Both races are scattered over the earth and seem to prosper best
outside their native country; they have the
Same songs and bards, the
same hero-chieftains, the same com-bativeness and frank hospitality;
both are sunk in bigotry and broils; they resemble one another in their
love of dirt, disorder and display, in their enthusiastic and
adventurous spirit, their versatile brilliance of mind, their incapacity
for self-government and general (Keltic) note of inspired inefficiency.
And both profess a frenzied allegiance to an obsolete tongue which, were
it really cultivated as they wish, would put a barrier of triple brass
between themselves and the rest of humanity.
Even as the Irish despise the English as their worldly and effete
relatives, so the Albanians look down upon the Greeks - even those of
Pericles - with profoundest contempt. The Albanians, so says one of their
writers, are "the oldest people upon earth," and their language is the
"divine Pelasgic mother-tongue." I grew interested awhile in Stanislao
Marchiano's plausibly entrancing study on this language, as well as in a
pamphlet of de Rada's on the same subject; but my ardour has cooled
since learning, from another native grammarian, that these writers are
hopelessly in the wrong on nearly every point. So much is certain, that
the Albanian language already possesses more than thirty different
alphabets (each of them with nearly fifty letters). Nevertheless they
have not yet, in these last four (or forty) thousand years, made up
their minds which of them to adopt, or whether it would not be wisest,
after all, to elaborate yet another one - a thirty-first.
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