Old Albanian – Introduction, Part 3
de Vaan, Michiel
Introduction to the two main dialects of Albanian, i.e. Tosk and Geg, their history and their isoglosses.
 Hello again, welcome to the third lesson of our module on old Albanian. In this video I will introduce you to the main features of the die-lag division in Albanian between Gag and Tosk. Let's first take a look at our roadmap. We will start by looking at the split between Gag and Tosk. Then we will look at the phenomenon of rotacism. We will discuss nasal vowels, also the diphthongs. We will discuss a few things in the lexicon. We will look at the verbal syntax. And finally I'll have some words to say on proto-albanian. The Albanian dialects fall into two groups, the Gag dialects in the north and the Tosk ones in the south. The border between them runs roughly from west to east, close to the river Škumbin, which runs from the Albanian mountains westwards to the sea in the middle of the Republic of Albania. This means that the Albanian dialects spoken in northern Albania in Kosovo, Montenegro, Serbia and northwestern Macedonia are Gag dialects. Conversely, the dialects spoken in southern Albania and adjacent parts of northwestern Greece and southwestern north Macedonia are Tosk dialects. Of the older diaspora dialects, which migrated out of Albania before the 19th century, most belonged to the Tosk varieties. This is shown by the colors on the map to the right. This is true of the Arvanitika dialects in Greece and of the Arborage dialects in southern Italy, as well as of a number of villages, a small number of villages in Ukraine and one in Bulgaria. There is also one Gag village near Zada in Croatia founded in the 18th century. During the Ottoman period and all through the 20th century, Albanian speakers from many different regions also settled in Turkey. The main feature defining the binary split between Gag and Tosk is a historical change, the passage of the consonant N to R between two vowels in the Tosk dialects. That is to say, the N originally stood between two vowels when this change happened. In part of the vocabulary, the second vowel was subsequently lost so that the Tosk R can now be found at the end of the word or directly after a consonant. I will give you a few examples. The proto-albanian word Zani for a voice has become Zani in Gag but has changed to Zuri in Tosk with the N changing to R. We find the same change in the plural of bone, astina, which has become estra in Tosk where the R from N is now after a T because a vowel has been lost before it. The participle dekuna dite has become with the prefix V vdekur in modern Tosk and finally the definite form of the word for ni gluni has become duri in Tosk with an R between two vowels. This map here shows the geographic extent of the roticism of N to R in southern Albanian. As you can see, the isogloss follows the river Skumbin quite closely. The diaspora dialects in Greece and Italy all show roticism too. It's very rare to find a map like this one that has such a clear-cut division between two variants, which is why it is taken as a basic criterion for the distinction between Gag and Tosk. Still, Tosk dialects also contain words with intervocalic N. Such forms must be explained from the relative chronology of developments. A new single intervocalic N arose in Tosk after the earlier intervocalic N had become R by the sound law we saw before. As far as we can see, such cases of a new intervocalic N always go back to consonant groups of the type consonant plus N or N plus consonant, which were thus immune to the roticism sound law. Here are a few examples. The ending of the definite accusative singular in nouns never shows roticism. This ending here. We can explain it on the basis of an earlier group Nt, which came out of Mt. Ultimately. The latter had final M of the accusative of the noun plus the T of the demonstrative word tom that. We know from various clues that this construction, that is, with the modifier glued onto the back of the noun, was regular in proto-albanian times. The slide also shows two other examples of words with intervocalic N in both Gag and Tosk going back to an earlier consonant cluster involving N. The word for moon, proto-albanian hanna. And the participle said proto-albanian thanna, which have intervocalic N in Gag and Tosk. Another important difference between Gag and Tosk is found in the phonemic system, whereas Gag dialects usually contain a series of nasal vowels, as you find, for instance, in French. Such vowels are absent from Tosk. The cause is the loss of nasalization at some point in the history of the Tosk dialect group. For instance, in the indefinite of breasts, the proto-form gin first became gin and le then gin, which is the form we find in Gag. In Tosk sooner or later, the vowel was denasalized, yielding G. The same changes apply mutatismutandis to the other vowels. An additional change is found with nasal an. Here the Tosk result is not an, but a central mid vowel schwa, written as an E with two dots on it. This vowel then can in Tosk be found in stress position, unlike in most Gag dialects. An example is the indefinite form of the word for voice, Tosk ze. The map you see now shows whether the different Albanian dialects possess one, two or three different series of vowels. It clearly shows that only the Gag area and all of the Gag area possesses the three series of short aural, long aural and nasal phonemic vowels. In the next area, vertically hatched area, which encompasses most of Tosk, including also Arvanitika and part of Arberisch, there is only one series of vowels, namely short aural vowels. In the cross hatched area along the southern Albanian coast, as well as in Calabria and Sicily, we find a series of short aural vowels, which contrasts