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0 pointspaganel2y ago0 comments

Also, the way Albanian is spoken, the intonation, the way the words come out of one’s mouth is very, very similar to Romanian, or at least to the Romanian dialect spoken in Southern Romania, between the Danube and the Carpathians.

I’m Romanian myself, and the first time when I heard someone speak Albanian was as a teenager, when zapping through the satellite TV channels and landing on a Albanian news segment.

I was very intrigued because it felt that the lady presenting the news spoke a language that I should have understood, and yet I didn’t, not one word.

Later on I found out that there’s a name for that, i.e. for languages that have very similar intonation, but I forgot which one was exactly. Granted, that similarity between how Romanian and Albanian sound is most likely caused by our common Thracian/Dacian substrate.

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OfSanguineFire2y ago

There is no one Albanian intonation. If you think that the standard pronunciation used on Albanian television sounds like Romanian, or like Oltenian-dialect Romanian, then OK. But in general the Albanian language is extremely fractured dialectally – it is quite common in the region to go over a mountain pass and find that the people on that side speak markedly different, yet it is a distance of only a few km. I personally see very little in common in intonation between an Albanian speaker from, say, Gjirokastër and one from Kukës or Prishtina, and I suspect you might agree too if you checked out representatives of all these varieties on YouTube.

As I said elsewhere in this thread, Thracian has been conclusively shown to represent a different branch of Indo-European than Albanian, so the idea of “Thracian/Dacian” playing a role in similarities between Albanian and Romanian is very out of date.

paganelOP2y ago

> Thracian has been conclusively shown to represent a different branch of Indo-European than Albanian,

Has it?

And to the intonation thing, maybe I worded it wrong, as English is obviously not my primary language, but I'd say each and every language (or the great majority of them, anyway) have a distinct way of pronouncing their words. For example Italian, which I managed to learn just by watching TV as a kid, has definitely a different intonation compared to how we, Romanians, speak, even though they're both Romance languages and pretty close (closer than Romanian is to French, for example).

Close to us, I find that both Serbs and Bulgarians have different intonation compared to Romanian.

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