

Facts and explanations about the Albanian language - justliving
http://albaniatourism.info/albanian-language/

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stanleyh
quite off-topic for HackerNews I believe but an interesting read :-)

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ggchappell
> quite off-topic ...

On the contrary, under "What to Submit" in the Hacker News Guidelines, we
find:

> ... anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

And, yes, it is interesting.

One thing I wonder about: apparently Albanian has the c-cedilla that is also
found in French. It was my understanding that the cedilla was originally a
small "s" drawn under the "c", to show that it is to be pronounced like an
"s". However, according to this article, Albanian pronounces "s" much the way
English does, but the c-cedilla is like English "ch". So it seems that, at
some point in the distant past, Albanians began writing little "s" marks to
show that a "c" is _not_ pronounced like "s". I wonder why.

[EDIT: The Wikipedia article on cedilla is loaded with information. In
particular, it appears that I was wrong; a cedilla is not derived from an "s",
but rather a "z".]

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enkelejda
Hi, I am the writer of <http://albaniatourism.info>, I am Albanian too. I was
made aware today by a friend about the comments here, I don`t know the exact
reason of the "c" cedilla, but I would believe it is related to the usage of
the same letter in Turkish language
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_alphabet> , representing the same sound
"ch". The bases for the Albanian alphabet of today were set in 1865 -1866
(when we were still under Turkish occupation), till then Albanian was written
either with latin, greek, slavic or turkish letters. The main guideline for
the alphabet was to have one letter per each sound. I have a reference for the
history of the alphabet but it is in Albanian:
[http://books.google.com/books?id=9_gXTda0HS8C&pg=PA191&#...</a>

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justliving
cool, thanks a lot for the update. Quite interesting.

Regarding the website overall, it's nicely done, keep up the good work.

Cheers

