Todhri

1. Introduction. A number of 18th-and 19th-century orthographies exist for Albanian; one of the more significant ones given its corpus is called Todhri (/ˈtoðri/), from the nickname of the man who devised it, Dhaskal Todhri ‘teacher Todhri’, whose name was Theodor Haxhifilipi (§1730–1805). Unfortunately, I did not get a chance to work with the late Robert Elsie on this proposal, which never benefitted from his expertise due to his untimely death. I give below here the introduction to the script from Elsie 2017: The Todhri alphabet is an original writing system that was used for Albanian in the central Albanian region of Elbasan in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It consists of 36 letters (plus nine ligatures and six rare graphemes). This script is attributed to one Dhaskal Todhri (“teacher Todhri”), whose full name was Theodor Haxhifilipi (ca. 1730-1805), and who stemmed from Elbasan. The biblical texts in this Todhri alphabet were discovered by the Austrian consul in Janina, Johann Georg von Hahn (1811-1869), who announced his finding in an article entitled Bericht über die Auffindung eines uralten albanesischen Alphabetes (Report on the Discovery of an Ancient Albanian Alphabet), submitted to the Austrian Academy of Sciences in November 1849. Hahn published a small portion of this material, in what he regarded as “the original” Albanian alphabet, in his seminal three-volume Albanesische Studien (Albanian Studies), Jena 1854, and regarded it, rather naively, as stemming from ancient Phoenician script. On the author and origin of the material in Todhri script, Hahn explains: Todhri stemmed from a family of Orthodox silversmiths. For periods in the second half of the eighteenth century, he apparently kept the register of the Orthodox Church of Saint Mary’s in the fortress of Elbasan, though he was not a clergyman himself. In these records, he called himself Theodor, son of Haxhi, or Theodor Dhaskalos (teacher). He seems to have died around 1805. After Hahn, the study of Todhri script was taken up by Leopold Geitler (1847–1885), professor at the University of Zagreb, in his work Die albanesischen und slavischen Schriften (Albanian and Slavic Scripts), Vienna 1883, who regarded the Todhri alphabet as derived from Greek and Roman cursive. He had access to the copybooks that Hahn had found in Elbasan, and in 1883 he deposited them in the Imperial Library, now the Austrian National Library, in Vienna. The thirty sheets (46 pages) are still preserved in the manuscript division of the Library. This manuscript, kindly made available by the manuscript division of the said library, forms the basis of this publication. Other texts in Todhri script, of which there may have been many, seem, tragically, to have been lost. In 1901, the Albanian linguist Gjergj Pekmezi (1872-1938), in his Vorläufiger Bericht über das Studium des albanischen Dialektes van Elbasan (Preliminary Report on the Study of the Albanian Dialect of Elbasan) sent to the Austrian Academy of Science, reported that he had come across texts in Todhri script on his journey to Elbasan in 1900: “It was quite by coincidence that during my stay in Elbasan, an over eighty-year-old monk called Parthenius came to see me for health reasons from the Monastery of St. John Vladimir which is situated an hour away from Elbasan. He is no doubt the oldest man alive who knows how to write in this alphabet. He told me that he had learned it from a student of the Theodor who was said to have invented it. This student, called Camblak, succeeded Theodor as a teacher in Elbasan and later became Hegumen [ abbot] of the said monastery. According to him, Theodor invented the script and brought it with him from Moschopolis where he had studied. The script is now dying out. It was pushed aside by the Kristoforidhi alphabet, whereas now it is the Fashëri alphabet that is being used. Very few people (some merchants and a woman who gave me a sample of her writing) still use the old script for