Re: Keeping up, barely :-)

> >O-:I have read that the Rumanian dialect isoglosses show evidence
> >that Rumania was settled recently.
> >
> >Highly recommend not spending any more money on this man's
> >books until he has spent some time here.
>
>Can't comply. I haven't spent any yet. I think I read the remark in
>a review in one of the learned journals, possibly 'Word'. It would
>have been a review of a book describing the various varieties
>of 'Moldavian'. I remember the reviewer was very angry that anyone
>thought it made sense to consider 'Moldavian' dialects a coherent
>group, for they are a continuation of the Romanian dialects of
>Romania.

Those are subdialects, not dialects. Compared to Romania's (incl.
Moldavia's) Romanian, only Aromanian (Macedonian-Romanian),
Megleno-Romanian and Istro-Romanian are dialects (the differences
being as significant as one is even tempted to say they are different
languages).

BTW: regional differentiations in Hungarian are even of less
significance than those in Romanian (i.e., the so-called "Daco-
Romanian" dialect, to which standard Romanian belongs). And
this in spite of the fact that Hungarian native-speakers have been
scattered in a territory between Vienna and Western Moldova,
as well as between the Polish border (to Slovakia and western
Ukraine, "Trans-Carpathia") to Croatia -- since the very beginning,
i.e. since 896, when Hungarian tribes moved from Ukraine to
the West.

>Unfortunately, educating Alex is hard going. It doen't seem to have
>occurred to him to wonder how the outcome of dent- 'tooth' taken from
>a non-Latin source was going to differ from the outcome of Latin
>de:ns, dent- 'tooth'.

Well, dentists always say that wisdom teeth tend to cause
much trouble, easily getting caries... :-)

>Richard.

George