Odp: Dalmtian

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 948
Date: 2000-01-17

 
----- Original Message -----
From: David James
To: cybalist@eGroups.com
Sent: Monday, January 17, 2000 12:38 AM
Subject: [cybalist] Dalmtian

From a previous post I noticed that reference was made to a language
called Dalmation and that it was a Romance language. Forgive my
ignorance but I was not aware that there had been a Dalmatian language.
I assume it was spoken in what is now coastal Croatia. How widely was
it spoken and when did it die out? From the previous post I assume that
it resembled Romanian. Is this so?
To put it more cutiously, it seems to have many features in common with Romanian. Our knowledge of Datmatian 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.
 
Piotr