Sllavizmat e shqipes së vjetër nën dritën e botimeve të reja filologjike: “Dittionario italiano-albanese” i Da Lecce-s (1702 - Ms.) - një burim i pahulumtuar
The Slavisms of Old Albanian in the light of the new philological editions: the “Dittionario Italiano-Albanese” of Da Lecce (1702 - Ms.) - an unexplored source

Summary/Abstract: The research of Slavisms in Old Albanian texts in the period from XVI.- XVII. century (Buzuku, Matranga, Budi, Blanchus, Bogdani) comprises a word stock of approx. 115 lexical primary units of South Slavic origin. The Ludwig-Maximilian University project Digital Philological Etymological Dictionary of Old Albanian aims, in addition to lemmatization, to the philological and etymological determination of the existing word corpus of Old Albanian, which covers the period up to the end of the 18th century. This also includes the "Dittionario italiano-albanese" by Fr Francesco Maria da Lecce (1702 - Ms.), which was critically edited only in 2009. Its rich language material is now to be made accessible as part of this project. The extensive collection of words from the local vernacular led the Italian missionary to enter a significantly larger number of Slavisms in his dictionary, namely around 215 primary units, of which 129 appear for the first time in (old) Albanian literature. They have not yet been recorded and dealt with in previous dialectological field research and accordingly in previous Albanian South Slavic studies (since Franz Miklosich 1870). In addition, several Slavisms that were previously only observed in Buzuku's “Missale” can now also be identified in Da Lecce, which indicates, among other things, their former linguistic distribution in the Albanian-speaking area. The Slavic loanwords in Da Lecce's dictionary also belong to various semantic fields, but mainly to the vocabulary of rural and social culture. The contribution also discusses issues of the etymology of specific lexemes of this corpus. Regarding the status of specific Slavisms in Da Leccs’s dictionary in the corpus of Albanian Slavisms, we can say that, as long as these lemmas remain isolated within a single dictionary, it is difficult for them to be considered Albanian Slavisms. It is possible that they belong to the linguistic periphery of the Albanian space, today outside the state borders, with a mixed Albanian and Slavic population, where bilingualism or even diglossia with Slavic as a language of prestige reigns, resulting in linguistic interferences in various fields. In this case those borrowings have a special and different status from that of the general Albanian Slavisms in the compact Albanian linguistic space. But in an old Albanian dictionary they will take their rightful place as long as they are part of the vocabulary of a text of the beginning of the XVII. century. They have their historical value and also serve as useful evidence in the linguistic and antropological investigations to identify the degree of linguistic mixing at certain stages of Albanian history and in certain geographical linguistic spaces.

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