian homeland and into the northern Albanian region in the early ninth century, probably to escape the persecution of Christians by the still pagan Bulgar khans. [56] The early conversion of the Bessi to Christianity is indeed, in Schramm's view, the key to the entire question of how and why Albanian survived as a language. We know that the Bessi were converted by an enterprising bishop, Nicetas, in the late fourth century, and from the writings of a friend of Nicetas who celebrated this event we also know that he learned their language and taught them to practise their Christianity in it - in other words, that Bessan was used as a liturgical language. (The evidence of the Bessan-speaking monks supports this point.) Nicetas, whose own mother-tongue was Latin, may also have translated parts of the Bible; the obvious model - or competition - that he must have had in mind was the work of a heretical bishop, Ulfilas, who was using the Germanic Gothic language for liturgy and Bible-translation among the nearby population of Goths in northern Bulgaria. And, as comparison with other linguistic survivals (such as Armenian or Coptic) shows, nothing helps a language to survive quite so much as its use from a very early stage in a kind of national church. [57]
One thing is quite certain: the Albanians did acquire their Christianity from a Latin-speaking teacher or teachers. The Albanian language contains much Latin-derived vocabulary anyway, having obviously absorbed words from nearby Romans or Romanized barbarians from the second century bc onwards; but the Latin element is especially rich in the area of Christian belief and Christian practice. Thus we have meshe (mass), from missa; ipeshk (bishop), from episcopus; ungjill (gospel), from evangelium; mrekull (miracle), from miraculum; and a great number of other words, extending far into the vocabulary of psychology, morality and even the natural world (such as qiell, meaning heaven or sky, from caelum). [58]
Many of the words that would need to be put on such a list, in fact, are not special ecclesiastical terms, for which a non-Christian population would have no equivalent of its own; they are simple words such as 'spirit', 'sin', 'pray*, 'holy', and so on, for which most languages, even in pre-Christian times, have their own vocabulary. When other early evangelizers translated the Bible or the liturgy into Armenian, or Gothic, or Anglo-Saxon, they used local words for these things - that, indeed, is what is implied by the whole idea of translation. Why should Nicetas, translating into proto-Albanian, have simply transferred huge quantities of Latin words? Schramm notes the oddity of this in passing, and suggests unconvincingly that there must have been some special cultural reasons. [59] But the oddity is more overwhelming than he admits. For example, even the word for a flock, as used in Christian discourse, was taken from the Latin (grigje, from grex) - of all the things in the world, the one for which a shepherding population must surely have had its own word already. [60]
The solution to this puzzle is blindingly simple. These elements of Latin vocabulary have undergone exactly the same sorts of sound-changes, compressions and erosions as all the other Latin words which entered the Albanian language over several centuries; and the reason why those words entered the language was that the Albanians were in contact, over a long period, with people who spoke Latin. The existence of large quantities of such Christianity-related Latin vocabulary does not show that someone 'translated' Christian discourse into early Albanian. It shows the precise opposite - namely, that Albanians were for a long time exposed to the conduct of their religion not in translation but in the original Latin.
This can even be demonstrated grammatically. The term for 'Holy Trinity', Shendertat, bears a final 't' and an accent on the last syllable: this shows that it developed from the accusative, sanctam trinitatem, not the nominative, sancta trinitas. That is in fact the normal pattern of development in Romance languages, which gives us, for example, Spanish ciudad from dvitatem (not from civitas), or French mont from montem (not from mons). (There are many other Albanian examples too, such as grigje, mentioned above, which is really from gregem, not grex.) What this phenomenon reflects is a pattern of usage in spoken Latin: these words were heard much more often as the objects in sentences than as the subjects. If Nicetas had been coining new Albanian words out of Latin for the purposes of his translation, he would surely have taken them from the nominative form. These words entered Albanian because Albanians heard them, over and over again, in spoken liturgical Latin.
Schramm's theory fails, therefore; and in so doing it performs a signal service. Thanks to Schramm, the Thracians can now be eliminated from these enquiries. His research into Nicetas's activities does indeed show that the Bessi received their Christianity, so to speak, in translation; this must force us to conclude that the Albanians, who received theirs in the original Latin, cannot be identified with the Bessi. The language of the Bessi must eventually have perished. Since the Bessi were the only Thracian tribe known to have kept their language as late as the sixth century (and Byzantine sources are naturally more detailed on the Thracian areas, which for them were closer to home, than on the Illyrian ones), it is impossible to find any other Thracian candidates. The origins of the Albanians must be sought, therefore, on the Illyrian side of the divide - particularly in the mountains round Kosovo, in the Malesi, and in the tangle of mountains stretching north from there through Montenegro.
