And the people answered.
The consonants remained strong — the sh , the ç , the xh , the th — but now they were carried on a river of vowels, as a sword is carried in a velvet scabbard.
They chanted the vowels like a choir. Aaaaa for wonder. Eeeee for joy. Iiii for sharp hope. Oooo for sorrow. Uuuu for the wind. Yyyy for the star. And the soft Ëëë — the breath between words, the silence that holds meaning.
In a high, stone-walled tower in the old quarter of Gjirokastër, an aging linguist named Dr. Arben Cela spent forty years compiling a singular work: Fjalori i Gjuhës Shqipe me Zanore — The Dictionary of the Albanian Language with Vowels.
His colleagues laughed. “A dictionary always has vowels,” they said. “What nonsense is this?”