3 ms·
Trained linguist here, with a great deal of time spent in the Western Balkans, proficiency in Albanian, BCMS, and Aromanian, and familiarity with the specialist
by OfSanguineFire 3y ago
Trained linguist here, with a great deal of time spent in the Western Balkans, proficiency in Albanian, BCMS, and Aromanian, and familiarity with the specialist literature on the diachrony and sociolinguistics of the region. The only Kadade work I’ve read was Kronikë në gur, so I’m not entirely sure what he wrote in your story. However, what you describe sounds like total fantasy. There is a literary genre where the author takes some actual historical regime and ascribes completely fantastical traits to it. A prominent example is Milorad Pavić’s The Dictionary of the Khazars. So, I can only assume Kadare was doing the same.
The Ottoman Empire actually had very little detrimental impact on Balkan languages. There was language shift to Turkish among a few urban elites, but most of the Albanian population was rural and so continued speaking Albanian, Greek, South Slavic, or Aromanian just like they always had. Both Turkish and the languages of the Balkan Sprachbund have rich tense systems (richer than that of English), and no one has ever had any difficulty expressing past versus present versus future.
- black_puppydog 3y agoI love HN! Thanks for the explanation. I'm very glad this isn't real, it really gave me the creeps. :) I'm actually just halfway through "A concise history of Albania" by Fischer and Schmitt, so I just got past the Ottoman Empire in that. Most definitely not a historian of course. :D But indeed none of this shows up there. Although for the record, in the book I mentioned Kadare describes the areas between Arnavutluk and the capital of the empire (a lot of the book happens on this trajectory). And yeah, none of the Albanians, in Albania or outside, that I've talked to ever had any such problems. Although a lot of them do suffer from what looks a lot like "aspirational poverty" to me...
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago> Kadare describes the areas between Arnavutluk and the capital of the empire Still fantasy. The tense system of Bulgarian[0] and Macedonian is one of the most complex within the Slavic family, and contact with Turkish, if anything, only made it more complex by introducing an evidential distinction to the past tense. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulgarian_verbs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulgarian_verbs