[rmlew]

Albanian is a Balkan language like that of ancient Thrace. It is a distinct language group like Romance, German or Baltic languages. Romanian is a Romance language, derived from Latin. It is the language of the Romanized Thracians and Dacians, as well as of the Roman soldiers who were settled there after the conquest of Dacia. Romanians has a lot of Slavic loan words and probably some Balkan loan words. All the Balkan languages form a sprachbund. (I did not wiki Romanian. I know Romanians and studied Latin with one.)

[Verginius Rufus]

Albanian is hard to sort out. It is obviously an Indo-European language as the words for the numbrs show, but whether it is derived from ancient Illyrian (spoken in the area of modern Albania) or from a language of the Balkan interior is hard to say. Thracian seems to have no modern descendant (unless it is the ancestor of Albanian). At one point large numbers of Albanian speakers spread into Greece--they were Greek Orthodox and in the 19th-century much of the Greek countryside was still Albanian-speaking. In 1980 I was in a village in central Greece and was told by another American that she had had a conversation with an old lady who, after exchanging basic greetings in Greek, told her, "That's all the Greek I know--do you speak Albanian?" The village formerly had an Albanian name but the name has been changed back to the name it had in antiquity (Thisbe--modern Thisvi).

Romanian is definitely derived from Latin. The language of the Vlachs (Balkan shepherds) is very similar. There was another Romance language formerly spoken in Dalmatia but the last speaker died in 1898.

The Romanian for "yes" is "da" which is a Slavic loanword...at least it is the same as the word for "yes" in some of the Slavic languages.