I have an Albanian coworker who is always muttering insults under her breath. I asked her a couple, and she translated them for me – but some, she won’t translate. I’m curious to know what they mean and how to spell them.
The ones I know are budalla / budallaçkë which is “fool” and gomar / gomarica, which is “jackass”.
The ones I don’t know sound like:
[ol][li]CHEEN - ga (or guh)[/li][li]ro - SPEE - ya[/li][li]COR - va (or vuh)[/li][li]po - TAAHN - ka (or kuh)[/li][li]har - JESH - ka (kuh)[/li][/ol]
I do not know how to spell these in Albanian, and I do not know what they mean. If you do, please help! And if you know, can I have both the feminine and masculine versions? Thank you.
I don’t know a single word of Albanian, but if this word is somehow related to the romance languages, it could mean ‘whore’ (e.g. in French, it’s ‘putain’, in Spanish and Filipino, it’s ‘puta’, etc.).
Albanian is *not * an isolate, it’s a branch of the Indo-European family. I have some dictionaries at home I can check out tomorrow if no one has solved the quandaries by then.
I’m sorry – I misspoke. I meant that it is relatively isolated and largely unrelated to other languages spoken today. It is its own branch of the Indo-European family and is very distinct from other languages in the family.
It really, really does. In fact, the first time she said it, our Ecuadorian coworker shot her this look that I still find really funny (a combination of “what did she say?!” mixed with “I didn’t know she spoke Spanish!”). It’s so close to a conjugation chingar that I’ve told her it’s one she can’t say, because we don’t want our customers to hear that.
My store’s nickname is The United Nations. We have people from the Philippines, Albania, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Russia, Poland, Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia, Ecuador, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, India, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, Vietnam, Thailand, and England. It gets difficult tracking all of the various ways that people can insult each other. However, most of them are not the only person in the store who speaks that language, so I can usually get someone else to translate. The Albanian in question poses a special problem, because the other two Albanians don’t have the English needed to translate the words that she says.
Filipino is not a Romance language, it just has a lot of Spanish vocabulary from the Spanish colonial days. Also, Filipino didn’t exist back then; it’s a late 20th century invention, largely based on Tagalog.
Yeah, didn’t mean to say that it was a Romance language, I just felt like throwing it in there since I happened to know that it took puta from Spanish. It’s neat having language links between places half the world apart (even if it is based on imperialist history).
My dictionaries weren’t as helpful as I’d have liked. For #1, I will tentatively suggest qynq, “pipe,” if you’re sure you’re hearing an [n]. If not, qyqe, literally “cuckoo,” can also mean “unfortunate.” [q] is pronounced a little like [t] in mature, rather than [ch] in church
No clue about #2–#4 (though I suspect #4 is really a Slavic swear for ‘little whore’ borrowed in).
#5 is from the root harxh–. Harxhe are expenses, and harxhój is ‘I spend, disburse, consume.’ At least one person online posted an Albanian message with the word harxheshkë, which is how I think you’d spell it, but I have no idea what it means.
Çinga, spelled exactly this way, also seems to be an Albanian surname, so it can’t be that bad, though I’m guessing the clan avoids travel in Spanish-speaking countries.
I’m guessing that this one means “whore”. Kurva (and alternate spellings) means “whore” in many Slavic languages, and also in Hungarian, which I presume borrowed it. It’s not so great a stretch to think that Albanian might have borrowed it as well.
Depends on your dialect. I suspect that Dr. Drake pronounces the <t> in “mature” with some palatalization—i.e., [tʲ]. However, I suspect that Albanian <q> is closer in pronunciation to the Hungarian <ty>; namely [c] (a voiceless palatal plosive).
My sister-in-law is a language expert in the peace corps, currently stationed in… you guessed it… Albania. I’ll forward this to her, see what she can pry out of the locals.