The Position of Albanian

Eric P. Hamp, University og Chigaco
(Ancient IE dialects, Proceedings of the Conference on IE linguistics held at the University of California,
Los Angeles, April 25-27, 1963, ed. By Henrik Birnbaum and Jaan Puhvel)

1. It is fashionable at conferences to come out with no clear affirmative assertion, but rather with a statement of all the many difficulties. While I have no taste for fashion, this should prove a fashionable paper, on this ground if on no other. It is often hard enough to say conclusively where the IE features of Albanian lie, let alone to identify them unambiguously and assign them to a restricted relationship of shared innovation. This is not to say that things are as G. Meyer is all too well known to have put it; there is plenty of good Indo-European material in Albanian but it is often ambiguous and represented by small numbers of examples for each feature and combination.

Furthermore, I am not yet in a position to say what I hope will be possible when the dialect materials from most enclaves have been sifted and compared. This applies particularly to the verb.

There are also relative unknowns that are important in the total question on which I do not feel adequately informed to hold a worthwhile opinion: Thracian, with Deev's bewildering material, is the notable example here.

More here: http://members.tripod.com/~Groznijat/balkan/ehamp.html