Linguistic glob

Mythology and the Source of Life in Albanian Tradition Introduction The study of Albanian language and its connection with greek mythology offers a unique perspective for understanding concepts of life and cosmic order in traditional thought. This article examines the figures of Zeus and Cronus, the etymological links of the word "Zeus"  “Cronos” with Albanian, and how concrete and abstract meanings interact through symbolic and pictorial traditions. The analytical approach aims to show that mythological and linguistic interpretations are neither linear nor singular, but multifaceted and complex. 1. Zeus and His Interpretations The figure of Zeus can be interpreted in several ways: As voice (zëri); As the source of life (zënes); As fire (zjarri); Or as God  "Zot/Zojsi" in Albanian language and mythology . However, according to mythological sources, Zeus is not the first source of life. Cronus (Kronos), his father, is considered the origin of human life. Cronus’ posi...

The Greek verb spáo / spázo (to break, tear, pull) is not an original Greek formation. It derives from the Albanian verbal structure bash > besh (to do, to make) combined with the negative particle S. s’ba = unmake → from which spao develops the meaning “to break” or “to undo.” This shows that the concept expressed in Greek here—“breaking” or “unmaking”—is linguistically traceable to Albanian roots, not the reverse. In short: spáo = s’ba + action → unmake → break. The Greek verb encodes the same conceptual logic already present in Albanian verbal morphology.

I’m revisiting a topic I wrote about years ago. A Codical–Ideographic Interpretation of the Albanian Words grua (“woman”) and burrë (“man”) 1. Introduction The Albanian lexical items grua (“woman”) and burrë (“man”) are among the most fundamental terms of the language. Their earliest known written attestations appear in the glossary of Arnold Ritter von Harff (1496), where they are recorded respectively as: Groëa – woman Geneyre – man In Modern Albanian, these forms have stabilized as grua and burrë. This study proposes a non-traditional, codical–ideographic interpretation of these words, drawing on symbolic structures attributed to the Danube Script and on logographic principles rather than on standard comparative Indo-European methodology. 2. Methodological Framework The analysis is based on the assumption that early linguistic formations may preserve ideographic and logographic encoding, in which phonetic forms are secondary to symbolic structures. In this framework, graphemic ele...

 

The English flower: proposed etymology and Albanian perspective Abstract This study examines the etymology of the English word flower, combining traditional Indo-European derivations with a proposed semantic perspective based on Albanian. While conventional etymologies trace flower to Latin flōs, flōris and Proto-Indo-European *bhel- (“to thrive, bloom”), such accounts do not address the primordial semantic concepts embedded in human cognition, particularly those related to birth and life. This analysis proposes that a flower may be conceptualized as the “child” of a tree, a notion reflected in Albanian lexemes such as bilë (“daughter”), bir (“son”), lule (“flower”), and verbs associated with birth and movement (bë, lind, lëviz). This approach highlights the continuity between early symbolic meanings and the later lexical development of words designating natural phenomena. 1. Introduction The English word flower is commonly derived from Latin flōs, flōris (“flower”), via Old French flo...

Linguists generally propose that the English word flower derives from Latin flōs, flōris (“flower”), via Old French flor, and ultimately from the Proto-Indo-European root *bhel- meaning “to thrive” or “to bloom.” This root is said to be shared with words such as bloom, blossom, and flora (the Roman goddess of flowers). Many flower names have distinct origins—for example, daisy from Old English dæges ēage (“day’s eye”)—while others, such as chrysanthemum, derive from Greek roots like ánthos (“flower”) and khrýsos (“gold”). The commonly cited etymological chain may be summarized as follows: Latin: flōs, flōris (“flower”), with the accusative form flōrem Old French: flor or flur (“flower,” “prime,” “innocence”) Proto-Indo-European: *bhel- (“to thrive, bloom”), linked to Germanic forms such as blōstma (“blossom”) and bloom However, within these proposed etymologies, something fundamental is missing. Contemporary methods of tracing word origins reveal a significant gap: the absence of the p...

The word " kumbon " in Albanian, meaning “echo” or “to produce a repeated sound,” should be understood within the internal linguistic context of Albanian, and not simply as a loanword from Latin. Its root can be analyzed as ka (to have) + mbon (to sound like an echo), reflecting the phonetic structures of Albanian that convey the meaning of sound and the perceptual experience of hearing. Etymological analysis: Kumbon (Albanian): “echo,” “produce a sound,” or “boon / bh(ë)oon.” (to make OO-n) Some authors have attempted to connect it with the Latin com-bonare (“to sound well”) and the root bonus (“good”), but this connection is purely formal-linguistic and lacks primordial semantic support. There is no evidence that the core meaning—“echo / repetition of sound”—derives from Latin. The Albanian language word bumbullim / bubullim (storm, thunder) come from the same sound symbolism “ bum, bum ” and are directly related to kumbon, reflecting the same concept of repeated sound as ...

Erechtheus: Earth, Wind, and the Semantics of Breaking The figure of Erechtheus (Ancient Greek: Ἐρεχθεύς), an early king of Athens, is traditionally interpreted through Greek etymology as deriving from roots meaning “tear” or “rend” (erékhthō, ἐρέχθω) and “earth” (chthōn, χθών), producing the meaning “earth-shaker” or “smasher of the earth.” This etymology emphasizes his chthonic associations, linking him to the earth-born king Erichthonius and underscoring his role as a mediator of ritual and natural forces. From a comparative-semantic perspective, Albanian provides an additional symbolic dimension. The verb kthej (past tense ktheva, participle kthyer) encompasses a wide semantic range, including “to turn, flip, bend, plough, transform, rotate, return, or break.” Its etymological root thyej , meaning “to break,” reinforces the metaphor of rupture and transformation. Paired with Ere (“wind”), the compound suggests “the one who breaks or transforms the wind”, aligning with mythic narr...

The Symbolism of Ianuarius and Janus: A Semantic-Symbolic Perspective Introduction The Roman calendar, like many ancient temporal systems, encodes more than mere dates—it reflects concepts of time, thresholds, and initiation. The month Ianuarius (January) offers a fascinating case study. Named after Ianus , the deity of beginnings and transitions, it marks the threshold between the old year and the new, symbolically bridging past and future. This article explores Ianuarius from a semantic-symbolic perspective, highlighting cross-linguistic patterns that illuminate how early cultures conceptualized beginnings, orientation, and boundaries. Ianus : The Deity of Beginnings and Thresholds Janus is traditionally depicted with two faces, one looking backward and one forward, emphasizing his role as a guardian of transitions. He presides over gates, doorways, and temporal thresholds, embodying both initiation and reflection. In Roman thought, this duality encapsulates the cyclical and directi...

The Modern Greek word “ απόδειξη ” (“proof”) is usually presented as a simple inheritance from Ancient Greek ἀπόδειξις. That’s convenient—but misleading. Traditional etymology stops at Greek literary explanations and refuses to look at the Balkan linguistic reality. Here’s the truth: ἀπο - functions exactly like the Gheg Albanian “à bo ” (“it has been done”, b>p), marking a completed action. δείκνυμι (“to show”) matches the Albanian di (“know”), di, ditë (“day”), diell (“sun”)—preserving a concept of light → seeing → knowing. -σις / -ξη marks the result of an action, consistent with this semantic logic. In short : what is done in the light is seen; what is seen is known. This is the real idea of proof—not some abstract Greek invention. Ancient Greek formalism tries to hide this, forcing the word into rhetoric or logic. Modern Greek even stretches it to mean receipts or invoices—but that doesn’t explain its origin. By excluding Albanian and other Balkan substrate evidence, main...

 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. I...

Against Greek-Centric Abstractionism Generation, Quantity, and the Misordering of Semantic History Greek-centric historical linguistics has long suffered from a systematic inversion of semantic chronology. By privileging abstract lexical forms preserved in Classical Greek—particularly adjectives of quantity such as πολλά (“many”)—it mistakes philological visibility for semantic primacy. This error is not incidental; it is structural. At the core of this paradigm lies an unexamined assumption: that the earliest attestable abstractions in Greek texts reflect the earliest stages of linguistic meaning itself. This assumption collapses immediately when confronted with cognitive, typological, and anthropological evidence. 1. The Greek fallacy: abstraction as origin Greek-centric models routinely treat abstract categories—number, measure, plurality—as primary semantic units, simply because they are lexicalized early in written Greek. This is a methodological fallacy. Writing preserves late c...

The Emergence of an “Engineering Language” from the Symbolic Root di The so-called “technical” or “engineering” forms of Indo-European languages—Latin vidēre, Greek oida, Sanskrit véda, and so on—are not arbitrary lexical innovations. They are the fossilized remnants of a fully articulated symbolic system, still alive and transparent in Albanian. At its core lies the root di / dia, encoding sun, light, visibility, and knowing, combined with spatial or perceptual operators such as ve / vi (“place, position, orientation”) or sy (“eye”). The fundamental equation is simple, elegant, and mechanical: LIGHT → VISIBILITY → SEEING → KNOWING Albanian preserves this semantic machine in its living grammar, while other Indo-European languages have reduced it to fragments—isolated words, abstract roots, and fossilized forms. The “seeing–knowing” root in Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, and Germanic languages is not a reflection of independent invention but a derivative, opaque shadow of what Albanian still a...

Cham Albanian and the Root “di” In the Cham Albanian dialect, the expression “ u di ” (standard “ u gdhi ”) means “it dawned / it became day.” This is not a poetic metaphor but an ordinary, living usage: u di → impersonal, intransitive → literally: “it became known / it became visible” → semantically: light appeared; darkness ended u gdhi → from gdhihem / gdhi, “to dawn; to wake into daylight” → more concrete, but semantically equivalent The decisive point—systematically ignored in Greek-centric etymology—is that di here does not mean “to know” in a modern cognitive sense. It preserves an archaic semantic identity: di = to see = to become visible light → visibility → consciousness This is not speculative reconstruction; it is direct linguistic evidence, still functioning in a living Balkan language. Cham Albanian exposes the pre-abstract layer from which later philosophical meanings were derived—and subsequently obscured. The Root “di” and the Semantic Mechanics of αἰδώς The key to un...

