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The Albanians (Albanian: Shqiptarët) and their country Albania (Shqipëria) have been identified by many ethnonyms.The native endonym is Shqiptar.The name "Albanians" (Latin: Albanenses/Arbanenses) was used in medieval Greek and Latin documents that gradually entered European languages from which other similar derivative names emerged. [1]
The language is spoken by approximately 6 million people in the Balkans, primarily in Albania, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Serbia, Montenegro and Greece. [1] However, due to old communities in Italy and the large Albanian diaspora, the worldwide total of speakers is much higher than in Southern Europe and numbers approximately 7.5 million.
Proto-Albanian is the ancestral reconstructed language of Albanian, before the Gheg–Tosk dialectal diversification (before c. 600 CE). [2] Albanoid and other Paleo-Balkan languages had their formative core in the Balkans after the Indo-European migrations in the region.
Depending on which proposed etymology and phonological development linguists support, different etymologies are usually used to link Albanian to Illyrian, Messapic, Dardanian, Thracian or an unattested Paleo-Balkan language. Brindisi is a town in southern Italy.
The pronunciation of "β" changed from /b/ in ancient Greek to /v/ in Byzantine Greek. This is reflected in the Turkish term, Arnavut or Arnaut, by ways of metathesis (-van- to -nav-). [1] [9] [10] A related Greek term is Arvanites. The Ottoman Turks borrowed their name for Albanians after hearing it from the Byzantine Greeks. [9]
In Albanian folk etymology, this word denotes a bird totem, dating from the times of Skanderbeg as displayed on the Albanian flag. [ 85 ] [ 103 ] The other is within scholarship that connects it to the verb 'to speak' ( me shqiptue ) from the Latin " excipere ". [ 85 ]
The Arnold Ritter von Harff's lexicon is the second oldest Albanian-language document ever retrieved, after the Formula e pagëzimit.The lexicon was written by Arnold Ritter von Harff, a German traveler, who in 1496 was spending some hours in the port of Durrës and transcribed some words of the locals Albanians, by writing on the side, the German translation of them.
[4] [5] Johann Georg von Hahn (1854) was the first to derive the term Shqiptar from the Albanian verbs shqipoj ("to speak clearly") and shqiptoj ("to speak out, pronounce"), [6] while Gustav Meyer (1891) was the first to derive shqipoj from the Latin verb excipere, denoting people who speak the same language, [6] similar to the ethno-linguistic ...