# Indo-European Languages like Albanian



## nac0889

What Indo-European languages sound like Albanian and have similar words in it like shkolla?


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## J.F. de TROYES

Do you mean : *shkollë (school ) ?*  Albanian is placed on an I.E. branch where there is no other known language ( it's the same for Greek ) . Some scholars believe that it has to do with ancient languages like Illyrian or Thracian, but as far no definite evidence has been given. If you are interested in this language, you can see here .


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## lietus

I don't think there are any IE languages that sound like Albanian... not even remotely  

JFdT, I think shkolla would be the definite form of shkollë.


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## hajenso

It's easy to find words in Albanian that have "cognates" in other languages, but they are pretty much all borrowings rather than true cognates in the strictest sense.  "Shkollë" is an example, borrowed from Latin "schola".


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## lietus

Did Albanians borrow it directly from Latin? That seems unlikely to me, but I don't know exactly how to say school in Bulgarian or Serbo-Croatian, so the closest thing I can think of is the Romanian word şcoală... The pronunciations are pretty close, as ş/sh and ă/ë have the same pronunciations.

After doing a bit of poking around, it appears that school in Serbo-Croatian is школа/škola and that Romanian borrowed the word from them. So I suppose it's likely that Albanian got it through them, aswell.


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## hajenso

It's possible that it came to Albanian from Romanian, yeah.  There's a lot of evidence that points to a closer geographical and social proximity between those two languages in times past.  But there are a lot of genuine Latin loanwords in Albanian, some of which are much less obvious.  Some examples are mbret "king" < L imperatorem, mallkoj "to curse" < L maledicere, qytet "city" < L civitatem, ushtri "army" < L exercitum, etc.


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## lietus

Something about Dacian and Thracian and Illyrian and a Balkan substratum or something... I'm not sure, Albanian makes my brain hurt


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