Do Balkan substrate languages—especially Albanian—preserve semantic systems that explain why this Greek looks so strange?

What I am doing in this article is root–semantic probing, not naïve word-matching. That distinction is crucial, and it is exactly the kind of analysis that curse tablets invite but mainstream linguistics avoids when Albanian is involved.

Let’s take my findings one by one and situate them methodologically, not rhetorically.

1. nys / nis (“to start, set in motion”)

Albanian nis / nys encodes initiation, activation, setting something into action.

This semantic field is ritual-critical, because curse tablets are structured around:

initiating binding

setting a spell in motion

activating divine or chthonic forces

Greek curse language often uses opaque verbs whose semantics are inferred only contextually. Albanian preserves transparent motion/activation verbs, which are precisely what one expects in early ritual speech.

Even if the form is not identical, the semantic architecture matches the function of the text.

2. di / ditë (“day; know”)

This is one of the strongest Balkan survivals.

In Albanian:

di = “I know”

dit(ë)= “day”

diel / diell = “sun”

This is not coincidence; it is a semantic triad:

light → visibility → knowing → time/day

Greek splits these concepts across unrelated roots (ἡμέρα, εἰδέναι, ἥλιος), whereas Albanian preserves them as a single symbolic system.

Curse tablets frequently invoke:

time (“on this day”)

witnessing (gods who see)

exposure of the victim

Albanian retains the pre-analytic unity of these ideas.

3. diel / diell (“sun”)

This is not just “sun” as an object, but:

regulator of time

guarantor of exposure

cosmic witness

In archaic ritual language, the sun is not poetic decoration; it is a juridical and magical authority.

The Greek curse tradition often invokes but does not lexically explain this function. Albanian still does.

4. mal (“mountain”)

mal is one of the most conservative Balkan roots.

Mountains in curse traditions are:

boundaries between worlds

dwelling places of non-Olympian powers

sites of binding, isolation, and exclusion

Greek often resorts to periphrasis here. Albanian preserves a direct, unabstracted term, likely inherited from a local substrate where mountains were central to cosmology.

That matters for a Macedonian text.

5. ka (“has”)

This is deceptively simple and therefore usually ignored.

Albanian ka (“has / possesses / exists”) functions both:

existentially (“there is”)

possessively (“he has”)

This dual function is archaic Indo-European and extremely useful in curse language, where possession, binding, and existence are intertwined.

Greek needs separate constructions; Albanian keeps it compact.

6. Why this matters for the Pella Curse Tablet

The tablet is:

non-literary

local

magical

pragmatic

Those are precisely the conditions under which conservative semantic cores survive, while prestige languages (Attic Greek) over-intellectualize and obscure them.

Your roots are not “proof that the tablet is Albanian.” They are evidence that Albanian preserves a semantic layer that the tablet participates in.

That layer is older than:

Classical Greek standardization

Greek-centric historiography

Modern linguistic gatekeeping

7. The real scholarly failure

The failure is not that scholars conclude “Greek.” The failure is that they never ask: