This winter is likely to give us some more interesting chapters in European history.
The Sultan of Turkey has fresh worries. The Albanians are now rebelling against him.
Albania is on the western border of European Turkey; its shores are washed by the Adriatic Sea.
It is a mountainous country, inhabited by a war-like race of people, who are much given to robbery and brigandage.
The Albanians are a curious people. They claim to be descended from the Pelasgians, who were a people of Greece, supposed to be the most ancient race in Europe.
They arrived and settled in Europe centuries before men began to keep records of the events that occurred, and so their origin is unknown. It is supposed they came from Asia, and probably from India.
The Albanians base their claim to Pelasgian origin on their language, which differs from any known tongue, and cannot clearly be connected with any of the mother tongues. These mother tongues were the original languages from which the various modern languages are derived.
More than one thousand languages are spoken on the globe, and these are so different that each is unintelligible to the speakers of the other.
The study of these languages is an especial science. Students of this science, philologists, as they are called, have traced, classed, and grouped these thousand languages, until they have divided them into six main groups, or mother tongues.