Of the origin and history of the Albanians it is difficult to write much that has meaning with any certainty. One fact only is fairly well established — that they are not newcomers. The Greeks, anxious to identify them with a race akin to the Hellenes, declare with conviction that they are the descendants of the Pelasgi of antiquity. But who were the Pelasgi ? They must have been known to the Romans under the generic name of Illyrians, a race as intractable and as impervious to civilisation as are the modern inhabitants of Albania. Doubtless, too, the Southern Albanians are to some extent the descendants of the Epirotes who followed Pyrrhus. It matters little whether we identify them with the Pelasgi, the Epirotes, the Macedonians, or the Illyrians. They are, at all events, a race which never possessed a civilisation of its own, never completely assimilated the culture of its neighbours, and always led, in spite of Greek schools or Roman roads, the same wild tribal life in the same inaccessible mountains. Ethno-logically it belongs to the Indo-European group, and probably it migrated to its present fastnesses before the Italian and the Hellenic branches, which are its nearest kinsmen. The Albanian language, despite marked dialectical variations, is essentially the same wherever it is spoken — as far north as the Montenegrin border or as far south as the Gulf of Arta. It is unquestionably an Aryan language, sufficiently distinct both from Slav and from Greek, and superficially at least more nearly akin to Latin than to Greek. But it has borrowed so much from all the tongues with which it has been in contact that it is difficult to tell at a glance how many of these manifestly Aryan words it brought from the Aryan home, and how many it has recovered in recent centuries. An educated Southern Albanian employs as many obviously Greek words as a Hellenised Vlach, while a Northern Albanian exerts his predatory talents upon Italian and Servian.
Henry Noel Brailsford
Ako ste zainteresirani za poveke slobodno citajte ovde
http://promacedonia.org/en/hb/hb_8_2.html