30-08-2025, 04:02 AM
(29-08-2025, 11:34 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.If you gave me someone's historical attempt at writing Catalan in a modified alphabet, I could tell you pretty quickly that we're looking at a member of the Romance language family, then take it from there.
Yeah, but Albanian? Or even Armenian?
Quote:Were the three Albanian[? Caucasian?] alphabets really created from scratch? What do they look like?
Armenian is currently spoken mostly in Armenia, a landlocked country East of Turkey and South of (Caucasian) Georgia; but at one point in late Middle Ages the Armenian kingdom of Cilicia extended to the Mediterranean and interacted with the Crusader States of the Levant.
The language is Indo-European but not Romance. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. it is an isolated branch of Indo-European, with no established connections to other branches. Its You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. deviated a lot from the prototypical IE one. It completely lost the IE grammatical gender, even in pronouns. Nouns are inflected for number (singular or plural) and according to seven grammatical cases, which distinguish between animate and inanimate nouns. Only ~1500 words of the lexicon are derived directly from Indo-European, the rest being loans from other languages. Verbs are inflected for person, number, and several tenses and moods, including some that do not exist in other IE languages, like "optative" and "necessitative". Negation is formed by prefixing a letter (something like "ch") to the verb.
The Armenian script was supposedly designed by a Christian monk in the 5th century. While the concept was taken from other European alphabets, the letter shapes are original. Some letter pairs are distinguished only by small serif-like strokes. The written language has some long consonant-only clusters, but in the spoken language they are broken up into smaller clusters by schwas.
(Balkan) Albanian has long been spoken in (Balkan) Albania, just north of Greece, on the Adriatic coast. It too is Indo-European but not Romance. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., it too is an isolated branch of Indo-European, with some You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. Nouns have three grammatical genders and four syntactical cases. There is a definite article (only singular?) but it is a vowel suffix that depends on gender and final consonant. It lost many IE grammatical features, such as verb inflections. Little of the original IE lexicon survived; maybe 50% of Albanian words are loans from Latin. Since the earliest surviving document (from 1462) it has generally been written in the Latin alphabet, with a few extra letters. However some communities in the past have used modified Greek and Cyrillic alphabets.
(Balkan) Albanians were mostly Christian (first Byzantine, later partly Roman, partly Eastern) until the Ottoman conquest of the country in the 1400s. Refugees from that conquest settled in Southern Italy, starting ~1450, and their descendants are a population of ~100-200 thousand Albanian speakers (Arbëreshë).
Caucasian Albanian was the language of the ancient kingdom of Caucasian Albania, which existed between 100 and 700 CE North of the Caucasus Mountains, in present-day Azerbaijian. There is no relation to the Balkan country or language; the shared name is just an unfortunate coincidence. ("Alwan" is a more accurate version of the name, but still not widely used.). The population was Christianized in the 4th century but most of it converted to Islam in the 8th century. In the 11th century the region was conquered by Turkic peoples, which is why the modern population of Azerbaijan speaks an unrelated language very similar to Turkish.
The Caucasian Albanian language is known almost exclusively from a ~180-page palimpsest from ~500 CE found in a monastery in Mount Sinai in the Sinai Peninsula. The date of its extinction is unknown; but it is believed to be the ancestral of the nearly-extinct Udi language still spoken in a couple of villages in Azerbaijian.
Caucasian Albanian was not an Indo-European language, but a member of the Northeast Caucasian family, which has only a few members anyway. The language is agglutinative, forming long words by adding multiple suffixes to a stem, or inserting infixes into the stem. It has 11 grammatical cases and grammatical number, but no gender. There seem to be only two stem classes, nouns and verbs; adjectives and adverbs are derived from them by suffixes. It has many verbal tenses and moods, including uncommon ones like "prohibitive" and "adhortative".
I was surprised to see that this obscure language in the Far Bunnies has, among half a dozen "indeterninate pronouns", the word "fulano" = "a certain", exactly like the Portuguese and Spanish word meaning "indeterminate person". But the latter comes from Arabic, so presumably it is not a coincidence: Udi must have borrowed their "fulano" from Arabic too.
The You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. has 57 letters. It has been said to be similar to the Coptic one, and allegedly was designed by the same monk who designed the Armenian alphabet.
(Caucasian) Georgian or Kartvelian is spoken in the country of (Caucasian) Georgia. You may be surprised to know that it has no relation to the American state of Georgia; the name is another unfortunate coincidence. Between ~300 BCE and ~500 CE part of the region was the Kingdom of Iberia, which -- you guessed -- has nothing to do with the Iberian Peninsula or the Iberian peoples, which in turn have nothing to do with the Kingdom of the Iberians which existed in the territory of the former Kingdom of Iberia between the 9th and 10th century.
(Caucasian) Georgian is not an IE language either, and is not related to Caucasian Albanian even though the countries were essentially neighbors. Cauasian Georgia has been Christian since the 4th century, whith its own Eastern-rite Church. I mention it here only because its script is the third "Caucasian" alphabet designed by that same monk.
All the best, --jorge
PS. Since the old Kingdom of Albania interacted with the Crusades, and Azerbaijian was dominated by the Mongols in the 12th to 13th centuries, the theory that the language of the VMS is is a (Caucasian) Albanian-Mongol Jargon used by the Knights Templar cannot be entirely dismissed a priori.