Albanian Alphabets

Download or read book Albanian Alphabets written by Robert Elsie and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2017-03-09 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The hundred years between 1750 and 1850 were an age of astounding orthographic diversity in Albania. In this period, the Albanian language was put to writing in at least ten different alphabets - most certainly a record for European languages. This book introduces the diverse forms in which this old Balkan language was recorded, from the earliest documents to the beginning of the twentieth century. They consist of adaptations of the Latin, Greek, Arabic and Cyrillic alphabets and, what is even more interesting, a number of locally invented writing systems. Most of the latter alphabets have now been forgotten and are unknown, even to the Albanians themselves.