with long aural vowels. In proto-Albanian, three diphthongs arose from long mid vowels E, Ö and O, which had arisen mainly, though not exclusively, in front of tato-celabic word final L, R or N. The resulting diphthongs Ihe, Ühe and Uho show that the phonetic change was parallel for all three vowels. Examples showing this development include inherited words from proto-Indo-European, such as B, D, D, and M, as well as Latin loan words such as K, Sky and V. Schuall for soul. These opening diphthongs, especially Uho, partly show different developments along the Tosk-Gag divide, though not precisely. In Old Albanian, the form Uho is generally preserved, whereas in Old Tosk we already find the lowering of the second element to R, hence a diphthong Ua. The modern dialects show a slightly different image. The Old Form Uho is preserved in part of Northwestern Gag, as we can see on the map, for instance here, but also in a few places in Southern Albania. For instance here. But elsewhere in Gag we find reduction to a diphthong Uhe, a form that is also found in some lexemes of the standard language, next to widespread monothangization to short or long U. So we have Uhe and a large area with U. The Tosk area had, for the most part, retained the diphthong Uhe, that is already found in the oldest texts. Another clear isogloss between Gag and Tosk concerns the development of proto-Albanian word initial Long O, which resembles the fate of the word internal and word final diphthong Uhe. Word initially we find Vo in Gag but Va in Tosk, where the vocaliic element has been lowered from O to A. The development is found in inherited words such as the word for hearth, vater, but also in a few Latin loan words with initial O, such as the word for orphan, varver, from Latin orfanus. The next map shows that the distinction between Vo and Va goes back at least to the earliest Tosk migrations to Greece. This is the only phonological isogloss between Gag and Tosk that is as clear as the rotosism of N to R. Interestingly, it is not that easy to find clear lexical differences between all of Gag on the one hand and all of Tosk on the other, if we ignore more recent loan words and derivatives, which may have been formed or spread after the Tosk migrations to Greece and Italy. It has been stated that around 3% only of the lexicon is divided along the schkumbin isogloss, but for the core vocabulary this number must even be lower. Here are four of the 400 words in the recent Albanian dialect Atlas which differ between Gag and Tosk as a whole. The only terms that are really basic words, butter and milk, show a Tosk innovation for one word and a Gag innovation for the other. So they are underlined. Here historically, etymologically, the Tosk word is newer than the Gag word, whereas for milk it is the other way round. So even these two words are likely to have diverged only after the Tosk Gag split. The clearest grammatical isogloss between Gag and Tosk is their different formation of the future. In Gag, the future is formed with the auxiliary verb come, to have, plus the infinitive. In Tosk, on the other hand, the future is made by means of invariant do, originally the third singular of to want, plus the subjunctive as in do toskoy for I will go. This do future is an innovation of Tosk. In fact, it is not very old. Since the phrase do d'appeler, in von Haarff's word list from 1497 still possesses the literal meaning I want to buy it rather than I will buy it. Another grammatical difference famously concerns the infinitive. Gag possesses an infinitive construction, which consists of the preposition met literally with, followed by the participle, that is an inherited feature of proto-Albanian. For instance, in Gag a form such as meskue, which means to go, or mekian to be. Standard Albanian, like the Tosk dialects, does not possess a productive infinitive. Other participle constructions are instead used to express certain verbal contents, as in the case of the future which we saw on the preceding slide. But Tosk dialects do contain some traces of mek constructions, which are exactly like the Gag infinitive. For instance, the expression Domathan, which is found in the standard language, means that is, that is to say. And mekianse means because and derives from the literal meaning with being that. So Tosk too knew the mek plus infinitive construction, but gave it up as a productive category. Let us recapitulate our findings, especially with a view to the question when and where the split into Tosk and Gag took place. The only isogloss which seems to be relevant is the rotissim of N. It is general in all Latin loanwords from antiquity, but absent from all Slavic loanwords with one disputed exception. Thus, the split should be dated to before the main influx of Slavic words into Albanian, but we don't know when exactly that influx started. The isoglosses concerning Uo Ua and Vova are so trivial that we cannot rely on them for in-depth reconstruction. On all other accounts, Gag and Tosk share the same basic lexicon, basic morphology and basic syntax. We have seen a few examples of this. The conclusion must be that the Tosk area may have developed from a fairly small territory in which the sound law of N to R took place. In view of the later geography, this territory was probably at the southern end of the proto-Albanian continuum, but it was not necessarily already located to the south of the Skumbin River. We know nothing of medieval migrations within the Balkans, so many different things may have happened. This concludes our survey on the Gag-Tosk dialect split. In the next video, we will delve into the different kinds of loanwords in Albanian. I thank you for your attention by saying Falamindaret Purvamendian Tuai. Take care and goodbye. Thank you.
