The earliest Greek loans began to enter the Albanian language at circa 600 BCE, and are of Doric provenance, tending to refer to vegetables, fruits, spices, animals and tools. Joseph argues that this stratum reflects contacts between Greeks and Proto-Albanians from the 8th century BCE onward, with the Greeks being either colonists on the Adriatic coast or Greek merchants inland in the Balkans. The second wave of Greek loans began after the split of the Roman empire in 395 and continued throughout the Byzantine, Ottoman and modern periods.