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 th nuk l dogberry from earlier th nub l PAlb tsunu ab la cf Lith nobuolas 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