The Old Albanian verb in the Balkan context

The goal of the project is a comprehensive synchronic and diachronic analysis of the Old Albanian verbal system in view of the hypothesis that Albanian is the central and key language of the Balkan Sprachbund. The project will be based on a computer corpus comprising the works of all Old Gheg authors - Buzuku (1555), Budi (around 1620), Bardhi/Blanchus (1635), Bogdani (1685) - and the two Old Tosk authors Matrnga (1592) and Variboba (1762), a text corpus that equals roughly 1.500 printed pages. The project comprises the following tasks: (1) Production of a lexicon of all Old Albanian verbs, with full documentation concerning the linguistic characteristics of each verb in Old Albanian, such as earliest attestation plus a thesaurus of all attestations, semantics, voice, valency and verbal syntax, stem formation, etc. Where possible, an etymology and a historical explanation of the morphology of each verb (particularly present stem formation vs. aorist stem formation) will be furnished. (2) An examination of the entire tense and mood system of Old Albanian with regard to the question of which categories are inherited and which categories were newly developed. In the course of this examination, special emphasis will be laid on those newly developed categories that are typical of the Balkan Sprachbund. (3) A systematic search of the entire Old Albanian verbal lexicon for loans, calques and other contact phenomena. Again, special emphasis will be laid on those loans, calques and other contact phenomena that result from the close contact of Albanian with the neighbouring Balkan languages (e.g., phrasal idioms typical of the Balkan languages). In this field, compound verbs are an area where calques and typically Balkan verbal concepts are most likely to be expected and will therefore receive special attention. (4) The project seeks to remedy the shortcomings of the philology of Old Albanian, a much-neglected area both of Albanian linguistics and of Balkan linguistics in general.

The project`s main task was the compilation of a dictionary of the verbs in Old Albanian. To accomplish this task, the project workers Dr. Stefan Schumacher (project leader) and Dr. Joachim Matzinger (co-worker) excerpted all verbal forms from the oldest sources of Albanian (books from the 16th through the 18th centuries AD, on the whole some 2,000 printed pages). These verbal forms were fully analysed, and the results will be published as a dictionary in 2012. This book will not only list and analyse all verbal forms but also contain a lengthy introduction dealing with the Albanian verbal system and its prehistory. The primary focus of the project was thus basic research, and the dictionary will consequently provide a valuable basis for further linguistic research in the prehistory and history of Albanian. By providing comprehensive information on the verb in Old Albanian, it will be useful for historical and general linguistics, for Balkan linguistics, and for Albanology. Albanian is an Indo-European language. It is thus related to Latin, Greek, the Germanic languages (such as English and German) and a number of other languages or language families. All of these languages or language families go back to a single language, the so-called Indo-European proto-language, that was presumably spoken in Western Eurasia in the 5th millennium BC and split up afterwards. This proto-language was never written down, but can be reconstructed by comparing its early attested daughter languages such as Greek, Sanskrit and Latin, whose written attestation started more than 2,500 years ago. Within the Indo-European language family, Albanian is attested late, as it was not put down in writing before the 15th century AD. One of the most interesting features of Albanian is its verbal system, which contains a complex system of tenses and moods. One major part of this verbal system consists of categories that Albanian shares with the early attested Indo-European languages. Surprisingly, Albanian has retained a good deal of the categories of this system, whereas other Indo-European languages, most notably English, have drastically reduced it. The other part of the Albanian verbal system consists of newly developed categories that comprise not only extra tenses but also extra moods. The development of these categories cannot be separated from the fact that the speakers of Albanian up to the 20th century were in intensive contact with speakers of the neighbouring languages (Medieval and Modern Greek, Rumanian, Bulgarian/Macedonian, and Turkish). Even though the development of these verbal categories (both inherited ones and newly developed ones) can only be interpreted correctly if the oldest sources are scrutinized closely, these sources have been largely neglected up to now. It was the explicit intention of the authors to analyse and make fully accessible to linguistics the complete evidence of verbal forms in the Old Albanian sources so that in the future this evidence can no longer be ignored.