The Latin elements in Albanian help to confirm this location. From the fact that so much general vocabulary was absorbed into Albanian from Latin, and so little from Greek, it is clear that the proto-Albanians lived some way to the north of the Latin-Greek linguistic divide. This language frontier ran from the Adriatic coast near Lezha across the middle of Albania, then up to the line of the Sar mountains, curving southwards to take in Latin-speaking Skopje, and then running northwards roughly along the Serbian-Bulgarian border. [61] At the same time, the fact that the proto-Albanians never actually lost their language indicates that they were somewhat isolated from the main areas of Roman settlement - which included the lowlands and the major roads. One influential theory therefore places the early Albanians in the part of northern Albania which (according to archeological evidence and place-names) was the most untouched by Roman influence: the 'Mat' district north-east of Tirana and west of Debar. From there, according to this theory, the early Albanians were able to expand to fill the region bounded by the river Shkumbin, the Black Drin, the united Drin and the coast. [62]
What this theory fails to account for, however, is another key aspect of the Albanian language's connection with Latin: its intimate involvement in the development of the Vlach-Romanian language. Linguists have long been aware that Albanian and Romanian have many features in common, in matters of structure, vocabulary and idiom, and that these must have arisen in two ways. First, the 'substratum' of Romanian (that is, the language spoken by the proto-Romanians before they switched to Latin) must have been similar to Albanian; and secondly, there must have been close contact between Albanians and early Romanian-speakers over a long period, involving a shared pastoral life. (Some key elements of the pastoral vocabulary in Romanian are borrowed from Albanian.) [63] The substratum elements include both structural matters, such as the positioning of the definite article as a suffix on the end of the noun, and various elements of primitive Balkan pre-Latin vocabulary, such as copil ('child' in Romanian) or kopil ('bastard child' in Albanian). [64] If the links between the two languages were only at substratum level, this might not imply any geographical proximity - it would merely show that proto-Albanian was similar to other varieties of Illyrian spoken elsewhere. But the pastoral connections do indicate that Albanians and early Romanians lived for a long time in the same (or at least overlapping) areas.
This has some geographical implications. Late Latin developed in two different forms in the Balkans: a coastal variety, which survived as a distinct language (known as Dalmatian) until the end of the nineteenth century, and the form spoken in the interior, which turned into Romanian and Vlach. [65] From place-names it is clear that the coastal form, spoken also in Shkodra and Durres, penetrated some way into the northern Albanian mountains. [66] There are some traces of this variety of Latin in Albanian, but the Albanian language's links with the inland variety of Balkan Latin are much stronger. This suggests that the centre of gravity ofAlbanian-Vlach symbiosis lay a little further to the east. [67]
When and how did that symbiosis take place? Presumably the Latin-speaking proto-Romanians came to pastoralism later than the early Albanians. If they had been doing it for as long as the Albanians, and in similar areas, they would - just like the Albanians - have escaped Latinization altogether. Some historians have decided that the proto-Romanians must have been Latin-speaking city-dwellers, who somehow extricated themselves from their towns in the early Slav centuries and became long-distance travellers or shepherds instead; but this seems inherently implausible. [68] (Had they come from the towns, their Latin would surely have been closer to standard Latin in its structure, too.) There is in fact enough Latin agricultural vocabulary in Romanian -words for sowing, ploughing, harrowing, and so on - to show that they were farming in Roman times. [69] The shift towards pastoralism was probably quite gradual. One particular factor that may have helped to promote it was the practice of horse-breeding, which was, or at least became, a Vlach speciality: the medieval records are full of Vlach muleteers and Vlachs leading caravans of pack-horses. [70] Such an occupation requires contact with towns (where the trade is), and may be combined with some farming in the towns' vicinity; but it also involves a form of stock-breeding, which could have given the early Vlachs an entree into the higher-altitude world of Albanian flocks and herds.
The main area of the Balkan interior where a Latin-speaking population may have continued, in both towns and country, after the Slav invasion, has already been mentioned: it included the upper Morava valley, northern Macedonia, and the whole of Kosovo. It is, therefore, in the uplands of the Kosovo area (particularly, but not only, on the western side, including parts of Montenegro) that this Albanian-Vlach symbiosis probably developed. [71] All the evidence comes together at this point. What it suggests is that the Kosovo region, together with at least part of northern Albania, was the crucial focus of two distinct but interlinked ethnic histories: the survival of the Albanians, and the emergence of the Romanians and Vlachs. One large group of Vlachs seems to have broken away and moved southwards by the ninth or tenth century; the proto-Romanians stayed in contact with Albanians significantly longer, before drifting north-eastwards, and crossing the Danube in the twelfth century. [72]
Having reached these conclusions, it may be possible, finally, to draw some further implications from them that point back to a much earlier period of Kosovo's history. The point is a very simple one. If Albanian-speakers were able to live in this area without losing their language during the period from the sixth century to the twelfth, is there any reason to think that they could not have been there in the previous six centuries or more? The Roman province of Dardania contained some Roman towns and several large estates, but it was far from being utterly and homogeneously Romanized: frequent Roman references to Dardanian bandits and robbers, and the presence of many forts and watch-towers, suggest that it was never completely under control. [73] References to Dardanian cheese, a famous and widely exported product, also testify to a large shepherding population. [74] And if the shepherds in the hills were speaking proto-Albanian, then perhaps that is what the ordinary Dardanians had spoken in the valleys too, before the Romans came. This is more a speculation than a conclusion; and it is not meant to exclude other areas in the Albanian (or Montenegrin) mountains further to the west, given that 'Dardania' was, essentially, a tribal division, not a linguistic one. Once again it must be emphasized that such ancient history can have no implications for modern politics. Nevertheless, the idea that the Illyrian Dardanians were ancestors of the Albanians may be of some sentimental interest to Kosovo Albanians today.
Shqipëria
Originally Posted by Varda
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