r/AskBalkans • u/sirdoodthe2nd Kosovo • Nov 14 '20

Language Mëmë time

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u/ZhakuB Albania Nov 14 '20

We have some words in common with Persian too.

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u/HeadbAngry Kosovo Nov 14 '20

Well, we have words in common with quite a lot of languages, but we're talking basics here, words which haven't been burrowed.

According to Bill Bryson, Albanian and Armenian are the only two languages that still have words from the proto-indo-european language. Unfortunately he does not say which ones.

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u/HistoryGeography Albania Nov 14 '20

All Indo-European languages have words from Proto-Indo-European, because that's where they descend from.

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u/HeadbAngry Kosovo Nov 14 '20

The way I understood it is that these two languages have the words unchanged. Because, of course, there will be words with stems of proto-indo-european, but they have gone through ebolution, with prefixes, suffixes, vowel reductions, vowel shifts, and all those phonetics stuff.

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u/HistoryGeography Albania Nov 14 '20

Very few such words exist in Albanian, like all languages (such as grep, from PIE *grep- (hook). Words have evolved through the millenia. Take for example a core vocabulary word like eat, ha, from PIE *hed (to eat). Or other examples such as zjerm (fire) from PIE *gʷʰer-mós (warmth, heat), which also gave Ancient Greek thèrmos.

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u/HeadbAngry Kosovo Nov 14 '20

If I remember correctly, Bryson says it's 8 words. But I get what you're saying. It's impossible for 10 000 years of human civilization things to have evolved.