 Hello again, welcome to the third lesson of our module on old Albanian.  In this video I will introduce you to the main features of the die-lag division in Albanian between Gag and Tosk.  Let's first take a look at our roadmap.  We will start by looking at the split between Gag and Tosk.  Then we will look at the phenomenon of rotacism.  We will discuss nasal vowels, also the diphthongs.  We will discuss a few things in the lexicon.  We will look at the verbal syntax.  And finally I'll have some words to say on proto-albanian.  The Albanian dialects fall into two groups, the Gag dialects in the north and the Tosk ones in the south.  The border between them runs roughly from west to east, close to the river Škumbin,  which runs from the Albanian mountains westwards to the sea in the middle of the Republic of Albania.  This means that the Albanian dialects spoken in northern Albania in Kosovo, Montenegro, Serbia and northwestern Macedonia are Gag dialects.  Conversely, the dialects spoken in southern Albania and adjacent parts of northwestern Greece and southwestern north Macedonia are Tosk dialects.  Of the older diaspora dialects, which migrated out of Albania before the 19th century, most belonged to the Tosk varieties.  This is shown by the colors on the map to the right.  This is true of the Arvanitika dialects in Greece and of the Arborage dialects in southern Italy,  as well as of a number of villages, a small number of villages in Ukraine and one in Bulgaria.  There is also one Gag village near Zada in Croatia founded in the 18th century.  During the Ottoman period and all through the 20th century, Albanian speakers from many different regions also settled in Turkey.  The main feature defining the binary split between Gag and Tosk is a historical change,  the passage of the consonant N to R between two vowels in the Tosk dialects.  That is to say, the N originally stood between two vowels when this change happened.  In part of the vocabulary, the second vowel was subsequently lost so that the Tosk R can now be found at the end of the word or directly after a consonant.  I will give you a few examples.  The proto-albanian word Zani for a voice has become Zani in Gag but has changed to Zuri in Tosk with the N changing to R.  We find the same change in the plural of bone, astina, which has become estra in Tosk where the R from N is now after a T because a vowel has been lost before it.  The participle dekuna dite has become with the prefix V vdekur in modern Tosk and finally the definite form of the word for ni gluni has become duri in Tosk with an R between two vowels.  This map here shows the geographic extent of the roticism of N to R in southern Albanian.  As you can see, the isogloss follows the river Skumbin quite closely.  The diaspora dialects in Greece and Italy all show roticism too.  It's very rare to find a map like this one that has such a clear-cut division between two variants, which is why it is taken as a basic criterion for the distinction between Gag and Tosk.  Still, Tosk dialects also contain words with intervocalic N.  Such forms must be explained from the relative chronology of developments.  A new single intervocalic N arose in Tosk after the earlier intervocalic N had become R by the sound law we saw before.  As far as we can see, such cases of a new intervocalic N always go back to consonant groups of the type consonant plus N or N plus consonant, which were thus immune to the roticism sound law.  Here are a few examples.  The ending of the definite accusative singular in nouns never shows roticism.  This ending here.  We can explain it on the basis of an earlier group Nt, which came out of Mt.  Ultimately.  The latter had final M of the accusative of the noun plus the T of the demonstrative word tom that.  We know from various clues that this construction, that is, with the modifier glued onto the back of the noun, was regular in proto-albanian times.  The slide also shows two other examples of words with intervocalic N in both Gag and Tosk going back to an earlier consonant cluster involving N.  The word for moon, proto-albanian hanna.  And the participle said proto-albanian thanna, which have intervocalic N in Gag and Tosk.  Another important difference between Gag and Tosk is found in the phonemic system, whereas Gag dialects usually contain a series of nasal vowels, as you find, for instance, in French.  Such vowels are absent from Tosk.  The cause is the loss of nasalization at some point in the history of the Tosk dialect group.  For instance, in the indefinite of breasts, the proto-form gin first became gin and le then gin, which is the form we find in Gag.  In Tosk sooner or later, the vowel was denasalized, yielding G.  The same changes apply mutatismutandis to the other vowels.  