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The origin of the Albanians has been for some time a matter of dispute among historians. Contemporary historians conclude that the Albanians are descendants of populations of the prehistoric Balkans, such as the Illyrians, Dacians or Thracians.〔 Little is known about these peoples, and they blended into one another in Thraco-Illyrian and Daco-Thracian contact zones even in antiquity. The Albanians first appear in the historical record in Byzantine sources of the 11th century. At this point, they were already fully Christianized. Very little evidence of pre-Christian Albanian culture survives, although Albanian mythology and folklore are of Paleo-Balkanic origin and almost all of their elements are pagan, in particular showing Greek influence.〔Mircea Eliade, Charles J. Adams, (Encyclopedia of religion'' ), Macmillan, 1987, ISBN 978-0-02-909700-7, p. 179.〕 The Albanian language forms a separate branch of Indo-European, first attested in the 15th century, and is considered to have evolved from one of the Paleo-Balkans languages of antiquity. Studies in genetic anthropology show that the Albanians share the same ancestry as most other European people.〔(Michele Belledi, Estella S. Poloni, Rosa Casalotti, Franco Conterio, Ilia Mikerezi, James Tagliavini and Laurent Excoffier. "Maternal and paternal lineages in Albania and the genetic structure of Indo-European populations". ''European Journal of Human Genetics'', July 2000, Volume 8, Number 7, pp. 480-486. ) "Mitochondrial DNA HV1 sequences and Y chromosome haplotypes (DYS19 STR and YAP) were characterized in an Albanian sample and compared with those of several other Indo-European populations from the European continent. No significant difference was observed between Albanians and most other Europeans, despite the fact that Albanians are clearly different from all other Indo-Europeans linguistically. We observe a general lack of genetic structure among Indo-European populations for both maternal and paternal polymorphisms, as well as low levels of correlation between linguistics and genetics, even though slightly more significant for the Y chromosome than for mtDNA. Altogether, our results show that the linguistic structure of continental Indo-European populations is not reflected in the variability of the mitochondrial and Y chromosome markers. This discrepancy could be due to very recent differentiation of Indo-European populations in Europe and/or substantial amounts of gene flow among these populations."〕 ==Place of origin== The Albanian language is attested in a written form only in the 15th century AD, when the Albanian ethnos was already formed. In the absence of prior data on the language, scholars have used the Latin and Slav loans into Albanian for identifying its location of origin.〔The Illyrians The Peoples of Europe Author John Wilkes Edition illustrated, reprint Publisher Wiley-Blackwell, 1995 ISBN 0-631-19807-5, ISBN 978-0-631-19807-9 p.278〕 The place where the Albanian language was formed is uncertain, but analysis has suggested that it was in a mountainous region, rather than in a plain or seacoast. While the words for plants and animals characteristic of mountainous regions are entirely original, the names for fish and for agricultural activities are generally assumed to have been borrowed from other languages. However, considering the presence of some preserved old terms related to the sea fauna, some have assumed that this vocabulary might have been lost in the course of time after the proto-Albanian tribes have been pushed back into the inland during invasions.〔D. Dečev (Charakteristik der thrakischen Sprache 113 (1952 ))〕〔E. Çabej (VII Congresso intemacionale di scienze onomastiche, 4-8 Aprile 1961, 248-249)〕 The Slavic loans in Albanian suggest that contacts between two populations took place when Albanians dwelt in forests 600–900 metres above sea level.〔The Illyrians The Peoples of Europe Author John Wilkes Edition illustrated, reprint Publisher Wiley-Blackwell, 1995 ISBN 0-631-19807-5, ISBN 978-0-631-19807-9 p.278–279〕 The overwhelming amount of mountaineering and shepherding vocabulary, coupled with the extensive influence of Latin makes it likely that the Albanians originated north of the Jireček Line, further north and inland than the current borders of Albania suggest. It has long been recognized that there are two treatments of Latin loans in Albanian, of Old Dalmatian type and Romanian type, but that would point out to two geographic layers, coastal Adriatic and inner Balkan region.〔The position of Albanian by Eric Hamp Ancient Indo-European Dialects. Publisher University of California Press p. 105〕 Some scholars believe that the Latin influence over Albanian is of Eastern Romance origin, rather than of Dalmatian origin, which would exclude Dalmatia as a place of origin.〔John Van Antwerp Fine, ''The early Medieval Balkans: A critical survey from the sixth century to the late twelfth century.'' University of Michigan Press, 1991, p.10 ()〕 Adding to this the several hundred words in Romanian that are cognate only with Albanian cognates (see Eastern Romance substratum), these scholars assume that Romanians and Albanians lived in close proximity at one time.〔 The areas where this might have happened is the Morava valley in eastern Serbia.〔 Another argument in favor of a northern origin for the Albanian language is the relatively small number of words of Greek origin, mostly from Doric dialect, even though Southern Illyria neighbored the Classical Greek civilization and there was a number of Greek colonies along the Illyrian coastline. However, in view of the amount of Albanian-Greek isoglosses, which the scholar Vladimir Orel considers surprisingly high (in comparison with the Indo-Albanian and Armeno-Albanian ones), the author concludes that this particular proximity could be the result of intense secondary contacts of two proto-dialects. Those scholars who maintain the Illyrian origin of Albanians maintain that the indigenous Illyrian tribes dwelling in South Illyria went up into the mountains when Slavs occupied the lowlands,〔Migrations and invasions in Greece and adjacent areas By Nicholas Geoffrey Lemprière Hammond Edition: illustrated Published by Noyes Press, 1976 Original from the University of Michigan Digitized Jun 24, 2008ISBN 0-8155-5047-2, 978-0-8155-5047-1 ''"Illyrian has survived. Geography has played a large part in that survival; for the mountains of Montenegro and northern Albania have supplied the almost impenetrable home base of the Illyrian-speaking peoples. They were probably the first occupants, apart from nomadic hunters, of the Accursed Mountains and their fellow peaks, and they maintained their independence when migrants such as the Slavs occupied the more fertile lowlands and the highland basins. Their language may lack the cultural qualities of Greek, but it has equalled it in its power to survive and it too is adapting itself under the name of Albanian to the conditions of the modern world."'' p.163〕〔Thunman, Hahn, Kretschmer, Ribezzo, La Piana, Sufflay, Erdeljanovic and Stadtmüller view referenced at The position of Albanian by Eric Hamp Ancient Indo-European DialectsPublisher University of California Press p. 104〕 while another version of this hypothesis maintains that the Albanians are the descendants of Illyrian tribes located between Dalmatia and Danube, who spilled south.〔Jireček view referenced at The position of Albanian by Eric Hamp Ancient Indo-European DialectsPublisher University of California Press p. 104〕 The scholars who support a Dacian origin of Albanians maintain that between the 3rd and 6th centuries AD, Albanians moved southwards from the Moesian area,〔Puscariu,Parvan, Capidan referenced at The position of Albanian by Eric Hamp Ancient Indo-European Dialects. Publisher University of California Press p. 104〕 while those scholars who maintain a Thracian origin hypothesize that the proto-Albanians are to be located in Thracian territory in the area between Niš, Skopje, Sofia and Albania〔Weigand, as referenced in 'The position of Albanian' by Eric Hamp, ''Ancient Indo-European Dialects'', University of California Press, p. 104〕 or from the Rhodope and Balkan mountains, where they moved to Albania before the arrival of the Slavs.〔Baric, as referenced in 'The position of Albanian,' ''Ancient Indo-European Dialects'', p. 104〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Origin of the Albanians」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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