Back to Beekes: αἰδώς and the Failure of the PIE Abstraction 1. The Data Greek Cannot Explain In the Cham Albanian dialect, the expression “ u di” (standard “ u gdhi ”) means “it dawned / it became day.” This is not a poetic metaphor but an ordinary, living usage. u di → impersonal, intransitive → literally: “it became known / it became visible” → semantically: light appeared; darkness ended u gdhi → from gdhihem / gdhi, “to dawn; to wake into daylight” → more concrete, but semantically equivalent The decisive point—systematically ignored in Greek-centric etymology—is that di here does not mean “to know” in a modern cognitive sense. It preserves an archaic semantic identity: di = to see = to become visible light → visibility → consciousness This is not speculative reconstruction; it is direct linguistic evidence, still functioning in a living Balkan language. Cham Albanian thus exposes the pre-abstract layer from which later philosophical meanings were derived—and subsequently obs...

6. Hypothesized Primordial Phonetic–Symbolic Units and Their Reflexes in European Languages This study further proposes that a limited set of primordial phonetic–symbolic units, associated with the mouth, sound production, and articulated speech, underlies a broad range of lexical formations across European languages. These units are not presented as directly reconstructible Proto-Indo-European roots in the strict comparative sense, but as pre-lexical symbolic elements that may predate formal linguistic differentiation and later grammaticalization. 6.1. A / HA / FOL / FIAL / ZË, ZO, ZA: Mouth, Consumption, and Sound The vocalic element A, together with related Albanian forms such as ha (“to eat”), fol (“to speak”), and zë (“sound, voice”), is interpreted here as encoding the mouth as both an organ of intake and articulation. Symbolically, this cluster represents a nexus uniting eating, breathing, and vocalization—core biological functions mediated by the oral cavity. From an anthropolo...

Abstract This study examines the Latin term Kalendae through a multi-dimensional philological framework, integrating phonological, semantic, symbolic, and comparative perspectives. While mainstream etymology derives Kalendae from calendae (“first day of the month”) and calendarium (“account book, register”), this analysis investigates the underlying conceptual structures preserved across Indo-European languages. Albanian, Greek, and Proto-Indo-European (PIE) roots are examined to identify primordial phonetic–symbolic units that encode emergence, separation, and temporal transition. The findings suggest that Kalendae reflects an ancient cosmological understanding of time, subsequently formalized in Roman ritual and administrative practice. This approach demonstrates that etymology can reveal deep symbolic and cognitive continuities underlying lexical evolution. Keywords Kalendae, Albanian, Greek καλέω, Proto-Indo-European, etymology, symbolic semantics, comparative philology, temporal c...

Etymology, properly understood, is concerned with the origin and development of the constituent elements of a word, not simply with the word as a fixed lexical unit. Consequently, a comprehensive analysis requires consideration of multiple perspectives—phonological, semantic, symbolic, and comparative—rather than relying on a single comparative explanatory framework. The current approach seeks to trace the origin of words through the partiality of elements in place of the basic symbolic element, rather than through later administrative or functional partial meanings of the word that may represent later historical layers. From this perspective, primordial symbolism constitutes a generative substrate from which multiple lexical forms have emerged, subsequently changing in meaning over time and across languages. Within this framework, a limited set of archaic phonetic-symbolic units - such as bhë, bho, bha, bher, al, el, ar, ol, oi, oia, ui, ul, i, o, zë, zhër, zhor, zhur, za, zan, da, nd...

A Comparative Philological Note on the Semantic Origins of Calendar The standard etymological account derives calendar from Latin calendarium (“account book, register”), itself formed from Kalendae, the Roman term for the first day of the month. While this derivation accurately describes the term’s attested Latin usage, it does not address the semantic motivation underlying the formation of Kalendae itself. From a comparative-philological perspective, such administrative explanations may reflect secondary institutionalization rather than primary conceptual origin. This study advances a semantic-comparative hypothesis, examining whether the phonological form Kalendae corresponds to a deeper conceptual structure preserved in other Indo-European languages, particularly Albanian, which is frequently noted for retaining archaic semantic patterns. Morphological Segmentation and Semantic Parallels For analytical purposes, the form Kalendae may be segmented as ka + le + ndae. When compared wit...

Petro Zheji and the Symbolic Conception of Language Petro Zheji is frequently described as a “linguistic genius,” not because his work conforms to the conventions of mainstream historical linguistics, but because it proceeds from a fundamentally different epistemological framework. Rather than treating language as a mechanical or exclusively historical system, Zheji approaches it as a symbolic and cognitive totality, integrating linguistic form with metaphysical structure and semantic genesis. This methodological divergence largely explains the difficulty many linguists encounter when engaging with his work. The following analysis outlines the principal reasons for both the opacity and the originality of Zheji’s linguistic thought. 1. Departure from Conventional Linguistic Methodology Contemporary linguistics is largely characterized by: diachronic analysis (sound laws and attested developments), comparative reconstruction, positivist criteria of verification based on documentary evide...