An additional change is found with nasal an.  Here the Tosk result is not an, but a central mid vowel schwa, written as an E with two dots on it.  This vowel then can in Tosk be found in stress position, unlike in most Gag dialects.  An example is the indefinite form of the word for voice, Tosk ze.  The map you see now shows whether the different Albanian dialects possess one, two or three different series of vowels.  It clearly shows that only the Gag area and all of the Gag area possesses the three series of short aural, long aural and nasal phonemic vowels.  In the next area, vertically hatched area, which encompasses most of Tosk, including also Arvanitika and part of Arberisch, there is only one series of vowels, namely short aural vowels.  In the cross hatched area along the southern Albanian coast, as well as in Calabria and Sicily, we find a series of short aural vowels, which contrasts with long aural vowels.  In proto-Albanian, three diphthongs arose from long mid vowels E, Ö and O, which had arisen mainly, though not exclusively, in front of tato-celabic word final L, R or N.  The resulting diphthongs Ihe, Ühe and Uho show that the phonetic change was parallel for all three vowels.  Examples showing this development include inherited words from proto-Indo-European, such as B, D, D, and M, as well as Latin loan words such as K, Sky and V.  Schuall for soul.  These opening diphthongs, especially Uho, partly show different developments along the Tosk-Gag divide, though not precisely.  In Old Albanian, the form Uho is generally preserved, whereas in Old Tosk we already find the lowering of the second element to R, hence a diphthong Ua.  The modern dialects show a slightly different image.  The Old Form Uho is preserved in part of Northwestern Gag, as we can see on the map, for instance here, but also in a few places in Southern Albania.  For instance here. But elsewhere in Gag we find reduction to a diphthong Uhe, a form that is also found in some lexemes of the standard language, next to widespread monothangization to short or long U.  So we have Uhe and a large area with U.  The Tosk area had, for the most part, retained the diphthong Uhe, that is already found in the oldest texts.  Another clear isogloss between Gag and Tosk concerns the development of proto-Albanian word initial Long O, which resembles the fate of the word internal and word final diphthong Uhe.  Word initially we find Vo in Gag but Va in Tosk, where the vocaliic element has been lowered from O to A.  The development is found in inherited words such as the word for hearth, vater, but also in a few Latin loan words with initial O, such as the word for orphan, varver, from Latin orfanus.  The next map shows that the distinction between Vo and Va goes back at least to the earliest Tosk migrations to Greece.  This is the only phonological isogloss between Gag and Tosk that is as clear as the rotosism of N to R.  Interestingly, it is not that easy to find clear lexical differences between all of Gag on the one hand and all of Tosk on the other, if we ignore more recent loan words and derivatives, which may have been formed or spread after the Tosk migrations to Greece and Italy.  It has been stated that around 3% only of the lexicon is divided along the schkumbin isogloss, but for the core vocabulary this number must even be lower.  Here are four of the 400 words in the recent Albanian dialect Atlas which differ between Gag and Tosk as a whole.  The only terms that are really basic words, butter and milk, show a Tosk innovation for one word and a Gag innovation for the other.  So they are underlined.  Here historically, etymologically, the Tosk word is newer than the Gag word, whereas for milk it is the other way round.  So even these two words are likely to have diverged only after the Tosk Gag split.  The clearest grammatical isogloss between Gag and Tosk is their different formation of the future.  In Gag, the future is formed with the auxiliary verb come, to have, plus the infinitive.  In Tosk, on the other hand, the future is made by means of invariant do, originally the third singular of to want, plus the subjunctive as in do toskoy for I will go.  This do future is an innovation of Tosk.  In fact, it is not very old.  Since the phrase do d'appeler, in von Haarff's word list from 1497 still possesses the literal meaning I want to buy it rather than I will buy it.  Another grammatical difference famously concerns the infinitive.  Gag possesses an infinitive construction, which consists of the preposition met literally with, followed by the participle, that is an inherited feature of proto-Albanian.  For instance, in Gag a form such as meskue, which means to go, or mekian to be.  Standard Albanian, like the Tosk dialects, does not possess a productive infinitive.  