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AlbanianAlbanian-English lexicon 29,766 bytes
OVERVIEW With about three million speakers, Albanian is the last remaining member of the Illyrian branch of Indo-European. It is spoken in Albania, and the Kosovo region of Yugoslavia. There are two major dialects: Tosk, spoken in the south, and Gheg, spoken in the north. There are also smaller communities in Southern Italy and Greece who speak a third dialect, Arbëresh. Albanian literature began in the sixteenth century. In 1908 the Roman alphabet was adopted. There is little difference between the dialects, mainly the equivalence of Gheg -VnV- to Tosk -VrV- (rhotacism) and the morphology of the future tense. WORD ORDER The standard word order is SVO. ORTHOGRAPHY The spelling of Albanian is regular. Albanian uses the Roman alphabet (except w) with the addition of ç and ë (which represents the phoneme /ə/). The following digraphs are used:
PHONOLOGY Consonants stops: p, b, t, d, k, g, k´, g´ affricates: ʦ, ʣ, ʧ, ʤ fricatives: f, v, θ, ð, s, z, ʃ, ʒ, j, h nasals: m, n, ɲ, ŋ laterals: l, ɫ, r, rr Vowels Tosk has seven vowels and Gheg has twelve, including five nasals. The Tosk vowels are: i, e, a, ə, o, u, y Stress Mostly penultimate. MORPHOLOGY AND SYNTAX Nouns There are two genders, masculine and feminine. A few nouns are neuter, but this has almost disappeared. Masculine plurals end in -a, -e, -nj, -q(e), -gj(e), -ë; some nouns indicate plural by internal vowel mutation. The feminine plurals are -a, -e, or no change. Articles The singular indefinite article is një, and the plural ca or disa. The definite article is indicated by a noun affix and has grammatical gender. Masculine affixes are -i, -u, -ri/-ni, -a, the feminine affix is -a. Case There are four cases, nominative, genitive, dative and accusative. Feminine and masculine nouns are declined differently. Masculine noun (mal = mountain)
Feminine noun (shtëpi = house)
Pronouns Personal Pronouns
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