Dear Chris,
Unfortunately, although Sardinian has a large bibliography, it's
practically all in Italian. But if you're interested in Sardinian
online, you'll find plenty of information here:
http://www.spinfo.uni-koeln.de/mensch/sardengl.html
We discussed Dalmatian on Cybalist some time ago (#948). Let me
repeat here what I wrote then:
To put it more cautiously, it [Dalmatian] seems to have many features
in common with Romanian. Our knowledge of Dalmatian is very
incomplete. It died out at the end of the 19th century in the last
place where it was used -- the island of Krk (Italian Veglia). The
last speaker, Tuone Udaina (d. 1898), was interviewed a few months
before his death by the Italian linguist Matteo Bartoli; this is our
only source of knowledge about Modern Dalmatian. There are a few
written documents from the 13th-14th c. written by Dalmatian scribes
in Latin or Italian, but showing linguistic traits interpreted as
Dalmatians. To make matters worse, when Bartoli was recording their
conversations Udaina was a toothless and half-deaf old man who
normally spoke the Venetian dialect of Italian and who hadn't spoken
Dalmatian for twenty years. BTW the name "Dalmatian" was invented by
linguists. Udaina called his language Veklisun (< Vikla = Veglia =
Krk). The other known dialect, Ragusan, survived in Dubrovnik until
the 15th c.; other parts of Dalmatia had been Slavicised or
Italianised much earlier. Dalmatian loanwords can be detected in
Croatian (especially as placenames) and in Albanian.
Like Romanian, Dalmatian had some remarkably archaic features, e.g.
the word for 'head' was kup (Romanian cap, Latin caput) as opposed to
Italian testa. In some respects it was more archaic than Romanian,
e.g. the Latin consonants /k/ and /g/ were not palatalised before /e,
e:/ (only Sardinian shares this trait with Dalmatian): Latin
ce:na 'dinner' > Dalmatian kaina.
There's very little on Dalmatian anywhere; we know it mostly from
Bartoli's original publications. Probably the most recent description
is the following (Mario Doria, of Triest University, is one of the
very few competent Dalmatologists):
Doria, Mario. 1989. Dalmatisch. Lexicon der Romanistische Linguistik.
III. Tübingen.
Here's a link to the website of an enthusiast who's trying to revive
the language (there are apparently three speakers of "Neo-Dalmatian"
at the moment):
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Parthenon/6502/
The site owner possibly knows more about Dalmatian resources.
That's about as much help as I can possibly offer.
Piotr
--- In
cybalist@egroups.com, "Christopher Straughn" <cstraughn@...>
wrote:
> I have been curious about the Dalmatian and Sardinian languages for
a while.
> Can anyone recommend any websites or good books (in English or
Spanish,
> preferrably) that have overviews of either of those languages,
especially
> with some vocabulary and a review of phonetic changes?
> Thanks
> Chris