Other participle constructions are instead used to express certain verbal contents, as in the case of the future which we saw on the preceding slide.  But Tosk dialects do contain some traces of mek constructions, which are exactly like the Gag infinitive.  For instance, the expression Domathan, which is found in the standard language, means that is, that is to say.  And mekianse means because and derives from the literal meaning with being that.  So Tosk too knew the mek plus infinitive construction, but gave it up as a productive category.  Let us recapitulate our findings, especially with a view to the question when and where the split into Tosk and Gag took place.  The only isogloss which seems to be relevant is the rotissim of N.  It is general in all Latin loanwords from antiquity, but absent from all Slavic loanwords with one disputed exception.  Thus, the split should be dated to before the main influx of Slavic words into Albanian, but we don't know when exactly that influx started.  The isoglosses concerning Uo Ua and Vova are so trivial that we cannot rely on them for in-depth reconstruction.  On all other accounts, Gag and Tosk share the same basic lexicon, basic morphology and basic syntax.  We have seen a few examples of this.  The conclusion must be that the Tosk area may have developed from a fairly small territory in which the sound law of N to R took place.  In view of the later geography, this territory was probably at the southern end of the proto-Albanian continuum,  but it was not necessarily already located to the south of the Skumbin River.  We know nothing of medieval migrations within the Balkans, so many different things may have happened.  This concludes our survey on the Gag-Tosk dialect split.  In the next video, we will delve into the different kinds of loanwords in Albanian.  I thank you for your attention by saying Falamindaret Purvamendian Tuai. Take care and goodbye.  Thank you.
Old_Albanian_1_0_515.png Old_Albanian_1_516_767.png Old_Albanian_1_768_1163.png Old_Albanian_1_1164_1307.png Old_Albanian_1_1308_1727.png Old_Albanian_1_1728_2831.png Old_Albanian_1_2832_3311.png Old_Albanian_1_3312_5867.png Old_Albanian_1_5868_8327.png Old_Albanian_1_8328_9887.png Old_Albanian_1_9888_10343.png Old_Albanian_1_10344_10559.png Old_Albanian_1_10560_12095.png Old_Albanian_1_12096_12371.png Old_Albanian_1_12372_12467.png Old_Albanian_1_12468_12815.png Old_Albanian_1_12816_13727.png Old_Albanian_1_13728_14255.png Old_Albanian_1_14256_16175.png Old_Albanian_1_16176_20147.png Old_Albanian_1_20148_20639.png Old_Albanian_1_20640_22475.png Old_Albanian_1_22476_24707.png Old_Albanian_1_24708_25139.png Old_Albanian_1_25140_25391.png Old_Albanian_1_25392_25511.png Old_Albanian_1_25512_25758.png
Hello again, welcome to the third lesson of our module on old Albanian. In this video I will introduce you to the main features of the die-lag division in Albanian between Gag and Tosk. Let's first take a look at our roadmap. We will start by looking at the split between Gag and Tosk. Then we will look at the phenomenon of rotacism. We will discuss nasal vowels, also the diphthongs. We will discuss a few things in the lexicon. We will look at the verbal syntax. And finally I'll have some words to say on proto-albanian. The Albanian dialects fall into two groups, the Gag dialects in the north and the Tosk ones in the south. The border between them runs roughly from west to east, close to the river Škumbin, which runs from the Albanian mountains westwards to the sea in the middle of the Republic of Albania. This means that the Albanian dialects spoken in northern Albania in Kosovo, Montenegro, Serbia and northwestern Macedonia are Gag dialects. Conversely, the dialects spoken in southern Albania and adjacent parts of northwestern Greece and southwestern north Macedonia are Tosk dialects. Of the older diaspora dialects, which migrated out of Albania before the 19th century, most belonged to the Tosk varieties. This is shown by the colors on the map to the right. This is true of the Arvanitika dialects in Greece and of the Arborage dialects in southern Italy, as well as of a number of villages, a small number of villages in Ukraine and one in Bulgaria. There is also one Gag village near Zada in Croatia founded in the 18th century. During the Ottoman period and all through the 20th century, Albanian speakers from many different regions also settled in Turkey. The main feature defining the binary split between Gag and Tosk is a historical change, the passage of the consonant N to R between two vowels in the Tosk dialects. That is to say, the N originally stood between two vowels when this change happened. In part of the vocabulary, the second vowel was subsequently lost so that the Tosk