: I understand quite well the situation in Albanian because it occurs also in my native Romanian and other Balkan languages (e.g. in Romanian "great man" is usually omul mare or un om mare, but it also can be marele om). It is related to compound names and nouns, and actually you brought it up when you started lecturing on Albanian "structures" in a post-scriptum.
 All your examples come from modern Albanian, not from Proto-Albanian whatever language it was. I can add some etymologies such as the one Orel provided for thënukël = "dogberry", from earlier *thënubël < PAlb. *tsunu-abōla, cf. Lith. šúnobuolas, Dacian kinouboila (= "dog's apple").
 In what you quoted so far, Hamp did not claim anything about Proto-Albanian compound nouns or syntax. Please provide relevant bibliography, otherwise I don't see why should we be dismissive of other scholars' theories. Orel, Georgiev and many others are also linguists.