Your post is sadly an example of the pop-sci history that circulates in Romania,* and it is out of sync with the considerable advances made in Albanian historic

Your post is sadly an example of the pop-sci history that circulates in Romania,* and it is out of sync with the considerable advances made in Albanian historical linguistics in recent decades. The evidence is overwhelming that Albanian originates from the Central Balkans. While Albanian does show signs of belonging to a Balkan Indo-European subgroup deep in prehistory, it is not closely related to Thracian – Matzinger’s 2012 paper “Zur herkunft des Albanischen: Argumente gegen die thrakische Hypothese” in the Ismajli Festschrift conveniently sets out why. While Romanian bucur ‘happy’ and Albanian bukur ‘beautiful’ are indeed regarded as shared lexicon of disputed etymology, București (Bucharest) does not mean ‘beautiful is’ in Albanian: -ești is a common toponym-forming suffix in Romanian. It’s certainly not related to the Albanian copula, which is âshtë with a nasal vowel both historically and in many dialects still today (standard Albanian është is based on the Tosk variety that lost nasal vowels a few centuries ago). * (For HN readers unaware of Balkan quarrels, a cornerstone of Romanian nationalism is the idea that the Romanians are descendants of a Romanized population in Dacia who remained behind when the province was lost to the Roman Empire. This would, crucially, allow the Romanians to have been in Transylvania before the Hungarians, longtime rivals for that land, arrived in 896 CE. That Romanian and Albanian share lexical material from the early first millennium is awkward for that view – many linguists internationally have concluded that the Romanian language was brought to modern day Romania from somewhere across the Danube. Romanian pop-sci, in order to save the Dacian continuity theory, therefore occasionally makes the claim that the Albanians came from the territory of Romania, or that the Albanian and Dacian languages were related.)