R can now be found at the end of the word or directly after a consonant. I will give you a few examples. The proto-albanian word Zani for a voice has become Zani in Gag but has changed to Zuri in Tosk with the N changing to R. We find the same change in the plural of bone, astina, which has become estra in Tosk where the R from N is now after a T because a vowel has been lost before it. The participle dekuna dite has become with the prefix V vdekur in modern Tosk and finally the definite form of the word for ni gluni has become duri in Tosk with an R between two vowels. This map here shows the geographic extent of the roticism of N to R in southern Albanian. As you can see, the isogloss follows the river Skumbin quite closely. The diaspora dialects in Greece and Italy all show roticism too. It's very rare to find a map like this one that has such a clear-cut division between two variants, which is why it is taken as a basic criterion for the distinction between Gag and Tosk. Still, Tosk dialects also contain words with intervocalic N. Such forms must be explained from the relative chronology of developments. A new single intervocalic N arose in Tosk after the earlier intervocalic N had become R by the sound law we saw before. As far as we can see, such cases of a new intervocalic N always go back to consonant groups of the type consonant plus N or N plus consonant, which were thus immune to the roticism sound law. Here are a few examples. The ending of the definite accusative singular in nouns never shows roticism. This ending here. We can explain it on the basis of an earlier group Nt, which came out of Mt. Ultimately. The latter had final M of the accusative of the noun plus the T of the demonstrative word tom that. We know from various clues that this construction, that is, with the modifier glued onto the back of the noun, was regular in proto-albanian times. The slide also shows two other examples of words with intervocalic N in both Gag and Tosk going back to an earlier consonant cluster involving N. The word for moon, proto-albanian hanna. And the participle said proto-albanian thanna, which have intervocalic N in Gag and Tosk. Another important difference between Gag and Tosk is found in the phonemic system, whereas Gag dialects usually contain a series of nasal vowels, as you find, for instance, in French. Such vowels are absent from Tosk. The cause is the loss of nasalization at some point in the history of the Tosk dialect group. For instance, in the indefinite of breasts, the proto-form gin first became gin and le then gin, which is the form we find in Gag. In Tosk sooner or later, the vowel was denasalized, yielding G. The same changes apply mutatismutandis to the other vowels. An additional change is found with nasal an. Here the Tosk result is not an, but a central mid vowel schwa, written as an E with two dots on it. This vowel then can in Tosk be found in stress position, unlike in most Gag dialects. An example is the indefinite form of the word for voice, Tosk ze. The map you see now shows whether the different Albanian dialects possess one, two or three different series of vowels. It clearly shows that only the Gag area and all of the Gag area possesses the three series of short aural, long aural and nasal phonemic vowels. In the next area, vertically hatched area, which encompasses most of Tosk, including also Arvanitika and part of Arberisch, there is only one series of vowels, namely short aural vowels. In the cross hatched area along the southern Albanian coast, as well as in Calabria and Sicily, we find a series of short aural vowels, which contrasts with long aural vowels. In proto-Albanian, three diphthongs arose from long mid vowels E, Ö and O, which had arisen mainly, though not exclusively, in front of tato-celabic word final L, R or N. The resulting diphthongs Ihe, Ühe and Uho show that the phonetic change was parallel for all three vowels. Examples showing this development include inherited words from proto-Indo-European, such as B, D, D, and M, as well as Latin loan words such as K, Sky and V. Schuall for soul. These opening diphthongs, especially Uho, partly show different developments along the Tosk-Gag divide, though not precisely. In Old Albanian, the form Uho is generally preserved, whereas in Old Tosk we already find the lowering of the second element to R, hence a diphthong Ua. The modern dialects show a slightly different image. The Old Form Uho is preserved in part of Northwestern Gag, as we can see on the map, for instance here, but also in a few places in Southern Albania. For instance here. But elsewhere in Gag we find reduction to a diphthong Uhe, a form that is also found in some lexemes of the standard language, next to widespread monothangization to short or long