Annotated Swadesh wordlists for the Albanian group (Indo-European family).

Languages included: Albanian, Tosk [alb-alb].

DATA SOURCES

Mançe et al. 2005 = Mançe, Mukades; Zykaj, Xhemile; Dhimitri, Lidja; Myrto, Ludmilla; Malo, Natasha. Fjalor Rusisht-Shqip. Tiranë: EDFA. // A 35,000-item Russian-Albanian dictionary of the standard literary language.

Koçi & Skendi 1950 = Koçi, R. & Serebrenjikov, B. A. Fjalor i Shkurter Shqip-Rusisht [Краткий албанско-русский словарь]. Москва: Государственное Издательство Иностранных и Национальных словарей. // A 12,000-item Albanian-Russian dictionary of the standard literary language.

Mann 1948 = Mann, Stuart E. An Historical Albanian-English Dictionary. London-New York-Toronto: Longmans, Green and Co., Ltd. // Classic dictionary with references to the oldest recorded sources of Albanian lexical etyma. Primarily based on the Gegh dialect, but includes all the Tosk forms as well.

Mann 1957 = Mann, Stuart E. An English-Albanian Dictionary. Cambridge University Press. // A useful companion to Mann 1948; also based on the Gegh dialect.

Orel 1998 = Orel, Vladimir. Albanian Etymological Dictionary. Leiden-Boston-Köln: Brill. // One of the latest major reference works on Albanian etymology. Contains important original work on the reconstruction of Proto-Albanian and its external connections, with references to etymological research of all of the author's predecessors.

NOTES

1. General.

Dialects: The wordlist is restricted to lexical items of the Tosk dialect, since it forms the basis of the literary language and is most frequently covered by detailed modern dictionaries. However, Gegh forms, where they are different from Tosk, are regularly quoted in the Notes section, either from [Orel 1998] or from the two older Albanian dictionaries by Stuart Mann that are based primarily on Gegh. Perusal of these sources shows that lexicostatistical differences between Tosk and Gegh are minimal (if at all existent) and do not necessarily require the construction of separate wordlists.

Etymology: The main etymological reference is [Orel 1998]; where possible, we quote Orel's Proto-Albanian reconstruction and the principal etymological hypothesis that accompanies it. Alternate etymologies are discussed only in those cases when they may be, for phonetic or semantic reasons, preferable to Orel's solution. Forms are explicitly marked as borrowings only when the evidence is overwhelming (thus, many of the words that have no plausible Indo-European etymology could be potential borrowings, but they are not marked as such unless a specific source can be suggested with certainty).

2. Transcription.

All of the items are given in standard Albanian (Tosk) orthography as well as the regular UTS transliteration. Transliteration involves the following changes:

a) vowels: e > UTS ɛ; o > UTS ɔ; y > UTS ü; ë > UTS ǝ.

b) consonants: th > UTS θ; dh > UTS ð; sh > UTS š; x > UTS ʒ; ç > UTS č; q > UTS ɕ; gj > UTS ʓ; r > UTS ɾ; rr > UTS r; ll > UTS ɫ; nj > UTS ɲ; j > UTS y.

Database compiled and annotated by: G. Starostin (July 2011; revised 2018).