voron wrote:Michael wrote: expect the answer to be an Italianate or Turkish-derived term.
Well, köfte does exist in Turkish, and perhaps entered Albanian via Ottoman.
Keen eye there;
sağol, kardeş!
Normally, I would have been able to make the connection too, as colloquial Albanian is replete with Turkish loans (you'd love it, btw *wink*) and I enjoy learning about them, but this is the first time I learn of that specific word
köfte. I think I figured out what was confusing me in regards to
qoft/e, -ja: Its resemblance to the word
qoftë, a conjunction stemming from the isolated third-person singular optative conjugation of the copula verb (
për të qenë) that means "whether … [or not]", also used in the conjunctive phrase
në qoftë se meaning "in the case that, lest". (Sorry, I didn't mean to provide you with all that irrelevant information.) Thus in a nutshell,
qoft/e, -ja is indeed ultimately derived from Turkish, and the resemblance to
qoftë, an indigenous word, was purely coincidental!