U. So we have Uhe and a large area with U. The Tosk area had, for the most part, retained the diphthong Uhe, that is already found in the oldest texts. Another clear isogloss between Gag and Tosk concerns the development of proto-Albanian word initial Long O, which resembles the fate of the word internal and word final diphthong Uhe. Word initially we find Vo in Gag but Va in Tosk, where the vocaliic element has been lowered from O to A. The development is found in inherited words such as the word for hearth, vater, but also in a few Latin loan words with initial O, such as the word for orphan, varver, from Latin orfanus. The next map shows that the distinction between Vo and Va goes back at least to the earliest Tosk migrations to Greece. This is the only phonological isogloss between Gag and Tosk that is as clear as the rotosism of N to R. Interestingly, it is not that easy to find clear lexical differences between all of Gag on the one hand and all of Tosk on the other, if we ignore more recent loan words and derivatives, which may have been formed or spread after the Tosk migrations to Greece and Italy. It has been stated that around 3% only of the lexicon is divided along the schkumbin isogloss, but for the core vocabulary this number must even be lower. Here are four of the 400 words in the recent Albanian dialect Atlas which differ between Gag and Tosk as a whole. The only terms that are really basic words, butter and milk, show a Tosk innovation for one word and a Gag innovation for the other. So they are underlined. Here historically, etymologically, the Tosk word is newer than the Gag word, whereas for milk it is the other way round. So even these two words are likely to have diverged only after the Tosk Gag split. The clearest grammatical isogloss between Gag and Tosk is their different formation of the future. In Gag, the future is formed with the auxiliary verb come, to have, plus the infinitive. In Tosk, on the other hand, the future is made by means of invariant do, originally the third singular of to want, plus the subjunctive as in do toskoy for I will go. This do future is an innovation of Tosk. In fact, it is not very old. Since the phrase do d'appeler, in von Haarff's word list from 1497 still possesses the literal meaning I want to buy it rather than I will buy it. Another grammatical difference famously concerns the infinitive. Gag possesses an infinitive construction, which consists of the preposition met literally with, followed by the participle, that is an inherited feature of proto-Albanian. For instance, in Gag a form such as meskue, which means to go, or mekian to be. Standard Albanian, like the Tosk dialects, does not possess a productive infinitive. Other participle constructions are instead used to express certain verbal contents, as in the case of the future which we saw on the preceding slide. But Tosk dialects do contain some traces of mek constructions, which are exactly like the Gag infinitive. For instance, the expression Domathan, which is found in the standard language, means that is, that is to say. And mekianse means because and derives from the literal meaning with being that. So Tosk too knew the mek plus infinitive construction, but gave it up as a productive category. Let us recapitulate our findings, especially with a view to the question when and where the split into Tosk and Gag took place. The only isogloss which seems to be relevant is the rotissim of N. It is general in all Latin loanwords from antiquity, but absent from all Slavic loanwords with one disputed exception. Thus, the split should be dated to before the main influx of Slavic words into Albanian, but we don't know when exactly that influx started. The isoglosses concerning Uo Ua and Vova are so trivial that we cannot rely on them for in-depth reconstruction. On all other accounts, Gag and Tosk share the same basic lexicon, basic morphology and basic syntax. We have seen a few examples of this. The conclusion must be that the Tosk area may have developed from a fairly small territory in which the sound law of N to R took place. In view of the later geography, this territory was probably at the southern end of the proto-Albanian continuum, but it was not necessarily already located to the south of the Skumbin River. We know nothing of medieval migrations within the Balkans, so many different things may have happened. This concludes our survey on the Gag-Tosk dialect split. In the next video, we will delve into the different kinds of loanwords in Albanian. I thank you for your attention by saying Falamindaret Purvamendian Tuai. Take care and goodbye. Thank you.
introduce you to the main features of the die-lag different Albanian dialects possess one, two or between Gag and Tosk is their different formation