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Jan. 24th, 2014 04:45 pm
Mbushur me dëshirë
Yesterday I caught a wild hare and decided to learn some Albanian, so laid hold of Colloquial Albanian and spent some quality time with it. I've always a vague interest in it. I probably would've attempted to learn it years ago if only I'd had someplace in my fantasy world to stick it. I toyed with the idea of making it the language of the satyrs and their ilk, but in the end I decided to create one of my own along similar but simpler lines.
I've always been put off by its nominal morphology, which has some real head-scratching alternations. Take the pair djale "boy" and djallë "devil", which in the singular form a minimal pair for the contrast of /l/ and /ɫ/. The corresponding plural forms are djem and djaj. I'm sure this all makes sense if you go back a couple thousand years to the proto-Albanian stage and then follow each inflected form through a half dozen or more regular sound changes, but from a synchronic point of view it's baffling to say the least.
But now some patterns are beginning to emerge and I can at least glimpse the skeleton of a real-life sentence through all the unfamiliar lexical items. Those are becoming less so as well now that I've learned a few of the correspondences which govern proto-Romance loanwords, for example. It's kind of like when I began to recognise all the Arabic borrowings in Turkish, although in that case the deformations are much less pronounced.
In the meantime, since my language learning always seems to run in parallel to my reading, I dug out Balkan beauty, Balkan blood, a volume of short stories in translation I picked up cheap at our institution's booksale some years back. So far the quality is quite high, making me wonder if it would be worth hunting down more works by some of these authors. It's a high bar, however, since most haven't been translated into English, although most all of them are available in French.
I've always been put off by its nominal morphology, which has some real head-scratching alternations. Take the pair djale "boy" and djallë "devil", which in the singular form a minimal pair for the contrast of /l/ and /ɫ/. The corresponding plural forms are djem and djaj. I'm sure this all makes sense if you go back a couple thousand years to the proto-Albanian stage and then follow each inflected form through a half dozen or more regular sound changes, but from a synchronic point of view it's baffling to say the least.
But now some patterns are beginning to emerge and I can at least glimpse the skeleton of a real-life sentence through all the unfamiliar lexical items. Those are becoming less so as well now that I've learned a few of the correspondences which govern proto-Romance loanwords, for example. It's kind of like when I began to recognise all the Arabic borrowings in Turkish, although in that case the deformations are much less pronounced.
In the meantime, since my language learning always seems to run in parallel to my reading, I dug out Balkan beauty, Balkan blood, a volume of short stories in translation I picked up cheap at our institution's booksale some years back. So far the quality is quite high, making me wonder if it would be worth hunting down more works by some of these authors. It's a high bar, however, since most haven't been translated into English, although most all of them are available in French.
