Albanian is an enigma because it's not obviously related to other European languages and is a language isolate. It probably branched off from the Indo-European language family about 4,000-5,000 years ago, and is likely derived from some Paleo-Balkan language such as Illyrian. Since there are no written records of Albanian prior to 1462, and since history has given it a lot of loan words from Latin, Greek, Slavic, and Turkish, its origin remains a mystery. Unlike other European language families like Slavic and Latin that branched into many other languages, Albanian remained as a separate language and is one of the oldest linguistic heritages in Europe. In the past Albanian was written with Roman, Greek or Turkish-Arabic characters, but today it's all Roman characters like English, but with 2 letters that have diacritic marks to change the sound of the letter, Ç and Ë, and 9 digraphs that are considered distinct letters in Albanian, giving it a total of 36 characters, plus the letter W that's only used in loan words from other languages. I can understand some of the written words since they're obvious cognates with English, or Italian.
- Dave Badperson
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