Nje nga konkluzionet qe nxori Hamp rreth gjuhes shqipe, eshte ky i meposhtmi, ku behet fjale per vendndodhjen e shqiptareve ne lashtesi, problem qe vazhdimisht ka qene objekt diskutimi mes etimologjisteve.
The Position of Albanian
Eric P. Hamp, University of Chigaco
(Ancient IE dialects, Proceedings of the Conference on IE linguistics held at the University of California,
Los Angeles, April 25-27, 1963, ed. By Henrik Birnbaum and Jaan Puhvel)
5. Before continuing with the dimmer Balkan past, there are two sets of old loans in Albanian which lead us to a slender, but valuable, conclusion. It has long been recognized (since A. Thumb's basic article, IF 1910:26.1-20) that the ancient Greek loans are rare. Pre-Albanian was scarcely in close contact with Greek in antiquity. This places the Albanians north of the Jireek line.
However, Çabej has recently argued (VII Congresso intemazianale di scienze onomastiche 250-251) that these Greek loans do not necessarily remove the pre-Albanians far from Greek territory; that is, that they fit well with a location in present-day Albania, in contact either with Doric Greek colonists or with the Northwest Dorians. His points on the Doric character of the loans certainly look persuasive: drapën, Tosk drapër 'sickle' < *drapanon rather than drepanon; kumbull 'plum' < kokkumhlon, brukë 'Tamariske' < murikh, trumzë 'thyme' < qumbra ~ qrumbh. The last three (and, for that matter, reflexes of the first) occur in parallel forms in the Greek enclaves of southern Italy (though the Doric nature of these dialects is another famous debate!). But this still does not tell us precisely where the Dorians in question were at the time of contact.
Tek fjala gr.lashte brukë 'Tamariske' < murikh, une mund te thosha se ka ardhur edhe murriz pra te dyja kane origjinen nga e njejta fjale e gjuhes shqipe
bruke > murikh,murriz,pas asimilimit te mb > m .
Eshte teper qesharake ideja se, populli shqiptar qe i thote detit det(
THETIS was a goddess of the sea), ne lashtesi nuk banonte ne bregdet.
From these observations Cimochowski concludes only that the south of Albania, the north around Shkodër, and the Adriatic seacoast are excluded as earlier Albanian territory; but this does not prove a Thracian relationship. There then follows a long discussion of the evidence for an Illyrian relationship, which will be taken up in part below, after which Cimochowski concludes, with Stadtmüller, that the home of the Albanians was somewhere in the vicinity of the Mat, stretching to Ni.
Çabej's claim is even stronger than Cimochowski's. He first runs through the history of views on the early Albanian habitat in a convenient way: The Albanians continue the habitat of Illyrian (claimed by Thunmann, Hahn, Kretschmer, Ribezzo, La Piana, Sufflay, and Erdeljanovi). Half-Romanized Illyrians spilled south from the mountains between Dalmatia and the Danube (the view of Jirecek). In the third through sixth centuries, as nomads, they moved from the Carpathians south (Parvan, Puscariu, Capidan). They came from Pannonia (Procopovici, Philippide). Albanians and Rumanians were in Thracian territory between Ni, Sofija, and Skopje (thus Weigand). Albanians were in Dardania, where Illyria and Thrace meet, and moved to Albania in the late Roman period, so that the Slavs found them in the Bojana basin (Jokl, Durham, Skok). From the Balkan and Rhodope mountains they moved to Albania before the Slavs (Bari). They were in the Mati basin in Northern Albania, and expanded south in the Middle Ages (Stadtmiiller). This last location is too restrictive, according to Çabej. However, in VII Congresso internazionale 245, Çabej relates Mathis fluvius (Vibius Sequester) to mat 'river bank'.
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