Alexander Xhuvani
I don't know why our word bread comes from the Latin bucca and cannot be connected to the German backen, which also means to bake, or to the Albanian me pekë, and then bread means baked food.
According to Meyer's etymology, accepted by all, it turns out that the Albanian or Illyrian word for bread has been modified over the centuries by taking the Latinized form bucca and giving it the meaning of bread. But, to this day, we cannot know for sure what word the Illyrians used for the word bread that we use today.
It is worth noting that the word bread has also entered modern Greek, forming the feminine nouns vuka and buja = small piece, animal bread and the verb bukonomal = eat bread. But along with us, the modern Greeks have also lost the word bread, because they also do not use the old artos, nor any other form of this phonetically changed word, as has happened with many other words that modern Greek still has from the old, but terribly changed from it; but they use the word psomi, which to this day has not been able to find with certainty where it comes from.
Someone has said about this ancient Greek word that it is not Greek, but borrowed (cf. E Boisocq, Dictionnaire etymologique de la langue grecque, p. 267), just as other ancient Greek words beginning with si (sigma iota) are borrowed, such as sidheros, sindhon, etc.
But the ancient Greek word sitos can also be connected to the Albanian verb me shi (=trebbiare), as Thomopolius mentioned, I think, in his book "Pelasgika". And just as the ancient Greek sitos has the meaning of food, grain, flour and bread, so too our word shujte may have had the meaning of bread, and then this meaning became rare and almost forgotten (even today few people know it) and took on the general meaning of food./konica.al
Alexander Xhuvani
"Language Studies", 1956
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